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Original poster

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

138 replies

Teaandsleep · 19/02/2022 18:18

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?

OP posts:
Confusedpapoose · 19/02/2022 22:02

@Coldgreenman

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.

Sorry to read this. I hope you’re okay? X
watchingthedetectives · 19/02/2022 22:02

Ceilings all fell down - bringing a load of stinking rotten cannabis plants with them. The 'watering' system has caused the ceilings to disintegrate

twocatsandtwokids · 19/02/2022 22:03

We bought our lovely house a few years ago. Our purchase went through really quickly but for the previous 6 months we’d had an offer in on the house over the road, which we pulled out of after the vendor got cold feet/became really difficult.
Anyway, that house finally sold and within a month of the new owners being in they’d had a gas leak and discovered asbestos 😱 So now, whenever my husband ruminates on the huge garden that house has that could have been ours, I also remind him that those problems would have been ours too!

Grumpycatsmum · 19/02/2022 22:06

So far

Leaking roof £££ to fix
Unsafe DIY lighting around woodburner
Asbestos in artex ceiling
Blocked drains due to tree roots
Leaking cistern 1 - flooding carpet (!) In bathroom
Broken cistern 2 (required complete overhaul of WC as cistern inaccessible due to being completely tiles over)
Wall tiles on shower floor (so like ice rink when wet)
Boiler in last legs - now hot water only
Leak into garage

Am about 6 months behind redecorating plan and going to run out of money soon...

mathanxiety · 19/02/2022 22:18

A well-established raccoon colony in the attic.

Whypaytherent · 19/02/2022 22:20

That poor elderly lady living there OP. Have you no sympathy? Do you think she enjoyed living that way? One day in the future you might be 95 years old and living in that house

buddhasbelly · 19/02/2022 22:21

@Cissyandflora the PP said shes in Scotland £250k is not cheap for large areas of Scotland. It may be to other parts of the UK but certainly not for the area I'm in comparative to regional salaries/regional market.

2bazookas · 19/02/2022 22:21

@FlamingGoats

We bought our house in 2019, it’s beautiful and in the middle of the countryside so has a septic system. Found out when we moved in the whole system was completely broken. It basically had water going into it and had to be pumped out every couple of months! We’ve finally installed a new sewage treatment plant at the small cost of £15k! Oh and also the road out floods constantly so sometimes we get stuck in. Grin Still love it here though
EVERY buyer in UK can consult a free flood risk map.

www.gov.uk/check-long-term-flood-risk

Junobug · 19/02/2022 22:27

My oh lifted up the kitchen lino and fell through the floor boards. Survey did not pick up the dry rot. We had to replace every single internal wall. At one point you walked in the front door and could see light through the roof. Luckily we were living with family rent free but we must have easily spend half of what we paid on the house just making it habitable. I still love it but it makes me feel a bit sick when I think of the money.

amter · 19/02/2022 22:35

A baggy with 2 I assume MDMA pills in the previous teenagers bedroom, it had fallen under the bed and through a crack in the original wooden floor.

Cissyandflora · 19/02/2022 22:35

@Thissucksmonkeynuts

A loft filled with polystyrene, the large packing pieces from washing machine and fridge transportation. We didn't realise just how much untill we'd chucked it all down the stairs unto the hall and then had to tunnel our way to the front door to get out
Insulation?
Cissyandflora · 19/02/2022 22:37

[quote buddhasbelly]@Cissyandflora the PP said shes in Scotland £250k is not cheap for large areas of Scotland. It may be to other parts of the UK but certainly not for the area I'm in comparative to regional salaries/regional market.[/quote]
Even so, the price would reflect the condition. So it will have been a bargain.

user1471538283 · 19/02/2022 22:38

My last house had a broken boiler, an unsecured leaking toilet, rusty radiators, knackered front and patio doors, crumbling external walls, rotten floor joists and floorboards, a badly patched ceiling hole and a leaking sink. It hadn't been looked after at all. I did all the work and I really wanted to restore it to its former elegance but the awful neighbors meant I sold after 17 months.

Cissyandflora · 19/02/2022 22:38

@TheHoptimist

Friend found 2 dobermans- it was a repossession Luckily she went on the day of completion She kept them
That’s very lovely of her.
Cissyandflora · 19/02/2022 22:39

@user1471538283

My last house had a broken boiler, an unsecured leaking toilet, rusty radiators, knackered front and patio doors, crumbling external walls, rotten floor joists and floorboards, a badly patched ceiling hole and a leaking sink. It hadn't been looked after at all. I did all the work and I really wanted to restore it to its former elegance but the awful neighbors meant I sold after 17 months.
I always worry about neighbours. By far the worst risk I think.
MGMidget · 19/02/2022 22:39

A used nappy lying in the middle of the floor, a raw chicken crawling in maggots in the dustbin, a cellar full of rubbish including asbestos rolled up in carpet (we thought it might be a body when we found the carpet so relieved it was just asbestos!), dry rot hidden in a bathroom refurb, a hidden ‘water feature’ at the bottom of the garden that was a child’s sandpit and water play pool (it was so overgrown we hadnt seen it when viewing), an unusually thin interior wall (they had moved an interior wall but the new wall was ridiculously thin).

ChiefWiggumsBoy · 19/02/2022 22:39

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

So?

Similar to you OP, we moved in and have found various bodged electricals. So far it has cost about £1000 to fix and replace - but that's not all of it. Some of it was compounded by a cowboy builder who said he was an electrician but was actually a liar.

Bathroom that absolutely stank of piss. It was three women that lived here so I can only assume the late husband sometimes didn't make it? The lino was ancient and luckily replacing that has sorted it.

The roof - oh my god the roof. We had a structural survey done as per the lender request, but that was because a chimney breast had been removed and not braced. However, they didn't notice the multiple points of water ingress and within a couple of weeks we had three leaks - at a cost of £1500 to fix.

Kitchen is damp but we saw that, we just didn't realise it was so damp, but that's on us.

Oh - we also moved in to an amazing case of fleas which was really annoying. I didn't even notice as I don't get bitten but my son did and it took ages to get rid. I'm expecting when the weather warms up we'll find they were just hibernating Hmm.

Overall though, I am glad we moved here. The house - for all its faults and redecoration requirements - is lovely.

FarFarFarAndAway · 19/02/2022 22:41

Shower was wired into the mains, bypassing the meter! Free shower, but also the risk of being electrocuted!!!!

ChiefWiggumsBoy · 19/02/2022 22:43

Oh yeah - forgot the fireplace that was actually dangerous! We had it disconnected (gas) and two new radiators fitted at a cost of about £1k. At least we had some equity from the sale of our previous house otherwise we'd still be stuck in a leaky cold dangerous house.

FarFarFarAndAway · 19/02/2022 22:45

Surveys do not throw up all these problems, because even with the more thorough one they just write things like 'surface electrics is fine, cannot say anything about what is behind walls' and it's like that for everything, unless you have an electrician, plumber and so forth in, or rip off bits off the wallpaper, it can be very hard to get the surveyor to say very much at all, although they do wave a damp meter about!

On the positive side, I was really downhearted that my current house appeared to have a bit of damp when I moved in, with wallpaper peeling off which I hadn't spotted, but it's all cleared up due to heating and airing. Sometimes things can be better as well as worse.

echt · 19/02/2022 22:47

The floor of the lavatory was carpeted, as they were so often ack in the day. The vendors had brought up four boys in the house. When we ripped up the carpet, the floorboards were sodden with years of pissing and missing, and had to be replaced.

The rest of the house was in excellent nick.

OneSwallow · 19/02/2022 22:49

Huge nails had been hammered in the walls to hold up paintings. When they left they left the huge nails .
A previous house there had been a dispute over a tree which the neighbour had a file on!! The neighbour was barking mad and made our lives hell for years. Needless to say it wasn’t declared when we bought the house. We should have taken legal action.

Mischance · 19/02/2022 22:55

We discovered that the front door posts in our old cottage (well two cottages joined together were sunk in plastic flower pots in earth - we lifted the carpet when some damp showed on it and found to semicircles of earth in the concrete.

There were two bread ovens and when it rained a little waterfall dripped gently down the wall from one of them.

A radiator had been removed upstairs and the pipe that came from it had not been stopped properly so the first tome we put the central heating on, water pumped out of it and poured through the living room ceiling.

The up and over garage door had not been fitted properly and flew off in a gale and landed on my Dad's car which was parked in the drive.

I could go on ...... and yes, we had paid for a survey.

Oh -... and the previous owner rolled up a few days after we moved in to retrieve his mother's jewellery from the safe, which was under the carpet and we did not know even existed. There was a lot of it - and very valuable - had I realised this I would have claimed ownership.

WetLookKnitwear · 19/02/2022 23:03

Dodgy (dangerous) log burner installation.

quiteathome · 20/02/2022 07:22

Rats

We bought a fixer upper. So I was prepared for the old and dodgy electrics, the shower that caught fire, no central heating and layer upon layer of lino.

I was not prepared for the rat infestation in the loft. Followed by the smells and flies as we got rid of the rats. And oh my they were so noisy.

However I absolutely love my house and the neighbours are fabulous. Overall it was a great move.