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?

The first house that a friend and I bought together still contained the occupant and all his belongings! Not one single thing packed!!! Estate agents were panicking when they didn't have the keys. The funds had transferred, we decided to pop round and see what was going on. He was sat on his sofa drinking beer! 🙈🙈🙈. We were quite terrified that would just leave and not take anything with him! There was a massive fish tank and everything.
Fortunately we weren't planning on moving in. The place was minging and we had bought it to do up. He drained the fish tank on to the floor and everything. It was pretty stressful 😳

In our first house, we arrived to find the hot tap from the bath on the worksurface in the kitchen, and a note saying brightly "sorry! Came off in my hand this morning" 🤣

Our second home was just mushroom coloured throughout. We knew that, but had only seen it with charming table lamps in the evening. Moved in on 29 November and realised it really was a dismal hole in decor terms. (I did not like that house. Can you tell?).

This house - bought from a man whose chain had collapsed twice and so he was already packed when we viewed it. We allowed for some dust etc but oh my god the filfth. I remember crying down the phone to my DM that the lavatories were too grim to be rescued (hard water area) - in my defence, I was 14 weeks post partum, had 3 DC under 4 and was beyond exhausted. There was also sump oil on all the carpets (previously covered by boxes), mice, and the "conservatory" wasn't even water tight.

All this, however, is as nothing to the "complete and ready to go" house my DM bought 5 years ago. It has had to be completely rewired as Prat-Features, the previous owner, had done all his own electrics and achieved things like spotlights in the kitchen by daisy-chaining extension leads and the plastering them into the wall. There was also a loose live wire in the loft, we discovered the day after the DC had been up there helping to move things. I suspect his new house must have burned down by now.

No loft insulation whatsoever and two bare wires protruding from the ceiling where a light fitting used to be.
Also french windows with a dodgy lock.

[quote LyndaSnellsSniff]@Dontwatchfootball

Oh my - I am moving soon and this is food for thought! Just a quick question - I have taken down stuff from the walls but did not think it was up to me to make good screw holes and stuff. Am I wrong?

Best thing to do is get your solicitor to ask theirs if they want you to make good. Hopefully they'll say no![/quote]
Yes, you do need to make good unless you have amended the standard paperwork to say that you won't. Making good would mean filling holes and painting...sometimes it's better not to remove fixtures and fittings as making good can be costly.

a bag of dildos in the loft conversion.
Think they were used.

When my DD viewed current house I was unable to with her. She lived the property, cheaper than others in the same road and already vacant, bonus was a corner plot with huge garden. Her offer was accepted and my first visit was with her when she got the keys.
There was 2 double beds fully made up, 2 sofas, 3 shelving units and tv stand. Also washer drier and American fridge freezer that weren’t integrated. The kitchen cupboards were full of food and plates etc, drawers full of cutlery and utensils.
I started cleaning out the cupboards while she did runs to the tip. Put the furniture items on marketplace and got rid of them that way.
The beautiful kitchen was bodged, the sink was fastened to the worktop with cable ties and the tap was just sat on the sink not connected. The integrated dishwasher door wouldn’t open and the integrated oven tripped the electrics after a few minutes, we discovered it should have been hard wired on its own circuit but was plugged into a socket. The kitchen wall was painted plywood.
The garden shed was full, you couldn’t have even fit a teaspoon in there, just stuffed full of bags of toys and newspapers.
The gas meter was hidden, the store cupboard it was in had the boiler in there as well, a false wall had been put in front and a toilet had been fitted in front.
After 2 years the kitchen still needs sorting and a wall unit with nothing in it fell off the wall.

Forgot to say they did have a survey done.

Thought nothing of the burning incense when we visited the house before moving in, the couple who owned it were quite bohemian, plus we lived incense too.

The day we moved in we noticed the dog pee smell coming from the lovely parquet flooring that we'd been so taken by. We had to dig out all up and dispose of it.

Also, same house, the kitchen was a big extension and we discovered that it was made up of 3 separate freestanding walls that didn't interlock at the corners. The inside walls had wooden paneling but from the outside you could fit your hands through the gap and touch the paneling.

When we moved in the whole house was infested with thousands of cloth moths. They had eaten away large chunks of the carpet in every room. When we had viewed (twice) 3 months earlier they looked to have nice new carpets throughout and I guess they were in the carpet but hadn't hatched yet. It was expensive and inconvenient to recarpet an entire 3 bed house so soon after moving in. There was loads of bodged DIY everywhere too, which wasn't noticeable when just visiting.

Current home, bought 17 years ago. Electric spaghetti junction… had several sockets that blew within hours of moving in. Had to get the house rewired (thankfully hubbies best mate is a sparky so got mates rates), have a random stop cock in the dining room. Still have no idea what it is for

Bed bugs 😩

Cost us a fortune to sort out and months of being covered in bites!!

My friend was living in their house for at least 5 years before they decided to change their patio doors into bi fold doors. This is when they found out the extension had been bodged, no RSJ or solid structure, the upstairs could have colapsed at any time. Frightening.

It was an HA home swap. Soooo we got:
-A filthy house (they'd promised to get in cleaners on moving day - they didn't).
-A load of junk in the garden. And lots of dog mess everywhere.
-Lino soaked with cat and dog piss (this was vile, but turned up trumps as underneath the lino was a beautiful and original quarry tile floor!).
-A massive flea infestation. She hadn't given her cat and dogs any monthly flea prevention stuff. It took me weeks and cost me a fortune to eradicate the infestation (we didn't spot it until Day 2/3 and all our stuff was in the house).

My flat was left pristine for her. The wood flooring was spotless. I'd offered (and left for her) the curtains and curtain rails (they wouldn't have fitted the windows in the new house). I also left a dishwasher (again, she was happy with that - and it wouldn't have fitted in the new kitchen), all the instructions for it, spare bulbs for the lights, toilet rolls, a nice basket with tea/coffee/hot chocolate/nice cookies.

We took apart some fitted bedroom wardrobes and found a box of old watches under the base. We dropped them off at their new house and they were furious that we knew where they had gone to..even though we had been given the address to send post on to !
Also, same house, when we took down an old ceiling lamp fitting, we found the screwed up wrappers of an entire tub of Quality Street...guess that had been an after Christmas dinner game!

after moving in we had the boiler replaced. Gas man took the boiler off the wall and there was a bloody great hole in the wall behind. If he had been working on it and not replacing then it could have fallen off and seriously injured him. Held in place with a weak bracket above the boiler. Could have been catastrophic if we had leaned on the boiler at any point when it was on etc (not in a cupboard, just on the wall in the small spare bedroom)

Had to get a brickie in to brick it up so he had a wall to attach the new boiler to.

@Highfivemum that poor lady was lucky nice people like you moved in after. I hope karma catches up with her niece!!!

In one house we moved to, the previous owners asked if we would like to buy the carpets. They were 1960s or 1970s designs - red and brown swirling patterns. We politely declined. When we moved in, they had taken up all the carpet but left all the door grips with the spikes sticking up. We had a toddler with beautiful, delicate, soft feet.... They also took all the lightbulbs and left wires hanging from where the wall lights had been.
Our present house had been renovated by tradesmen who'd have been better bakers. Boiler flue liners installed upside down (no, I didn't know this was a thing - but it meant that rain cascaded inside and wet all the insulation), shower tiles on non waterproof boards, stuck on with little dabs of glue, resulting in huge flood in hall, dodgy electrics under kitchen sink waiting for the leak, wallpaper put on insulation backing which fell off the wall due to damp behind it, a central heating system with unlagged pipes heating void under suspended wooden floorboards so hardly any heat reached the radiators, downpipes from the gutters feeding into pipes under the patio which had been smashed when they put patio slabs on top.... I could go on! It's cost us a fortune to put everything right!

We moved on Friday 13th and I should have realised that was a warning. About two days in we realised the bare floor boards were not for stylistic reasons. They’d had indoor cats. It was jumping with fleas and my two-year-old was nearest to their level. Had to get the council in to sort it out. Then there was the cupboard under the stairs. It had been used as a cat toilet. Ground in cat poo in the carpet. 🤢 all the paint is one coat thick and they covered the front garden with shingle apparently destroying the beautiful planting of the previous owner. The waist-height light in the dining room went straightaway. The four-year-old would have run into it constantly. But the fleas were what made me cry.

A lovely couple where the gentleman was Italian had owned our house for 40 years. We kept on finding pictures of Jesus and Mary behind wardrobe doors for some time (which was quite funny, as we're Jewish)

We wanted to remove a built-in wardrobe and found the battens had been cemented into the wall, so the builders had to rip them out, along with a lot of the plaster. Just this month we have finally removed an absolutely vast wardrobe built into one bedroom and were very relieved to find nothing had been glued or cemented in.

Also, when we finally got round to redecorating the front room, we found under the carpet not just underlay, but also a large rug in the middle underneath it, with more underlay beneath that and with a layer of vinyl under that

Our house was built in 1853 and the previous owners had it looking stunning and telling us how perfect it was. They'd just had the top floor plastered as they were about to decorate it (apparently).

Turns out they'd re-plastered to hide the damp which quickly started showing through. The kitchen is a botch job, as is the roof. The basement floods, the brickwork is crumbling.... basically they sold us a load of shit.
The house is a money pit and it will take years to get it to where we want it but hopefully it will be worth it.

Not dirty or anything but first very old terraced house, opened the bedroom cupcakes cupboard to find a very large, very old bible with family tree written in. Members of the family passed away had been crossed out and a note had been left saying 'may all who rest here do so in peace'.

Contacted the old lady who had left and she claimed to know nothing about it.

I was so worried about 'disturbing' people I just wrapped it up and put it in the loft for the next people 😬

Went out to the garage while moving in & found a lovely Victorian fireplace leaning against one wall. Thought it was my lucky day - but then the vendors came back & took it away! It was a fairly new house, with central heating, but It would've been nice.

The house was very neat & tidy (& empty), except the kitchen was sticky.

Not my current home but two houses before. My husband and I moved into our first (shithole) apartment and found a brand new Seal album, an unused ironing board and the best for last, the entire place absolutely stank of cum. Lovely.

We found an electrical connection to a wall light held together with gaffer tape - on a 400 year old beam 😱

Kneeling on the bedroom floor to pull up the migraine inducing carpet I felt a stabbing pain in my knee.

It was a gold crown for a back molar. Still got it somewhere....... no, not in my mouth!!!!!!