What "surprises" did you find after moving in?

[thekaratekid]

I seem to find that most people upon moving into their new home discover something bizarre or something completely bodged (usually hidden) by the previous owner.

In our first house we found that the garage access door had obviously been broken during move day and as we opened it...it completely fell apart and was covered in still wet glue!

In the same house we also found the previous owners had lazily carpeted around large pieces of furniture...so two tone carpet in the bedrooms. Cue scrambling around trying to get new carpet fitted asap.

Current house, I assume that the vendors only ever cleaned what could be seen immediately at eye level or used useless cleaning products. The kitchen cupboards were a sticky, dusty mess of 15 years worth of grease and oil. The venetian kitchen blind was also sticky with grease. The sink drain brown with tea stains etc. I had to invest in heavy duty chemical degreaser and a drill brush and spent approx 10 hours scrubbing and breathing chemical fumes the day after moving in. Bizarrely the dirt was not particularly obvious when we viewed, I guess we didn't actually touch anything too much due to covid etc.

I appreciate the above is probably not as horrific as what some people find, but it always surprises me what people see as "normal" or feel they can get away with.

Anyone else find any horrors worth sharing?

When we went to collect the keys on moving day, our estate agent had a quick word. The house had been unoccupied when it came onto the market so the EA had access to handle viewings on behalf of the vendor. They advised that the vendor had rented out the house on short term leases and there had been several tenants in quick succession - none of whom had had their mail redirected judging by the amount they had returned to the vendor to deal with. They gave us this heads up because a few days beforehand a bailiff had rocked up to the EA - he’d called at the house to remove goods to the value of unpaid debts, found it empty and taken the details from the sale board in the hope that the EA could provide a forwarding address !! It seems one of the tenants had ignored various letters and had seen their chance to escape the debt by scarpering when the house was put on the market. Two years later we still get odd bits of mail which invariably consist of unpaid parking fines, unpaid credit card/store card bills and notices of defaults on loans. On a couple of occasions I’ve also had bailiffs letters threatening action and have had to do battle with them over the phone to convince them that we are not their intended targets !!

On a nicer note when I moved into my first house the sellers left me a small bottle of fizz and a little welcome note....But I had bough the house at the top pf the market ! (Not their fault I guess)

In our first house we found a large envelope on top of the wardrobe full of racy love letters between the couple, turned out they'd been having an affair for years behind their partner's backs.

mrbreezeet1 Luckily there's a small rodent rescue nearby and they agreed to take it, since there was a hutch and everything. I was pretty shocked how many exotic animals they were looking after, I thought it would be all hamsters and gerbils.

So many things AND it was a new build
Big hole in our downstairs loo that you could see outside and it was freezing (moved in December).
Fag stumps, crisp packets, etc under the bath which had been hidden by bath panel.
And a nice big crack in the toilet waste pipe that had been covered with tape.

@Amaksy

Mouse/ rat traps under the kitchen cabinet. Still hear them in the walls but at least they’re not inside the house anymore.

Also found roof leaks that were nicely covered by paint jobs - be suspicious of houses painted all white!!

Agree about being careful of houses painted all white Within days of moving into our previous house I noticed a damp patch on the ceiling of one of the bedrooms. It turns out that there was problem with the roof and the vendor had painted the rooms white at the time of viewing. The knobs on most of the doors were loose, the shower was blocked and so we had to use a plunger to get rid of the excess water. We had paid for a surveyors report so the structure of the house was generally ok. It was the little things which really annoyed me.

My external window edges were filled with newspaper and concreted over. My carpet in the lounge was nailed in place , my carpets in the bedrooms were underlaid with newspaper. My kitchen cupboard doors were hung upside down. My built in job wasn’t connected to the electricity. Plus my bathroom was an odd suite. All white so didn’t notice when viewing

@noraclavicle

Recently found a soft porn video tucked away in the electric meter cupboard - 15 years after we moved in!

Have you never read your meter?

Someone left an actual sh*t in the loo a few houses back.

@Fluffmum

My external window edges were filled with newspaper and concreted over. My carpet in the lounge was nailed in place , my carpets in the bedrooms were underlaid with newspaper. My kitchen cupboard doors were hung upside down. My built in job wasn’t connected to the electricity. Plus my bathroom was an odd suite. All white so didn’t notice when viewing

I remember in my parents house in the 70's we put newspaper under the underlay.....

Can't remember if I managed to post the hands we dug up in the garden

Oops, don't know how that lorry got there!

@Davros

Can't remember if I managed to post the hands we dug up in the garden

I’d be so freaked out!

• @ShouldIStaySelfIsolated* we have the keys but still waiting as vendors still packing up!

DH has just been cutting the hedge...and found another saw.

We are starting to wonder how often the previous owners had to replace their saws after losing them.

@Flamingobaby37 thanks for the update. Hope it all goes smoothly

I remember when I moved into my first flat (rented not bought) and a few months later the bath was leaking into the downstairs hallway. My landlady sent a plumber round to take a look and when he took the bath panel off to check, we found a pile of rubbish underneath the bath. Crisps/chocolate wrappers, empty bottles, cardboard. We even found a brand new shower curtain still in the packaging (how useful to leave it under the bath ). It use to be a council owned property so no doubt the workmen left all the shit there when they were putting the bath in, lazy feckers!

House before this one - we found a stash of magazines dedicated to women with large breasts on top of a cupboard - but - that I can cope with - just a binning thing - the evening we moved in we could smell gas - we had a 4 yr old DC & had to get it all switched off so no hot water / heating etc. I do not believe the vendors did not know - & I think it was naughty of them to leave the house with a gas leak.

They did leave two ( modest ) chandeliers which I auctioned to pay towards the gas invoice.

House before that the previous occupants took every doorknob , lightbulb , taps etc and gave all their dogs a bath in the bathroom before they moved out.

This one may be an urban myth - but someone had their kitchen done "on the cheap " - some months later the gas cooker stopped working. Once investigated it seems the builders had put various gas canisters at the bottom of the garden & buried the pipes under the lawn .

A recommendation for Builders Regs.

Danikm151. The hands are creepy and the house is nextdoor to a church. Maybe they crept over!

@Davros

Can't remember if I managed to post the hands we dug up in the garden

Fracking hell! 😯

Bought my first place and was delighted with the beautiful varnished hardwood floor in the bedroom. On moving in day I discovered the previous owner had only varnished the bits you could see around the rug that they obviously took with them. So a giant square of unvarnished floor in the centre of the room wasn't quite so appealing.

Current house the owners clearly didn’t clean from the day they got our offer as the house was filthy when we got the keys.
They had painted round furniture and the skirtings behind were yellow.
The 2 year old kitchen was thick with grease on the cupboard tops and the integrated fridge had black mould inside. Cooker never been cleaned and all coated in thick black grease. (Lovely MIL cleaned and scrubbed it for me)
Downstairs toilet had carpet which was wet with pee and stunk, BIL ripped it up for us as by this point I was in tears seeing the state of the downstairs.
Upstairs was even worse, POO left in the toilet and actually ON the toilet seat. A crack in the bath which had a bath mat over it at viewing.
All the radiators had to be taken off the wall as behind and inside them was full of cat hair.
We spent over a week scrubbing everything and repainting it all.

Later When we started doing things to the house like replacing the disgusting bathroom we discovered they had tiled on top of tiles and we had to replace the plasterboard as it was some sort of glue or cement product they had used to tile instead of tile adhesive and the tiles wouldn’t come off and the plasterboard was just collapsing.
All manner of bodged diy in the house.

I actually hated living there for about the first 3 years.

@Awalkintime

When we demolished the bathroom we found the plaster had been boarded and newspaper was stuffed behind it. The newspaper was dated 1995. We moved in in 1989. The bathroom was taken out after 2000.

Where do I start?!

Washing machine that could only be used if you used an extension lead.. bathroom is completely rotten and needs replacing. The plate under the bath was holding the drips until it wasn't anymore and it all came through the kitchen. Live wires in the loft insulation needed new lights on the landing. Damp everywhere, rats in the basement that had been there for years. Hall stairs and landing needed replastering. The entire house was purple but the bedrooms were a sicky scrabble tile yellow.

Every single plug had a plastic thing in them, some we still can't get out! Locks on the outside of doors, child locks on all the cupboards in the kitchen that all failed so we had to get a knife down the back to get them off. All in all the house has cost us £20k to fix in the last year.

The garden was nice when we moved in but I've let it get a bit overgrown because ive been really busy and it's not high on my list of priorities. Im getting it landscaped next week and hopefully it'll look lovely again but had to find another £1500 to fix the really badly made steps into the bottom garden that the previous owner did herself. They're falling down and so badly done im terrified of going down them to mow the bottom garden and the whole thing collapsing. Why do dry stone walking and then grow vines into them??

The worst thing is that they're still friends with our neighbours and they still come over and they will happily spend all day and night abusing our garden and how awful it is that we let it get so bad and how disappointed they are that it's so bad.

We could hear everything they were saying on the cctv. It's so draining. If they do it again I will be offering them the bath plate!