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?

So so so many raw plugs in every single wall which had been badly covered with filler and we had to go round pulling them out... sounds like a small thing but bloody annoying

When we moved in, everything looked perfect. It had been redecorated (with crap colours but it was clean). New bathroom etc…

Went to take a bath. All lovely. Pull the pug out, for dressed and heard DH swearing from the kitchen.

The bath hadn’t been fitted properly and all the bath water ended up in the kitchen, ruining the ceiling in the process. We had been in about 2 days.

@NotThisWeekSatan

An oil painting of Robert Mugabe in the attic.

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

Wow!

The back of the house wasn't being supported and I have no idea how it didn't fall down, we had to put in a steel beam. We only found this out when knocking the dining room and kitchen through. The shower was also leaking which the previous owners very obviously covered up. And the hot Water only works if you have the heating on which is not great in the summer.

A polystyrene wall! Ok I exaggerate, a sheet of polystyrene glued to the interior of the wall, wallpapered over. I'm terrified to take it off and see what it's hiding.

That it needed a full rewire, and that the whole of the ground floor needed digging out to a depth of 50cm and rebuilding as it was basically terracotta tiles on top of soil all hidden under about an inch of bitumen 🤯 - it explained the internal damp at least. It's not a small house. And cost over half a million to buy 🥴

A lone middle aged lady moved into a "newly fully renovated" victorian terrace (next to ours) and came round to ask if DH could help her find the water stop cock. None of the taps worked , the loo didn't flush and she couldn't even find the hotwater tank.

He brought her back in tears.

There was no stopcock, because there was no plumbing. No pipework or drains, no sewage outlet. Cowboys had screwed brand new modern kitchen and upstairs bathroom/loo fittings on the walls. Connected to nothing. There was no plumbing system at all. No hotwater tank. She had paid cash.

After that, very time I view a house I turn on all the taps.

Later we bought a huge very run down old place dirt cheap; the vendors had been doing it up then "suddenly" moved abroad. The taps all worked and it was recently completely rewired. On the day we moved in , we found they had taken every single lightbulb with them. DH went out and bought more.

That's when we found out quite a lot of the "rewiring" was totally fake, brand new lightswitches and power sockets just screwed on the wall, unconnected because there were no cables to connect them to.

Since then, every time I view property I turn on all the taps AND all the light switches.

The heating in the kitchen didn’t work, one end of the kitchen riddled with damp (they had stop blocked it so it didn’t show whilst it was for sale) a shower screen actually fell off in my DH hand, you could have a shower in the kitchen due to the totally knackered plumbing in the bathroom above which just gushed though the kitchen ceiling, the room above the garage hadn’t been built properly, so if you went up there you literally ran the risk of falling through the floor into the garage. Half the radiators didn’t work. It was endless! We’ve fixed it all now and I love my house…but they definitely knew about all of it but didn’t declare it, so I wasn’t at all sorry to hear that they are having significant issues with the next house they bought!!!

Sheets of asbestos in the garage.
Bath 'sealed' with grout. First time we used it this split.
Shower that was disconnected from the mains so didn't work.
Soil stack that was leaking. Probably for the previous 30 years, according to the plumber.
Overflow on the bath that wasn't connected and leaked everywhere.
A cooker that was broken - was working when we viewed.
Bailiffs and a loan shark. These were fun(!)
And a boiler that was just about condemned and needed replacing ASAP.

Two different leaks in the loft which the vendors obviously knew about as there were buckets under them catching the drips. Two cooked chicken steaks sitting on a tray inside the oven

Our house has 16 doors, discovered after we moved in that not a single one of them closes properly.

We moved into the house before this one . When we got there there was a smell of gas - DH had to go away for a week so I was left with gas had to be switched off ( winter ) no heating , lots of boxes and a toddler. I do not believe the vendors could not smell the gas. I thought that was pretty rubbish of them.

I feel your pain @Ohlalaohlala

The inches of grease & nicotine on the walls & floors. The fact that the husband had laid on a bed instructing the wife to plumb the bathroom in & there wasn't a piece of copper pipe longer than 6 inches & over 100 compression fittings, when the bath emptied the shower cubicle filled up. The kitchen fell apart, the cooker was lethally wired. The "tidying up the paintwork" the owner said he would do was paint every room dark purple. That we would be getting bailiffs calling for years chasing the previous owners debts.

@TravellingFrom

When we moved in, everything looked perfect. It had been redecorated (with crap colours but it was clean). New bathroom etc…

Went to take a bath. All lovely. Pull the pug out, for dressed and heard DH swearing from the kitchen.

The bath hadn’t been fitted properly and all the bath water ended up in the kitchen, ruining the ceiling in the process. We had been in about 2 days.

This is also something that people do when moving out, if they feel wronged by their buyer/landlord etc. A more extreme version of prawns behind the radiator.

• they'd stopped cleaning after we purchased (took 7 months to go through, during peak of pandemic), so carpets with two dogs pissing on them had to be immediately removed.

-downstairs toilet leaked and stunk of a public urinal and was filthy.

• conservatory full of mould.
• kitchen absolutely disgusting, i mean vile.
• en-suite shower had a major leak, which I only discovered when cleaning the skirting board my finger went straight through due to damp. Again absolutely filthy
• main bathroom toilet leaked every time it was flushed.
• any time the hot water was turned on it the pump would makes the loudest noise ever, needed a new pump.

• left the garage full of shit.
• left the garden (which was beautiful when we viewed) overgrown, and full of dog shit everywhere and holes where the dogs had dug.

• conservatory door doesn't lock

-front door didn't lock

• leak in the loft & conservatory roof (we did get money back from survey company for missing this)

I was 4 months pp and literally cried for weeks as it was supposed to be a renovation project when we viewed we knew it needed a freshen up. It was hell.

Dodgy wiring, random channels dug into walls for random wires.
The upstairs toilet that when flushed, leaked through the kitchen ceiling
Boiler is nearly 30 years old and needs replacing as the shower goes freezing cold when the pilot light goes off periodically (we knew the boiler was old, we didn’t know about the hot water issue!)

We were left with a lovely range cooker, a microwave and a washing machine though which has saved us a little bit buying new.

I think you can tell people what they are letting themselves in for as a vendor - so e.g. my late FIL's house he had two freezers in the garage & given all siblings lived a long way away we said it was sold with those and went on the form to say that would be up to them to dispose of them if they did not want them . What I do think is rubbish is to try to cover something up.

Woodworm
Broken back boiler which was condemned as dangerous
Rotten water tank in loft

We now rent.

Bed bugs
Shoddy electrics done by a sociopath
Mouse poo throughout the kitchen
Nails sticking up through the floors
Flood under the kitchen cupboards so they collapsed into the floor on day one

None of this was visible on viewings or came up on the survey

Bought a property that was derelict and empty for 7yrs. Original house 1930's. Some things obvious on purchase- other things we found when we started stripping it back:

• Multiple, large sheets of asbestos partially buried in the overgrown garden
• Ever light shade was different in every room. A chandelier, viking style wooden things, 80's bright red plastic balls etc
• Ever door handle different- even on the same door!
• 3 layers of carpet and 4 layers of tiles one on top of the other
• An old wasp nest twice the size of my head
• 1980's porn- lots of lace, suspenders and public hair!
• 1970's newspapers used to stuff inside door frames and holes in walls

And this delightful thing in the pic

Feels like par for the course here. To get a house at all, you practically need to make your offer the second it goes on the market, and even then you’ll somehow end up in a bidding war!

Our joys included:

Wood worm in all joists!
Leaking roof with cracked lead.
Leaking garage roof.
Fireplace doesn’t work at all.
Chimney half falling down.
Blocked gutters.
A buried tree stump, covered in concrete!
Front door falling apart.
Leaking shower.
Bathroom wall is falling apart.

Plus all the things we new about, like artex on every ceiling, a horrendous kitchen, and strange stud walls everywhere to make tiny rooms

Infestation of mice not picked up in survey. Carpets in dining room soaked with dog piss and, best of all, an open well which was under the floorboards in our bedroom.

@A580Hojas

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.

Yes exactly this. You’ve bought cheap and will benefit from it massively. If the son’s had done it up you would have paid more. I’d be happy to get such a bargain and I’d love to do it up myself. I feel sorry for the old lady who’s home you have. I mean she’s dead now obviously- but you’re critiquing her precious home. You got a bargain.

@2bazookas that poor lady. That's one of the worst moving in stories!

Tied flat so came with the job. Knew and worked with previous Tennant.

Used blue condom tucked under the carpet. Nice