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?

Ours was a house clearance job. I turns out the house clearance firm didn't get the key for the under stairs cupboard, or into the loft. Recycling lots of empty alcohol bottles was fine, but made me wonder about the state of the previous owner (who had moved away). Then finding his parents wartime ID cards and photos in the loft seemed sad that they had been left.

My favourite though - the old newspapers from decades before. How writing styles have changed!

Shocked by the amount of tampon and condom related findings?!! My greasy cupboards are nothing ...nothing...in comparison! Laughing at the charred sausage on the bbq though.

The bedrooms of our house still stink of the previous owners deodorant and perfume if they get a bit warm. We had the carpets professionally cleaned, but we think it is impregnated into the paintwork and stuff. Grim... they must have been dousing themselves in it.

Oh lord so much botched DIY. It looks like they have swapped around cupboards in the spare room and the master. Making a double cupboard in the spare room. But instead of replastering the wall to cover up the hole where the door was they have just used random bits of wood. Including what looks like part of a glossy door then wallpapered on top. We found this when we stripped the walls to paint them. We are now going to have to fix the wall ourselves.

Also there are like 3 suitcases in the attic I could only reach one so they'll just stay up there.

Oh and teeny tiny rusty golf club. And a coal bunker full of coal.

Former house: clapped out electric fire and rolls of scarlet carpet. Had to pay a little man to shift it all.

Current house: too many to list, but kitchen cupboards and dishwasher filters filthy (they apparently lived on lentils, coffee, tomatoes and cooking oil). Council replaced dustbins as they were utterly disgusting and I said I wasn't cleaning another person's crap out. Floorboards on landing were a bit saggy. Under the carpet the boards were just about snapped.

Porn VHS in the machine - it has been stopped half way through.

The house we moved into was beyond filthy. I knew from viewing it needed a good clean and everything was tired, but nothing like what we moved into. It took hours of scrubbing the oven before I felt it could be used, and then first time we used it discovered it hardly heated up! The integrated microwave didn’t work at all. The dishwasher was full of something resembling chicken skin and black mould covered cutlery. The hob had inches of grease and food baked on, the stands soaked in industrial degreaser in the bath for a day and a half before I admitted defeat. Everything had to be replaced within the week.
The mould on the shower head was like something I’ve never seen before, I have no idea how anyone could have continued to use it. My skin still crawls thinking of the filth we moved into. The house we sold was left absolutely spotless.

One house we viewed three times before putting in an offer. On every viewing, no matter what time, their toddler was always in the bath, so superficial viewing of the bathroom every time. On moving in, the filth around the bath tub was apparent. They’d clearly chucked the toddler in the bath for viewings to conceal the lack of cleaning. Mingers.

I didn't find ANY unpleasant surprises when I moved into my house last year, but lots of very pleasant ones. It was a probate sale and the family hadn't taken a garden parasol, a garden chair, lots and lots and lots of plant pots, lawn feed, outdoor chair cushions, bird feeders, one of those big plastic garden storage chests (I'm a keen gardener so was thrilled!) and when I finally got round to taming the very overgrown hedges and ivy I found a lot of lovely shrubs in pots that were completely hidden away.

In the loft i found a perfectly good picnic basket, a small painted bookcase and rather bizarrely a very nice "occasion" hat on one of the shelves!

Chest of drawers left behind..... with mens underwear in them. Mind you, on moving day his van was also at our house. Contacted the estate agent who got hold of him and told him to get off our property. We dumped all his stuff in the garage and told him to come and collect it. He kept putting it off and we kept finding more stuff so he had to get a mate to help him in the end as there was so much crap!

The smells were the thing that hit me. One of the stone walls in our kitchen used to smell really bad, especially in wet weather. I found out through neighbours that the wall was behind where cows used to be tethered for milking so I was smelling years and years of cowpats basically. Another small room stank so so bad and it had a little vent to the roof area. The first night we saw hundreds of bats fly out of our roof so I guess it was bat urine. Took me a long time to settle there!

I moved in to discover the previous owners had just painted around all their furniture for a quick sale. We thought we were moving in to a lovely ready to live in house, instead every single room needed decorating.

They left a key safe inside the cupboard next to our front door but didn't leave the code. It took us a year of going through a couple of numbers every time we went in there to finally get it open, revealing a £10 note. Also left loads of good buckets and spades in the which the kids were chuffed with.

we noticed the rug was in the floor, we thought this was a great idea as it looked really neat and stopped you tripping

I can't picture this. You mean they'd sanded a recessed rug shape into the floor?

My dad and a builder found a bag of porn magazines from the early 1970s under a floorboard. It was the only floorboard in the room that was screwed down.

The biggest surprise was the previous owners were still in the house! They didn’t seem to care that, legally, they no longer lived there (we had the keys, too) and were very relaxed about moving their stuff out even suggesting that they’d ring us in a couple of days when they’d sorted things out. Took them another day to vacate after threats of financial penalties. Fortunately, we weren’t expecting to move in on completion day and I have no idea what we would have done if we’d arrived with a removal van full of furniture.

Filth.

We had viewed 3 times & it was stuffed to the rafters. The week before moving day the guy asked to put back the date, we declined because people needed to be in our house. I don’t think he left it filthy because we didn’t extend, he just never cleaned. I was actually relieved the oven didn’t work because it would have taken hours and hours to clean it. As it was, the cupboards took 4 hours of bleaching and scrubbing.

The carpets were threadbare and were actually a completely different colour under where the furniture had been. The windows were so filthy the cloth was grey after one wipe and the wheely bin was full even though bin day was only a couple of days previously.

Bizarrely there was a fully built flat pack sideboard in the attic.

@Greystray

we noticed the rug was in the floor, we thought this was a great idea as it looked really neat and stopped you tripping

I can't picture this. You mean they'd sanded a recessed rug shape into the floor?

@Greystray I assumed this type. DM moved into a house with one in. A recess in the floor where a mat fits

Asbestos in the corridor

Tow things in our previous house:

1. A cooker that was so infested with grime and filth that even a professional oven cleaning company couldn’t shift it. Didn’t enormously matter as we were redoing the kitchen anyway, but we had to live with it for about 4 months and it made me dry heave every time I looked at it. What’s worth is that the previous owners were both local GPs and therefore should have known better.

1. An anal dildo left at the back of a fitted wardrobe. Not necessarily implying the GPs were the previous owners of said dildo. DH laughed when I said he had to move it as I wasn’t touching it as you didn’t know where it had been. He said we knew exactly where it had been…

ripped out some awful 70's botched fitting wardrobe...lined with wall paper...underneath was lesbian hard core porn pics pasted from magazines....!!....we all looked awkward when removing them...was funny now we look back but had nieghbours young children running about and had to hide it all in the skip etc...

A bag of white powder in the loo cistern. My neighbour reminded me last week the previous owners had cannabis plants in the garden so that made me think

One cottage we moved too the previous owners had painted the walls around furniture and heavy mirrors and vanished floors around the rugs!!! So come moving in day it looked liked a cartoon house with outlines of furniture and rugs visible in otherwise empty rooms.

Not me but my mates. Went up in the attic and found a 4 ft high statue of the Virgin Mary with the local twam football scarf on (not mentioning the team as its outing). They left it there and it was still there when they moved out. No idea if they told the new owners.

Ah yes the dry heaves when cleaning other people's dirt. It has brought back a lovely memory of cleaning a very narrow shelf space between the built in fridge and freezer. It was littered in dried bits of food and crud from previous owners. I had to tie a cloth to the end of the loft ladder hook and wang it around in there and flick out the debris....all the while dry heaving.

I am feeling slight guilt that we left our black bin very full when we left our previous house. We took all recycling to a supermarket with recycling bins, but unfortunately managed to fill the black bin within the last 48 hours before moving. House was left immaculate otherwise, but the guilt lives on.

We found that the carpet in main bedroom is structural. Fortunately it's holding up well and hope it continues to, until we're ready to renovate the entire room.

We also have a 'hidden room' (according to the estate agents particulars). In fairness we did know about this before buying the house. At some point during the previous owners' occupancy, they blocked up the external staircase that gave access to the room and never added an internal access.

When we moved in we had to put up a ladder and climb in through the window (which conveniently opens outwards) and found it contained about 40 fluorescent light bulbs and an archery target. There is only one fluorescent tube light in the house and the bulbs don't fit it!

There is still no internal access - waiting for listed building consent!

Also discovered than almost every house related decision they made in the last 50 years was bad!