Good or bad....what surprises awaited in your new home?

ankspon

Massive holes and gaps in concrete that Wimpeys won't repair

greenbee

Half the vendors' furniture as they hadn't actually finished moving out, and the garage full of cr*p. They never did come back for stuff like old car batteries and a huge bin full of glass chips from their picture framing business. They tried to leave me their filthy cooker (as a favour apparently) but I did at least get them to get that removed.

I was a FTB and didn't realise the rules around vacant possession, so just dealt with it myself. If I have the same problems this time round I'll be straight on the phone to the solicitor ...

I_have_spoken

First house I bought was from two Australians who were leaving Britain. After moving in, I received a tsunami of demands for unpaid bills and finally a letter from Home Office asking if I had contact details!

Current house, the vendors had kept all the instructions for the boiler, fire, built-ins etc. and were in a pack sitting on the mantelpiece with the readings they had taken from the meters.

mothershipton

In this house we were left a bottle of wine and a lovely letter together with all the info needed about the house together with pictures of the house being built. The only bad thing was that we needed to paint nearly all the walls and recarpet as they didnt look anywhere need as good as we thought.

The house before that was the cleanest house weve ever moved into but there was an infestation of fleas which I had to get treated!!

The worst has been a bungalow that we bought last year to rent out, the roof was knackered (£1000) and the main drain was knackered (£600). Needless to say we havent made any profit this year!

rosyw

The worst was a house we bought years ago, I don't think they'd cleaned it during the whole time they lived there :eek: kept getting comments from the neighbours along the lines of "you're brave moving straight in" !!!

Best was my current place, she had kept ALL instruction books for cooker, fridge, boiler etc. which were in a pack, plus she took the day off work to show me exactly where everything is and how it all worked - and the place was spotless :T

Mylo_The_Moggy

We bought our house in January & when we moved in we found the shower was stone bloody cold no matter how high you turned it!!! Totally knackered it was no matter what we tried. It was fffffffreezing. All I wanted at the end of the stressful day was a nice hot relaxing shower as at the time we moved we had very bad snow & sub zero temperatures! :snow_grin

Ended up having to go to nearest Screwfix as the walk in shower was the only thing we had, i.e no bath.
Really don't know how ex-vendor put up with that.....

Oh and the toilet seat was missing! Bit cold on ya bare a*r*s*e!!!! :rotfl:

Other than that, everything was perfect.

But not advisable to move when it's 3 foot deep of snow though, yikes!!!!!!

Mylo_The_Moggy

sparklysaver wrote: »

When I bought my first house, I found the vendors still there. They invited me in for a cup of tea then cried about not wanting to leave. It wasn't even their home, it had been their late brother's. I was so young, and so gobsmacked, that I just left and got someone from work to come back with me later to check they'd gone.

Then I immediately changed all the locks. :rotfl:

I've had ex-vendor of our house text me over recent months saying she misses 'her house' & it still upsets her that she doesn't live here! Not hers anymore lol, even though she has admitted she regrets putting it up for sale & moving!!! Too bad cos me & hubby love it & feel like we've been here for years even though it's only been nearly 6 months in reality. :kisses3:

chella

on the day I moved in here, I went up to the bedroom and saw the hugest stain on the floor, neighbours said they had heard a dog barking for the last month, so it had probably been crated in the room, my gawd it stank, I couldnt sleep here for 2 months. tthe stench was horiffic. There is still a nasty stain that has come through to the downstairs ceiling. No matter how many times I have painted the stain still remains.

In the garden there was, once I had pulled away the weeds, about 5 years worht of cat litter and crap in a huge pile. Its taken me 2 weeks to clear it. Some people are just disgusting.

rrtt

chella wrote: »

on the day I moved in here, I went up to the bedroom and saw the hugest stain on the floor, neighbours said they had heard a dog barking for the last month, so it had probably been crated in the room, my gawd it stank, I couldnt sleep here for 2 months. tthe stench was horiffic. There is still a nasty stain that has come through to the downstairs ceiling. No matter how many times I have painted the stain still remains.

In the garden there was, once I had pulled away the weeds, about 5 years worht of cat litter and crap in a huge pile. Its taken me 2 weeks to clear it. Some people are just disgusting.

aaargh, sympathies! I'd have been tempted to replace both floor and ceiling. Still, if that was bad, just think how the poor neglected dog must have felt ...they have v. sensitive noses and are usually desperate to avoid soiling their own nest, so it must have been shut in, or elderly/sick and not properly looked after some people are both disgusting AND bast**ds ...

The nicest thing I/we've ever been left was a lovely atmosphere - both here in this house and a flat we had in London years ago

phoebe1989seb

In our current house (purchased May 2011) there was nothing really unexpected as we knew we were buying a project that had been started then abandoned by the PO when he became seriously ill.

We knew, for example that the room originally intended as the kitchen (there were no units etc) that was housed in an attached stone outbuilding, was in genuine danger of collapse. Goodness only knows why he'd had the new oil-fired boiler fitted in that space the year before, when it had clearly been in need of demolition for 100 years or so

We also knew that the cistern for the antiquated upstairs high level loo was situated on the floor above in an attic bedroom, LOL :rotfl:

The only real surprise was the sheer quantity of hooks we found hammered into the beamed ceilings throughout most of the house. Consequently we now refer to the PO as 'Captain Hook'!

In a previous house we completed on the purchase only to find the PO had left more than 50 items of cheap and nasty furniture - beds, tables, wardrobes, sofas, you name it, it was there - that had been used to furnish the four flats the house had been divided into. There were also guitars, tennis rackets and most surprising of all - a large metal and plastic circular picnic table with attached seating was actually buried in the shoulder-height brambles that filled the garden

We were incredibly naive and just accepted that it was our job to get shot of them. The whole place needed gutting so we had great fun attacking the lot with sledge hammers and filled several skips! I should add that this was in the late 1990s, before Freecycle and despite calling the local charities, no-one was interested in such rubbish

There was also the most disgusting brown ring all around the inside of the yellow bath in one of the flats and about 30 empty loo roll tubes sitting next to it :eek:

Friends said we couldn't possibly move in with a young child, but we camped out in one of the upstairs flats till we'd got the downstairs habitable and thoroughly enjoyed recreating a family home from a total tip........