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?

Gosh this thread makes me feel better about our house, in the sense that we're not alone!
Boiler that sounds like a jet engine
Bath that leaked through the living room ceiling first time I used it
Leaking velux window
Dodgy drains in the kitchen (which our plumber discovered had been installed to run uphill 🤦🏼‍♀️)
Front door with an inch gap at the bottom that they had done a botch job of covering up
And the latest joy, rats in the loft 😱
I'm sure there is more but I've blocked it from memory.

The builders had chucked a bag of concrete down the manhole in front of the house and we found out because it then rained, a lot, and then the whole close flooded, including our front gardens. Rainwater and sewage, lovely.

An infestation of fleas that bit all of us. Previous inhabitant had a cat.

We think the previous owner had a dispute with the council because he seemed to have buried several years worth of rubbish in the garden. It was basically landfill. Most of it has gone in skips now but we still find the odd bit of glass...far left hand corner was his hiding place for the evidence of his whisky habit!

He also left us:
A self-fitted wood burner with no flue liner so it leaked smoke into the bedroom
A bathroom with a piss soaked cork floor and a shower head that repeatedly dropped on you while having a shower
Plastered-over massive subsidence cracks which very soon revealed themselves
And weirdly, no sockets at all in the reception room- like why would you even think to check if that was a concern?

@Walesrecommendations

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.

We had one of those. I think it's an insulation thing. In our case it was on an exposed wall, in an unventilated room so it was black with mildew when we removed it. Walls were fine underneath.

In a rented flat, some dangerous leaking chemicals in the top shelf in the lounge. The fire brigade sent specialists in breathing gear to collect and dispose of it.

We bought a purpose built Victorian maisonette back in 2011 and it had a beautiful internal staircase down to the back garden (which was shared and in itself an absolute nightmare with our knobhead downstairs neighbour).

On the day we moved in the whole UPVC door to the back garden fell out of the fitting.

The internal locks dropped on the front door, I had to ask strangers walking down the road to let me out by throwing down my key. We got that fixed very quickly.

We bought the flat furnished. It was a couple who had split up, flat had been on the market for a year due to a really short lease so they refurnished it ready to rent it out. We bought all the white goods and lounge furniture including rugs. On the day we moved in, lifted the huge rug in the living room to clean and found a huge square cut out of the living room carpet. The rug stayed.

We viewed a flat on the same road a few months earlier that was marketed as a two bed. Except there was no bathroom. The house still had round pin electrics (it was 2011 when we viewed it) and the bathroom was a tin bath hung on the back of the kitchen door. It was shockingly cheap but as first time buyers we weren't allowed to buy doer uppers. It sold about four times in the 5 years we lived on that road, it would be put back in an auction people would buy it unseen because of the area and basically turn up realise it was a money pit and put it back in the auction. The area has exploded price wise and I'd love if someone had bought it for a family property and put some real love in to it rather than it being bought to flip.

My house was cheap and it was full of dodgy DIY, it’s been gutted room by room. I expected most of it and even the things I couldn’t see like dodgy hidden electrics, I got over, laughed it off as it’s an old house etc.

But the one thing I will never get over is the amount of shit buried in the garden. Rubble, bricks, asbestos, old pipes, old boundary posts, slabs, random iron pipes. 3-4 skips worth. It was all close to surface, but covered by a layer of soil, with ivy/weeds intertwined. Even though you couldn’t see it, I couldn’t even pull out a weed, without hitting something solid so it had to come up.

I dug it all up myself, because I really couldn’t pay someone to dig the entire garden, sift the soil, returf etc (as it was all over the place, not just one spot). It took a couple of years, between work, life and waiting for dry weather.

I don’t even know how I would check this, if I ever decide to move. I think I’d look a bit deranged if I turned up to viewings with a shovel to check for surprises, but some sort of soil inspection would need to take place from now on!

@NotThisWeekSatan

An oil painting of Robert Mugabe in the attic.

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

want!

The wastewater from the kitchen sink drained onto the patio. Only noticed when I was rinsing paint brushes and the patio was awash with white painty water!

@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!!

Yes and also flush toilets / turn on taps!

Old house.
A barrel of old engine oil in the inspection pit in the garage. A leaking roof that had no more gaps squeezed in it. A back boiler that, the first morning when the heating kicked in at 5am, sounded like an explosion had gone off and frightened us to death. The pipes were seemingly too small for the installation. Draughty air blowing on my face in bed -when we had facias replaced we found that empty cement bags had been used as insulation. A sideboard that, seemingly had been assembled in the attic, no way could it fit through the loft hatch, the loft wasn’t floor so it was just sat on the joists and insulation. We also found a dozen long fluorescent light bulbs. When we peeled wallpaper off the previous owners had written their names in thick gloss paint repeatedly on every wall in pretty much every room. Oh & they also had a bit of a feud with the neighbours that wasn’t disclosed.

This house.
Filth. Pure filth. I was actually thankful that the oven didn’t work because it saved me several hours of cleaning. I cried when we collected the keys and walked in for the first time. The kitchen cupboards took four solid hours of scrubbing before the insides were clean enough to put things in. The patio door also didn’t have a working lock, the wheely bin was rammed full despite collection being just a couple of days previously, the attic was full off cut off pipes, the kitchen junk drawer was still full of junk and the living room carpet was a totally different colour where the sofa and chair had been. We thought the carpet was green, in fact it was originally red!

Does anyone remember the post on a similar thread where the owners had found an old lady sitting on the stairs crying when they moved in?

It had originally been her house, she signed it over to her niece and moved into the nursing home up the road. The niece had sold up and moved away without telling the aunt.

The MNetter used to have the old lady come for dinner every week and her & DC used to visit her in the home, right up until she died.

@AwkwardPaws27

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.

Oh. My. God.

Disgusting.

Not a house we bought (thank god!), but one we lived in as tenants for four years. I've never known a house like it - literally everything broke! Some of the things I can remember:

• wall outside house fell onto pavement on windy day
• felt blew off roof of shed
• archway in garden collapsed
• washing machine caught fire
• pipework to shower was so bad it poured water down the dining room wall
• curtains on large bay window in master bedroom fell down
• gas fire in living room leaked gas and had to be capped off
• 'finished' basement had a really bad damp/mould problem
• kitchen was a single brick skin add-on with no insulation, so it was freezing cold in winter and when you cooked or did laundry or anything that generated heat the walls ran with condensation
• render on exterior of the back of the house went mouldy, probably because of issues in kitchen
• boiler constantly breaking down - fortunately the owner had British Gas HomeCare so we just called them out repeatedly
• handle on shower broke off in my hand one day when turning it on
• and the woman who cleaned for us for a while thought it was haunted and refused to come back. I had my own suspicions about that, but never voiced them!

@AwkwardPaws27

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.

You win 🤢

Finding that the vendor had removed a lot of light bulbs and nearly all the screwed-in curtain rails, which should have been left.*

She was monumentally pissed off with us because dh had made a low offer which she felt obliged to accept, or risk losing their bigger house. We were working in the Middle East at the time, and she said in very snooty tones to dh, ‘You are not in an Arab marketplace now!’ (Pls imagine a slight German accent.)

*And this despite my having allowed her to stay 4 days after completion, because her other house wasn’t ready. My solicitor had a blue fit! I moved in on my own with a very young baby, dh back abroad, and had to put up a load of curtain rails on my own.

I know it's been said, however I can't believe a survey would not pick most of this up? Like ivy hiding cracks or there being no plumbing?

Garage and cupboards full of utter crap, fridge full of half-eaten food, house filthy. Furniture left behind- beds, mattresses, wardrobe. All utter crap obviously.
Oil tank cracked - had been temporarily patched so they obviously knew. £3k to replace.
Water to downstairs WC had been turned off... pipes leak.
Water tank in loft has no cover on it so hope to hell we don’t have rats in loft!
The electrics... live wires from wall lights still in place, without cover, just... wallpapered over.
Then the usuals - gutters blocked & leaking, drains blocked, roof leaks not picked up on survey, rotting woodwork patched up as diy bodge and painted over.

Not me, but my Dad.

8 - yes, 8 - dead dogs wrapped in bin liners and buried shallowly in the garden. Lots of vomiting that day from him, my Uncle and Grandad as they dealt with it.

Dog lovers, hide the thread.

Viewing list based on this thread :D

Flush all toilets
Turn all taps on/off
Run and drain showers
Run and empty baths
Check drains are draining
Turn boiler and radiators on/off
Light woodstoves, check chimneys
Turn all lights on/off
Inspect inside all cupboards
Check oven/fridge/freezer/dishwasher/washing machine work
Open and close all windows
Open and close all doors
Look behind and under all furniture
Look under all rugs and carpets
Look under floorboards
Inspect loft
Check outbuildings
Made test holes in garden to check soil is soil
Surveil for noise and neighbour disputes

Beware collapsing roofs/floors/ceilings/walls, toxic waste, pests, drugs, fire/flood/electrocution, endangered species, interesting art and vanishing jewels.

So, a second viewing then?

I wish it was on the vendor to do the surveys etc...
We've had eicr, drains, full building and awaiting an emf report.
Still half think there's gonna be some nasty surprises as the house is kinda unloved.

But... Irrationally, we love it.
It's the best we can get for our ££ and hopefully the works can be done over a few years, meaning we get to buy now rather than wait another few years to afford it.

Need to check for mice and dryrot tho.

dog grease

Stripping wall paper inside the built in wardrobe...later demolished it, found lots of german hardcore lesbian porn pasted over inside of wardrobe...!!