Snags after moving in (light hearted)

[Ammie83]

So after a hellish 15 months involving 2 chain collapses, 2 buyers and 1 seller pulling out due to top of the chain not owning the access road and a field with llamas (don't ask!), we finally moved into our dream house, yay! The house is 20y so not a new build either.

Since then lots of small things have popped up. This was an annoyance at first but now I'm just laughing at each new one as otherwise would have popped a vein by now! 😵‍💫

• 15 light bulbs blew in first 2 weeks, pretty much one a day...either the vendors saved nearly blown bulbs just for this or someone somewhere must be having a jolly great time as don't think this can be planned if you tried lol!

• The plastic bits that are used for temp change on 2 radiators "fell off"...turns out the bits holding them to the radiators were in literal pieces.

• Three radiators weren't working.

• The edges on the shower holder fell off first time the shower was used.

• The shower thermostat valve was frozen in place...and I mean FROZEN...we had to use a hammer to try turn it slightly so could have a lukewarm shower for the first few months until we could buy a new one.

• The wreath hook for the front door fell off immediately after we put ours up, taking everything down with it...

• One of the screws for the roller blinds in the dining room came off, was a lovely surprise on a Saturday morning, finding the cats swat at the blinds hanging off the other end.

Speaking of roller blinds, the plastic bit for the kitchen ones snapped on top AND bottom making them separate in the middle.

So can I hear your new house snag stories?

• 3 rads not working - cost £2k to fix - not funny
• bedroom door fell off hinges
• tiles in the bathroom all cracked hidden under bathroom rug
• The plugs in the sinks were stuck
• plumbing broken in the kitchen - vendor had to pay for this to be fixed
• They promised an end of tenancy clean - in the end, they cleaned nothing, oven was filthy - vendor had to pay to clean
• oven handle was stuck on with blue tack
• fridge came with food!
• floors all needed resanding (covered with rugs on viewing)
• shower head smashed to pieces
• no lightbulbs
• door knocker hanging off
• letterbox put on crooked
• Door warped in sun.
• Back door rotten (knew about this)
• windows big gaping holes - all had to be replaced
• massive pest problem that has taken us 3 months to get rid of.
• bin lid handles broken
• They left their washing left behind
• they attached their pictures with rawl plugs and screwed - the walls are a mess!
• They didn't redirect their post for 3 months.
• They took all the manuals with them - so we had to guess how to use everything.

Took me a long time to stop feeling angry about the house that was supposedly "immaculate". I don't find it funny but so little was seen in the 15min slots we were allocated. Total money pit!

Gas cooker that was not connected.

Livingroom wall lights had been literally cut off at the wall, leaving live wires sticking out.
Another light had been removed from the attic. The live wire end had been poked into the insulation to hide it.

Oh and they took all the keys for the double glazing with them. So all windows locked shut.
When challenged by solicitor, they said they didn't have them, had never had them.

Gas fire had a serious leak and was condemned by the engineer on day 2.

Lucky we didn't blow ourselves up on day 1 !

We moved into our current house September last year. When we moved in we found:

The gas cooker in the kitchen was leaking gas when we turned a hob and the glass in the oven was held in place with spoons. We had to have gasman in to disconnect it.

The stopcock under the sink was bust.

The shower in the wet room was leaking into the floor and has a caused a damp problem in the next door cupboard. We had a plumber in to deal with both of these problems. He also found a pipe under the kitchen sink that was about to burst and fixed that for us free of charge!

Two TV Ariels on the roof neither of which worked.

The wheelie bin was full of horse manure and urine all slopped into a bucket and crawling with maggots. It was the most disgusting thing I’ve ever seen up close. We had to deal with that and it wasn’t pleasant!

Despite all the above we love the house, I fell in love almost immediately, and can’t ever envision us moving.

Cockroaches and mice. A rental and the landlord 'hadn't thought to tell us as he was thinking about maybe contacting pest control at some point'. We had nowhere else to go so had to live with the pests until they were eradicated. Which takes a while.

-All furniture left in the house so we had to fit ours around it.
-Inefficient back boiler didn't work well enough to counter the draughty Louvre single-glazed windows, so the house was freezing for months.
-polystyrene ceiling tiles in every room except the kitchen (which had a suspended asbestos tiled ceiling!)
-nobody told the neighbourhood cats that we weren't going to feed them like the previous owner had, so we had months of guarding the doors every time we opened them to stop random moggies invading the house.
-The curtains were too heavy for the curtain tracks so the screws pulled out of the wall as soon as we used them.

We moved in a year ago yesterday. Since then, we have had to sort:

• A garage which flooded every time it rained (previous owners had allegedly never had a flood in 52 years). We have had the dropped kerb raised and 2 collapsed soakaways replaced and all is fine now.


• Rat infestations in the flat roofs and attic. It took a while to eradicate them but is sorted now.


• A garden pond that leaked 4000 litres a week


• A wall between a bedroom and shower room that was reliant on the fitted wardrobes on the dividing wall to support it.


• Smell of dog in all the carpets.


• A utility room where all the cupboard doors fell off as they were opened. Ditto the kitchen.


• All walls had been freshly painted, mainly to cover up mould.


• The windows were so decrepit that we suctioned up about a litre every day from every window.


• The electric radiators were useless and our bills were £600 per month initially. And one had been wired into a BT box. This was a system that had been installed by a reputable “big name” company and had a valid certificate.


• Our hot water boiler had no overflow fitted and flooded after a couple of months.


• Our sewage treatment plant drive belt failed after 2 months (luckily it was sorted, after a rather “fragrant” Bank Holiday weekend!).


• One of our toilets had a broken seal and therefore leaked.


• The shower tray was cracked.

We did have a full survey done before we moved in which came with so many caveats because the Surveyor was unable to access areas such as the loft as it was full of furniture etc, and we had been unable to examine the place properly “because of COVID”.
We are still renovating but can just about laugh at some of these problems. It WILL be beautiful when finished!

Wow guys, some of those sounds like a diabolical nightmare, especially the gas leak and pests.

DH opened one of the windows earlier and it came off the frame...

integrated electric cooker tried it to see if it worked till new kitchen put in no it blew the electrics
bought the house in july when winter came one window in the kitchen water pouring through the top of it
needed new pcp board for rewire
carpet in the bathroom rank when we lifted it
a 1940s chimney in the kitchen which cost a bomb to get rid of
kitchen didnt look too bad till we removed it most of the plaster fell off the walls and rampant mould behind the cupboards
winter again became obvious which double glazing panels had blown
all minor irritations which are now sorted

DS's house: Macerator toilet somehow plumbed into the adjacent shower making what the plumber called, "in effect an open drain". Cost £850 for corrective plumbing.

That's dangerous- and illegal.

Finding that the kitchen had no plaster whatsoever on two of the walls, only chipboard fixed to the inside brick layer under the tiling/behind the units. And then finding that there was no inner brick in one approx 2 metre-long section from just around work surface level down to the floor, because some () had taken the bricks out, presumably so they could push white goods further under the work surfaces, effectively into the wall cavity.😧Upper inner layer of brick just hanging above there, unsupported.....

Finding that the gas meter, electric meter, consumer unit, and water main, were all squashed up cheek by jowl in one corner behind the kitchen units. To get to any of them, you had to empty a corner cupboard, take the shelves and back out, and crawl through and behind it. And the gas main came in to the meter, wandered unsupported under the units (which were resting on it) then went outside the house again, coming back in to go to the boiler.🙄

Kitchen flooded the first night, combination of pipes under the concrete floor cracking under the weight of us moving in, and the sink backing up because it was pissing down and I’d cleaned the kitchen, sluicing water down the sink, and the previous owner had never ever cleaned the trap AND had piled up all their rubbish on the gulley drain outside.

Anyway, day two the flood took out all the kitchen electrics, shame as we quite needed them to install a washing machine and tumble drier to cope with the bed bugs we discovered on day three…

We paid a premium for our house on the basis it had been gutted and fully renovated.

• downstairs underfloor heating was non functional. 500-600 to replace the pump. Broken valve inside a year, think that was over 1k to sort.
• upstairs central heating and downstairs underfloor heating never worked in isolation from one another. Took multiple plumbers and 2-3k all in to finally fix.
• water damage in two bedrooms due to a broken gutter. Fixable only with scaffolding - around 5k to sort.
• leaky roof, again fixable only with scaffolding. We opted to replace the whole damn thing given the access issues. 8-9k.
• 1-2k worth of electrical fixes, including isolating reading lights from “big lights”
• Transpired the bathrooms had a lot of poor workmanship - after some use the tiles on the floors all came loose, all the grout cracked everywhere. Shower units came loose at all the connections, so we have water damage in the rooms underneath the two bathrooms. Have spent about 1k patching up the bathrooms as best we can.

that’s all I can remember off the top of my head but I’m sure there’s more, ugh!

Had no water and when we turned it in at the road all the taps in the bathroom couldn't be turned off. Got the plumber out who condemned all the gas and we had to replace the boiler and gas fire immediately. And fleas. So many fleas.

Went to wash my hands and the cold tap came off in my hands. Had been in the house all of 30 mins.
leaky radiator.
hole in the floor covered over with Lino- found that one the painful way.

Mains fuse board and electric meter situated in the shower. Tbf we knew this from the survey. Electrician said it was ‘unique’.
I consider it was an attempt to win a Darwinism award.

New build house. The shower looked lovely, all marble walls….but the shower was not connected to the mains, no piping or any attempt to give it water. I now insist on turning on every tap when we view a property ( the one where the tap came off in my hand was an obvious Nono)

I don’t think the sewerage was up to much, either, as the third night we were there we found our two cats watching with interest as a rat climbed out of the downstairs toilet.

The dining hatch held up by a bit of 2X1 , on the supporting wall ,bottom floor, of three storey house ( kitchen in extension.)

The bathroom vent which just went into the floor space, thus causing timber rot ( actually I think that is not uncommon).

Our current house had a ‘wet room’ where the drain went….nowhere. The water just collected on top of the membrane. When the plumber came to look at the ‘blockage’ which was stopping the water draining away, he discovered thirty litres of water between the floor of the shower and the membrane covering the floorboards. Another litre and the ceiling would have come down.

I don’t have much luck with showers installed by other people, come to think of it.

I just found out the hob extractor fan has never been used... because it is neither wired in nor have anywhere to vent 🤣

One house had bare wires instead of wall lights and bare wires behind a glass panel. Under the floorboards were quantities per empty gin and whisky bottles
The fridge had a dish of mandarin oranges in it.
The oven was so thick with grease that the grill pan had to be thrown out.

A new build show home had patio doors that wouldn’t lock
A wet room with tiles that weren’t laid on marine ply, so the floor had to come up and all the wall tiles had to be replaced too.
The underfloor heating downstairs didn’t work until the radiators upstairs came on. The pipes had been misrouted and the hall ceiling had to come down to fix it.
There were no isolator switches installed in the kitchen, so the kitchen fitters and electricians had a row about who was to blame. Most of the kitchen had to come out.
A French drain had to be dug in the garden as it flooded and was always damp.

Walked in our new house to find they’d taken out ALL the fitted wardrobes in three bedrooms leaving us with hundreds of holes in the walls and three rooms that had to be redecorated immediately. Every light bulb had been removed and they’d even dug up most of the plants out of what had been a very pretty garden.

Boiler not working. Full system flush needed and new boiler

Electricity pre payment meter not accepting money on the card but electricity still being supplied with no card. When we contacted npower they didn't believe they supplied our house.

Laminate flooring in dining room was built around furniture. Did discover original 1920s wooden floor under it though.

Front door would not close or lock. Had to prop a broom up to it the first night.

Garden so over grown that I walked into a Wheely bin hidden in the jungle.

Light bulbs constantly blowing

Gosh some of these are awful. When we moved into our first home the piping under the kitchen sink was all bodged and leaking. They left one light bulb in the light fitting which should have had 6 lol. Then as winter came we discovered damp/mould in most rooms - had been hidden by fresh paint and viewing/completing in summer months. We ended up replacing the front door and all windows, having the loft re insulated and the damp remedied. Oh and the neighbours adult son was obviously s drug dealer - people coming by at all hours, taking packages and him shouting and swearing down the phone at people. it stank of weed if we had the back windows open - he eventually moved out so the smell disappeared except when he visited!

Current house - lived here a month, again problems with pipes under kitchen sink - every time we use integrated dishwasher it backs up into sink, same with washing up the water backs up into the other side of the basin and doesn't drain and it stinks so bad! We are having a new kitchen in September so trying to just put up with it until then making use of a plunger and washing up in a bowl and tipping water away outside. Also the house is fairly new - 7 years but as we're redecorating realising the plastering is basically non existent- basically just plaster board screwed over the walls and then maybe a thin slick of plaster over - or in some cases just painted white! Lucky it's detached so it's only our own household noise but the walls/floors seem very thin - like a herd of elephants stamping around above you if you are downstairs and kids are upstairs - not being especially noisy either and if some one is having a shower upstairs and you are downstairs, it sounds like a monsoon or being under a waterfall. It is a lovely house though and hopefully we'll be here many years.