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?

What's to inspect when buying an old house? A good topic to read

Cheers!

@red30505 That's good of them to trim it for you. I wonder if they found issues after they moved in, or were just really worried it would put you off.
Ours is actually Virginia creeper which is less invasive than ivy, but it's made its way into the render and has been causing lots of damage. We've ripped the lot down over the last couple of months so we can assess the damage. It looks really bland and ugly without the greenery though :(

Good luck with your new home. Hopefully no major issues.

@red30505

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.

It is in Scotland. It’s called the Home Report.

Having read the whole thread mine doesn't seem so bad now...I've been here 6 months and on moving in day discovered damp in the dining room....has now been sorted but the cost for that plus re plastering and re decorating is just over 1k.
Shower upstairs leaked into kitchen as soon as we moved in too...got a handyman in to fix quite cheaply.
Kitchen tap leaking everywhere so needed replacing cost £100.
Integrated tumble dryer blew up within a couple of months...not replaced yet.
I'm hoping thats it as im running out of money.

@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.

This is a horrendous fire hazard, please get rid ASAP!

I wouldn't know where to start with the house we just bought

Asbestos
Pair of long johns with a glory hole in them
Walls that will not keep the house standing for very long

I could go on

@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

I appreciate this might have been quite inconvenient (not to mention a massive fire hazard!) but that actually sounds like quite good fun

When we ripped the kitchen out, it turned out they'd just tiled over tiles over tiles. On the floor they tiled over lino. There were live wires in an old cupboard.
In the sitting room rather than remove the fireplace, they put a fake wall up.
On the very top floor under the wallpaper we found mustard yellow gloss paint.
The utility room had its own water supply. When the sink was removed, they'd just plugged the pipe with a stick and put plasterboard over it. It didn't hold and one morning there was water everywhere. Called the waterboard out as presumed it was external, after digging the street up, they said it wasn't. I had hysterics holding a baby and they kindly offered to dig the floor up and have a look. Once they'd finished laughing they got that water supply turned off. Had to have all the walls redone, new flooring and new furniture.

So many things, everything was bodged in this house.

Recycling bin full of general waste
Old freezer abandoned in kitchen
Loads of sockets with loose wiring
Heavy fireplace surround only held on with a tiny bit of silicone
Dodgy kitchen worktops (she seemed to think they were a selling point but they seem to be a cheap version of granite worktop and I hate it)
Back of cupboards hacked to bits around piping
Radiator piping made horrendous noises when it reached temperature (nobody could work out what it was but it stopped when I had a radiator replaced so assume it was something with that)
Loads of random wiring
Stairs and floorboards that needed work
Kids rooms were painted with some random sort of paint that took loads of coats to cover
Badly fitting doors, including one that means there's a huge draught in the kitchen
Damaged handle on one front door, dodgy fitting on the other main door.
Probably loads more that I've blocked out

Oh and I have a light switch that doesn't turn anything on/off that I can find

We moved into our first home in September last year. The house was in a pretty good condition when we viewed it twice, it’s a ‘70s build, but I had a small budget for jobs that would immediately needs doing. Within days of moving in we had to:

Have a gas man in to remove the range cooker in the kitchen. I knew it was old and it would likely have to go, but when we got the keys it was in terrible state. The glass was being held in with metal spoons and the gas smell coming from the hobs as extremely strong. The vendor left a note apologising for it. Luckily I had a brand new electric cooker which I’d brought with me.

Secondly, the downstairs wet room was leaking and we had plumbers in to take out the shower head, and repair the cock stop under the sink. These brilliant plumbers also noticed a pipe under the kitchen sink that was about to burst and fixed that as well for the same price. Needless to say I kept their business card!

Thirdly there were two TV Ariels on the roof, neither of which worked.

All these things didn’t. bother me, as I knew the house would have problems, all houses do.

However, the worst thing which we weren’t expecting was the state of the wheelie bins. The vendor left the house in a very clean state but my God I’ve never seen bins in such a state. The vendor had 7 dogs and also did horse riding. In the main bin there was a huge bucket of horse manure and piss at the top. We don’t know what was lurking further down but it stank. My poor DH came in from the bins with the cuffs of his clothes soaked in horse piss.

My managed to dispose of the bucket and the bin men thankfully emptied the rest but we had to take the bin outside and use copious amount of Zoflora and Fairy Liquid to get it into a decent state. The worst part was there was also traces of manure in the recycling bin and that had to have the same treatment.

In previous house as well as the gas leak - they had a lodger - when we cleared out we found he had left a stack of soft porn magazines on top of the bookcase - was easy to fix - straight in the bin - but not what I was expecting to find - easier to fix than the gas leak

@AchillesLastStand - that sounds utterly horrible . 2 houses ago - we moved in and ( it was a doer upper I will admit ) but they had given all 4 dogs a bath in the bath and just left it - they took every door knob and every lightbulb and the kitchen floor ( which I would not have wanted anyway) but it did make it a bit tricky to navigate for a while . I think they tried to take all the taps but some were left .

Everything stank of smoke. We repainted the place the first weekend to try and get rid of the smell.

Every single part of the conversion (house into flats) had been done badly and we've gradually put everything right. DP is an electrician and said we were lucky we had avoided a fire as the wiring was singed in places.