Ok, own up! What did you lumber your buyer with?

[BluTangClan]

Much like an old car, it's got to the stage with our house where we think "do we spend loads of money fixing it all, or bodge it all and try to sell it?".

So here's the opportunity to own up to; the mould you painted over, the crack in the wall that you moved the bookcase in front of, the hob that doesn't work when the oven's on, and the iron mark on the carpet that you put the rug on top of.

We will forgive you your sins without judgement.

Well, I left my fireplace in the wrong position. It wasn't exactly in the centre of the living room.

My purchaser asked me - along with numerous other increasingly barmy requests as completion day approached - if there was any possibility I could 'move' it prior to the sale.

Me: 'Er, no. There happens to be a flue behind it'.

Her: 'well I'd like to know when it was last swept. I want it swept before you move, please'.

I did agree to this. Anything to make her go away!

I left all exh's crap in the shed when I sold the house we lived in & put a flannel over where he cracked the washbasin in the bathroom. If they ever moved the dishwasher in the kitchen they would have found that the laminate flooring didn't go underneath, just under the front.

@Enwi

As someone who bought my second home late last year after an absolutely awful year financially (due to covid), only to discover the enormous lengths the buyer had gone to to hide problems, I found this thread really hard to read.

I have two very young children (10 months and 2 years). The last few months of building work (in what was marketed as a refurbished and renovated property), having to rent a building to work from (I’m a childminder so can’t work from home with the work being done), having no kitchen or downstairs toilet, the whole of downstairs being stripped back to brick. It has been absolute fucking hell and we are now in quite serious debt. I cannot even fathom doing that to another person.

Yes. This is the other side of the story and it makes sobering reading.

Rats.
In our defence we’d had pest control out several times to eradicate them but our neighbours had broken air bricks at ground level (we were semi-detached) and a few months later more would squeeze those and run through to our house through the space under the floorboards where they’d chew their way through into the understairs cupboard. We’d then start the cycle again of getting pest control out and repairing the cupboard wall.

We also left them with a dickhead aggressive neighbour who failed to understand how a shared drive worked.

The bedroom carpet the dog had the runs on the day before we moved. I did my best to clean it but had too much else to do so ended up Febrezing the hell out of it and hoping for the best.

In my defence the carpet was third hand so would have needed replaced soon anyway. The dog had the runs in the night and I was up till 2am scrubbing but we needed to hand the keys over the following afternoon so just had no time to do it properly.

15 odd years ago we bought a house , me DH & toddler, We had visited 3 times knew it was slightly a doer upper .
The evening we moved in - tired , stressed after move - we smelled gas. The previous owners had obviously moved out and ignored it. So 1st night in we had to get someone out who switched off all the gas so no heating no cooking. Takeaway pizzas were our friend that evening but I do think those people were a bit shit for leaving us with that.

@IJustLovePirates

We left a rural property without catching the last rooster

Abandoning an animal is about the shittiest thing imaginable.

I live in a different cpuntry and we have to write down all the shortcomings of the house. Which I faithfully did only the buyer didn't read it. When we were exchanging his wife got a bit angry about some stuff (one of the balcony doors can't open, a key is lost, the ventilation shaft makes noise at certain times et cetera) but since I wrote it down and it was emailed to them before they even came to view the house the first time they had no leg to stand on (cannot pull out at that point unless you wish to pay a 10% penalty).

The thing is on this thread some people are mentioning cosmetic details that are a) no big deal and b) caveat emptor. Unless you completely revamp your house (which probably the buyers do not want) there’s obviously going to be a few niggles like squeaky doors and stuck windows and threadbare carpet.

In a different league is actual deceit of hiding dangerous things such as diy electrics or not mentioning disputes with neighbours.

@Sandrine1982

Honestly think stuff like this is part and parcel of buying and selling houses we moved into a gorgeous family home only to find out 2 of the 4 bathrooms didn’t work and one was leaking through the living room ceiling (patched up to hide it during the sale). Still not fully finished sorting and will have cost us approx £10k over what we had expected. Just is what it is.

@Handsoffstrikesagain

camp I’m not sure you can get a criminal record if you build something without permission? Are you in the UK?

Was a listed building and council wanted to make an example of him as he had done so much without seeking permission. I don’t think it’s a normal thing though on this occasion just zealous council officer in UK who was fed up with one thing after another, e.g. extended bathroom over a door and bath was balanced on ground floor doorframe as no JCB had been fitted.

I thought this was going to be light hearted drippy taps, a mark on the wallpaper that was hidden by furniture type, a stain on the carpet sort of things.
Some of the things on here sound less like leaving something annoying and more like intentionally misleading people.

Didn't leave anything too dreadful. Some terrible plumbing we'd fixed ourselves that we'd inherited.

New property is now lovely but was a disaster zone. We had a flood because underfloor heating pipes hadn't been wrapped so concrete had messed them up, boiler broke immediately and evidence of a rat infestation was found by our builder under the kitchen floor.

Drains which were filled with oil by the garage which therefore caused a major flood during the winter rains.

Worst of all was the old decking. There was no gap between it and the house so it had affected the bricks and mortar to the extend that the bricks could be pushed out manually with no force. The whole thing had to be exposed, left to dry for months, refloored and new decking smitten as well as new external coating being applied. It was a complete disaster.

We ripped out the whole kitchen due to the leak, boiler and decking issues and discovered that the kitchen ceiling had 5 layers of ceiling, affected massively by water damage AND fire damage. Our builder said we were very fortunate not to have had one side of the house collapse, considering the issues.

I think the person we sold to should be grateful for the only slightly dodgy plumbing given what we ended up with!

We didn't ever leave anything dodgy, but when we bought one of our houses we found:

A remote control Butler thing - it was like old Homepride men; plastic and about 2 and a half feet high. It had wheels on it and he was carrying a tray. The remote control made it very jolty so my husband thought it was for serving condoms at swingers parties! - it was in the loft.

My husband's theory gathered credibility when a few days after moving in we received a letter addressed to 'The Occupier'. When we opened it, it had a letter with an Ebay reference number on it to say they were sorry about the fault and they would refund the money to the bank account. When we did a search for the reference number it came back with black rubber pants.

We bought the house off a teacher at my old school - they were in their 60s when we bought it!

@thebusonthewheels

NC for this, as mine is awful.

A rat infestation.

@thebusonthewheels - that is pretty awful, but I imagine you didn't really enjoy your unwanted tenants either.

Can I ask - how did you personally know about the rats? The house I have recently bought has a distinct 'animal' smell that is still here despite mopping ... but only in 2 door ways (in & out of the utility room). I was wondering if maybe this is a sign of something?

The upstairs shower which always ran scolding hot and wasn't enough cold water to make it an enjoyable experience.

The leccy wiring which seemed to always blow bulbs here there and everywhere.. something must've been up with it.

The glass panelled door I painted on gloss white using no masking tape and got bits on the glass...

Sellers wanted more money but I couldn't agree as DH had stipulateted no more than X and was out of the country in the days before cellphones.
Took all the carpets, light fittings leaving dangly wires.

I sold my parents house cheaply to an investor who was going to gut it anyway.
There was a leak to the loo downstairs and the one upstairs wouldn't flush. The electrics fused completely so no light fittings worked and only a couple of sockets. There was a bodged repair to the roof that I think was still leaking. There was some structural movement to the gable end and above the front door. The central heating pipework/rads were v old and various ones had sprung leaks so all needed replacing. The suspended timber floor in the living room had slightly undersized floor joists and was a bit springy as a result.
She did it up and sold it on within a year and made 70k on what she paid me.

I'm appalled at reading this thread.
Or perhaps just feeling bitter about undiagnosed structural problems which were dumped on us via a lot of judiciously applied plaster and render.

Wow, there are some real horrors on here! We left our old house in lovely condition - no issues plus a new kitchen and bathroom which I was sad to leave. I wasn’t sad to leave one of the next door neighbours though. The mum and dad were nice but their grown up son was always in trouble with the police. The 2 teenage daughters got more and more shouty and horrible each year we were there. We used to lie in bed hearing them fight, it was awful. They were mid teens when we left so the poor buyers would have had several more years at least to put up with them On the plus side the rest of the neighbours were really nice!

I may have punched a hole in the plasterboard on the stairs as I was moving a bed out. That same hole was then covered by a picture frame we left behind

We moved out of Forces quarters and into our own home, finally.
Somehow the surveyers report managed to miss the fact that the previous owners had extended the kitchen by taking out a supporting wall... and didn't put a RSJ in! As the gradually sagging ceiling revealed!

Oh and the non functional downstairs loo... which turned out to have a terracotta plant pot rammed deep in the pipework! I love our house but 20 years in we are still discovering botched DIY!

we were left:

• massive white spaces on the walls where furniture had been painted around
• a boiler that was condemned within a week of moving in and was in a child's bedroom
• same with the oven in the kitchen
• broken tiles that were stuck to the wall with gum in the bathroom
• floors that were riddled with woodworm throughout the house that the builders' ladder went through
• rotten windows
• curtain rails attached to ceilings with nails across the top of the bay windows
• they left their dog! They came back later. They thought they could leisurely move out once exchange and completion had been done, and could pop the keys in with the estate agent the next day, even though we had agreed that they were going to be out at midday that Friday.

We have gradually fixed/replaced all the above.

We moved into a house with a nightmare neighbour. He was off his trolley and obsessed with cutting trees down. It turns out he’d been in dispute with at least two lots of previous owners. Nothing was disclosed. He made our lives a misery.