What “surprises” awaited you after moving in?

[BlessedKingfisher]

Feeling a bit down atm so just wanted to see if anyone else had a stressful time after moving in to their new place?

We are FTBs, because of many different reasons (the market earlier this year, pregnancy, low salaries etc) we didn’t really have a lot of choice and kept getting outbid on properties in our price range. We finally settled on a flat and moved in recently - we knew that some decorating needed to be done (painting, new carpets) but since then found out that the boiler needs servicing, we probably have a small leak in the pipes (but not sure where..), the electrics need testing and now it looks like we also have a silverfish infestation!! thank goodness we have money left over but it’s not going to last long at this rate…

So if you have a story to share about the weird/expensive/nasty surprises that you had after moving in, please do so - misery loves company

A garden full of dog shit, some very dodgy DIY (unfixed standalone bath with no pipes connected to the overflow, so you couldn't sit on the edge and if you filled it up too high your overflow ended up in the kitchen beneath) and occasional Amazon and ASOS deliveries even now, 11 years later!

I have posted this story on previous posts about ' finds'.....we opened up a fitted built in wardrobe....the inside was papered with pics of hard core german lesbian porn.....!!!....pages torn from mags and pasted inside....hard to remove as strong glue had been used....neighbours children came into the house and were running around and they saw it....!!....A friend also discoverd similar...hard core porn pics in a cupboard but papered over with tin foil....bizarre....

Nothing too bad, but we had a baby around the time we exchanged and competed, so I took my eye off the ball and didn't inspect again after exchange. We got:

• two bedrooms full of furniture (bed frames, bedside tables, chest of drawers)
• a garage full of broken wood and bits of metal
• a loft with half a bed frame, a dismantled computer desk, a dismantled canvas wardrobe, a mattress, a dozen half-full tins of paint, 2 hefty wooden mirrors and a weird, slightly-spooky wooden chair.

Oh yeah and a big black bag of socks and knickers in the loft!

We moved in May

We had a shower leaking through to the hall
All 3 toilets were absolutely filthy
The extractor fans were a fire hazard because they were clogged with dust.

They took a horrible fireplace that they’d screwed on the wall and left us with a magnolia square in the middle of a badly painted wall.

So much cat hair, and pee, in the carpets we abandoned the idea of cleaning them and skipped them instead.
DH took the bath panel off last week to find a leak, that was obvious they’d known about from the amount of tissues packed round it.
Debt collectors letters.
I keep getting her contact lens sent
The windows were that dirty that when I cleaned them the water came off black.
I don’t think they cleaned it from when we put the offer in until they moved out.

We knew we’d have to decorate because they liked bright colours, and we don’t, but it is naughty to hide things that you absolutely know are wrong with properties imo.

DS2 bought his house at auction. The lady had gone into a care home so her son dealt with it. They left everything that they didn’t want, which they’re apparently allowed to do, but they turned the fridge freezer off and left it for a month. DS2 was greeted to the most offensive smelling rotting chicken and blue cheese.

I can’t believe the way some people behave just because they can.

• Mice
• Fleas
• Bed bugs
• A mountain of junk in the shed and loft; when contacted about this the seller said “But it’s a fixer-upper and priced as such” – fixer-upper doesn’t mean the contents!
• All the filthy, smoke-scented rags she used as curtains, one of which was on a curtain rail that had a SPOON for a bracket – she’d very clearly ticked that curtains were excluded from the sale but I suppose it could be argued these weren’t curtains by any stretch of the imagination
• Fireplaces filled with years’ worth of ashes
• A mouldy, limescale-covered kettle, dirty mugs and half-used gone-off milk as a welcome gift
• The other welcome gift was the dirtiest mop and bucket I’ve ever seen in my life
• The entire front garden filled with black bin bags overflowing the bin, walls, and piled up against the window: she felt clearing them from the house was enough, why take them past the property line?

I still wish bad things upon her and when the bailiffs showed up I gave them every forwarding detail and bit of information on her I could 😡

Grime...lots of it.

Hadn't cleaned out the oven, hadn't wiped food grime from inside of kitchen cupboards, if a corner had been covered by furniture, they hadn't bothered cleaning it....layers and layers on dust accumulated behind where the sofa had been.

Filthy, manky people...

Wow, thanks for all the replies, I know it sounds bad but they do make me feel better, our stuff is pretty boring compared to some of these!

As for the survey - we had a level 2 as it’s a flat so a structural one seemed pointless. I’m not sure what the surveyor did, probably just walked around once and that was it! Though to be fair, it was done in the summer so damp from rain etc might not have shown…

Oh and the cleaning - yeah I’m pretty sure our vendors never cleaned 🤢 the kitchen floor was sticky with grime 🤢

@Grumpybutfunny wtf, they had a dishwasher in just for show?? That’s so weird!

@stevalnamechanger I’m sure the vendors (who we were in direct contact with) mentioned they did and they were happy to pay for it, I don’t think it happened though. That wasn’t the only problem with the paperwork but tbh at that point we were desperate to get out of our tiny flat & didn’t want to kick up a fuss. Lessons learnt!!

@LadyGardenersQuestionTime and @ifyoudreamofsanddunes do tell about the bailiffs?! Did you talk yourself out of it, or give them proof of ID, or how does that work? That must have been so stressful, I’m so sorry!

@oceanblue 🤞🏻🤞🏻 I’m thinking the same, that we can fix stuff in time and we will look back on this and laugh about it a few years down the line

@Newhousecrying love your username (sorry!) Oh yeah half the doors don’t close properly either, I guess because of the building settling - shows that the vendors never did a snag when moving in…crazy!

@Deguster wow 😮 words fail me!

@LeeHarper5 😂😂

@barskits 😮 omg I’m so sorry… we’re also off on holiday this week for 2 weeks and I’m terrified of coming back to a flat with a massive leak & full of silverfish

@ZeroFuchsGiven I think you win 😂 what do you even do with something like that?!

In one house porn magazines on top of the kitchen units. In another they had re carpeted but not moved the wardrobes just carpeted around them.

Did you sell the house I bought as well? When I eventually sell this house I’ll be very upfront about all its flaws and that it should be seen as a doer upper (or knock down and start again to be more truthful). Despite its flaws I like the area and the house’s situation so when I do sell it won’t need to be a quick sale and the buyers will need deep pockets. It could be be fantastic with money thrown at it.

We discovered that the surveyor had drawn the boundary wrongly and it was actually halfway through our living room, so on paper our neighbour owned half of our room. Neighbour was an absolute conman who tried to make the most of this, until we pointed out that that meant we owned half of his field. We did get it sorted out originally but it was v stressful.

So much.
conservatory leaking.
dodgy electrics.
black mould around upstairs windows
damp in the living room external wall
unfinished skirting boards with huge gaps making the house cold

yes we had a survey, an in depth one as well but it was during a heatwave and a lot of the problems were well hidden!

@BellePeppa it was def sold as a 'doer-uper' and she knew she would have to do a complete refit, hence why it sold at under market vaule.

Glad your happy with your place, in time these things can be fixed and as you say, you love the area and house situation.

Leaks in the conservatory aswell as windows not secured in properly with ill fitting surrounds that resulted in widows falling out when you shut them...shower sounds like a foghorn with no off button.Hole in the bathroom ceiling that drips rain water cleverly disgiused with a plastic vent.We loved the house so much though so not major inconvenience caused.

We have left (accidentally) our Christmas tree and decorations-we only realised around 8 months later in December when we couldn't find them and figured it would be too cheeky to go back and ask! But if you moved in a number 68 in 2006 sorry we left them and didn't mean too!

Not mine, but my DM in the 1980s.

moved a very large bookcase, which we had bought with the house. It was going to be moved to another room. Behind it, there was a piece of hardboard nailed to the wall. My DM and I pulled off the hardboard and there was a doorway to another room- even had a small window (big, sprawling house) behind the ivy. It was only 9’x8’ and had no heating in, nor electricity.

this “unwanted” room was as big as my bedroom in London.

This made me laugh 😂

I am going to exchange soon and hopefully no nasty surprises😥

First flat: constant mice you could never get rid of- and I doubt anyone every will (top floor or a badly cut up Victorian town house).

First house: switched to a combi boiler, pressure kept dropping, leak in the pipes under the concrete asbestos mixed floor- this happened twice- 2 insurance claims totalling over 20k each- had to move out each time to a serviced apartment, second time with a newborn. Every winter putting on the boiler I have PTSD.

You poor guys surely you claimed off them for the mess

Just googled silver fish ... I've had them before but didn't realise what they were!! Thank you for enlightening me 😊 how do you get rid please?
When we moved in the bathroom had a carpet and stunk of years old urine all the way through to the floorboards -yuk!

I hope you made your dh sort it all out!

We bought a house from a couple who split up acrimoniously. He had moved out weeks before; she hadn’t moved anything when we arrived with our movers. Her furniture was put out in the garden.

There were bare wires in the hall because he’d taken wall lights. The oven was filthy and the grill pan thrown out immediately. She left food in the fridge, also thrown out immediately.
The master bedroom had an extension, which, it became apparent, had been erected without consent. We had to have steels put in- and yes, we did have a survey.
When we did some work on the house and floorboards were removed, the space was full of empty gin and whisky bottles- maybe why they were divorcing.

@LadyGardenersQuestionTime @HavfrueDenizKisi and anyone else given cats, did the owners collect or did you keep them?

The previous owners of my house were tight arses, so I knew the electrics, boiler, heating system and gas fire had never been serviced plus cracked electrical sockets, they have two young children as well 🙄 The shower ran cold, and not because they were trendy, again they were too tight to simply pay a plumber £150 (Inc parts) to fix it. They'd rather freeze. The shower water leaked all over the floor because I guess for them it was easier to mop up water all the time, than just replace the sealant. Radiators jammed shut as they never put the heating on.

Nothing major like a well though!