After you bought your house…what horrors/inconveniences did you discover?

[Teaandsleep]

I bought in January and the entire house was wallpapered with anagylpta wallpaper, woodchip and stinking p*shy carpets that are easily 50+ years old due to the old woman that lived there (95+ years old).
Once ripped up (wallpaper and carpets) seen loads of settlement cracks/borderline subsidence cracks.

-Gutters completely blocked both front and back
-Lots of DIY electrics done throughout the house which is a big safety issue, well hidden in the attic £2000+ to fix
-Huge leaking Velux window in attic which was also a bodge DIY job. £980+ to fix
-Bathroom that has had NO VENTILATION in years. Smashed the tiles off the wall to reveal slight damp/mould…window vent opened for the first time in 21 years and bathroom airing now before total refurbishment. £3-4,000 to fix.
-Disgusting moulding stinking fridge and washing machine…washing machine which had dirty black stagnant water in it for 7 months.

• Digusting 25+ year old cooker complete with grease splashes, ingrained cooker dirt.

-Upstairs toilet that doesn’t flush at all and stinks of body odour? Not pee or poo but body odour. -Downstairs toilet that you need to flush multiple times before it does flush and sounds like a Saturn v rocket. Would not trust it with a number 2, due a total refurbishment.

Paid just under a quarter of a million for the house. The sons who are the beneficiaries did bloody well out of us, not bothering to clean anything at all!

The house has HUGE potential but by God does it need a lot of time, money and hard graft…

What did you discover?

urine soaked carpet off cuts shoved under the floorboards below a leaking toilet.We wondered what the damp patch on the kitchen ceiling was ! Same trick in loft space to absorb wet from leaking roof. No idea how the ceiling hadn't come down with the weight of them.

Similar to you op but I’m 3 years in I’m told by the lovely church lady who helped to clear it that there was vast quantities of hardcore porn so consider myself fortunate x

An oil painting of Robert Mugabe in the attic.

Not as inconvenient as OP’s or PPs’ things but … very random

did you not notice the anaglypta wallpaper and old carpets when you viewed?

Quarter of a million is rather under the average UK house price.

@A580Hojas definitely noticed it…obviously once ripping it off seen all the cracks and burst/blown plasterboard ceilings/walls…

I’m in Scotland so it’s bang on the average price…hell of a lot wrong with it for the price though. Loads of things the beneficiaries intentionally failed to admit and covered up intentionally! They done bloody well and I hope karma gets them!

A dustbin full of rotten bags of dog shit in the garden. It was horrendous. The worst job in the world on a hot August day.
It was too heavy to move full, full of liquid too, so had to be tipped over, drained, contents triple-bagged & then the whole patio cleaned.

That a major structural feature had been condemned 10 years prior to the sale. Not picked up in survey.

The boiler packed up the day we moved in.
When it rained, we had more receptacles catching water than we did rooms in the house.
The house didn't have an earth wire to the fuse board.
All carpets were drenched in cats piss, she had 9.
The water from the spring was fed by a hydroram, this ran continuously even if the holding tanks were full. The overflow was a hosepipe, when it was cold this pipe froze and the only place the water could go was over the top. The tanks were in the roof

6 years on, we have had a new roof, rewire, new central heating system, new bathroom and kitchen, all replastered and decorated throughout.
We now have barns and out buildings to do but no major hurry for those.

Everything in the kitchen was broken/leaked!
New fridge/Dishwasher/microwave

The boiler only lasted 2 weeks! It was a full conversion so a nice £3500 bill

The en-suite leaked into the bedroom when the shower was used

We bought a house that needs doing up. Will have spend neck end of a £100k once we’re finished but considering next door has just gone up for sale for £650k and we only paid £285k for ours.

Boiler broke down within a week, water leaking from bathroom through kitchen smoke alarm, water leaking through en-suite to lounge, toilet leaking through back downstairs. Faulty electrics in en-suite. Handles falling off 8 windows! (Hidden carefully) Broken Basketball hoop and it's massive pole hidden in trees along with old metal bannister!! Years worth of weeding.

Two colonies of honey bees in the chimneys. Never spotted in the survey because that was done in February when they weren’t really active.

Cost us over £4000 to have them humanely removed and relocated. We got about 200ml of honey…

Capricornes - wood-eating beetles in the oak timbers holding up a slave roof, there was no septic tank so, until we were connected to the mains, the house was officially uninhabitable.

A filthy fridge with old food still in...she had the gall to ask us for her pot back.
Peanuts in the roof to encourage vermin....there was plenty of evidence of rats so not sure what that was about.
A dishwasher full of stinking water and unusable.
A fireplace immediately condemned by the gas man.
Filthy bathrooms which hadn't been cleaned in months...the whole house was disgusting.

....oh yes forgot the infestation of carpet moths in 3 rooms. Not only were the carpets ruined, they were all over the blinds - squashed from when the moths had been rolled up in them.

Similar OP. We've been in our 60s home a few weeks, lots of anaglypta, woodchip and artex. The weird quirks are;

• all toilets need a double flush to work
• Boiler is 30yrs old and needs an upgrade
• Shower has just been replaced as the cold mist was just awful
• Bathroom door doesn't close, it needs door stop.

The day we moved in DH feel through the conservatory floor. Turns out the whole thing was rotten. Luckily we were ripping it down to build an extension but DH had to put a temporary floor in until we had plans and permission sorted.

Mice. Lots of mice. Even living in the bathroom cabinet. And lots and lots and lots of mouse shit. The moral of this story is - open the god damn cupboards when you view a house!!

A spent soakaway one month after we moved in (average life span 20 years)

A £200 emergency boiler repair 3 months after we moved in

Shite DIY (think paint splatters on bare wooden doors)

Absolute bitch of a neighbour who was all sweetness and light until we had a baby three months after we moved in. I'll never forgive that cunt for the things she said and did.

The bath waste pipe was fitted wrong so the first time I had a shower I discovered water running down the walls of the room downstairs and pooling on the window ledge.

Lots and lots of botched DIY, the more I look the more I see.

Dog fleas 🤮

@Silverjellybean71

Mice. Lots of mice. Even living in the bathroom cabinet. And lots and lots and lots of mouse shit. The moral of this story is - open the god damn cupboards when you view a house!!

We viewed in July 2020. All the doors were open and we were under express instructions not to touch anything. The shitty DIY on the internal doors is my main bugbear about the house now

This sounds like our house. Similar price too. Not been in it a year yet.

But dh has decided he's unhappy with it and everything in his life and wants to fuck off somewhere by himself, as buying the house has ruined everything. So it looks like after all that, I may be house hunting again fairly quickly for me and the kids. But not with him.

That the sitting room carpet had a huge hole in it that they'd covered with a sofa. The integrated dishwasher was kaput and there was a smashed bulb in the bathroom light socket that had fused to the fitting so there was no working bathroom light...we had a 3 month old baby, moved in during the first week of December and were skint.

Was SO cross because they made such a song and dance about being strong Christians, and wanted a young Christian family to have the house...I didn't feel their actions were very faith based!

The entire roof felt on the loft conversion just blew off in the storm. It's been inspected now and we are quite lucky the timber didn't go too.

A gas leak the week we moved in, which also happened to be days before Christmas. Was a pricey and very cold Christmas.