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

cwcw

Our only real surprise was that the previous owners, who had decorated through out, had had the new master bedroom carpet and new skirting board fitted around a freestanding wardrobe that they took with them! Bought a new carpet straight away but still trying to find a match for the 2m of missing skirting.

Looby_Lou

We got the keys to find that the hot water cylinder had water squirting out of the top of it, and had been for a while. I turned the oven on to cook dinner and it blew all the lights, I went to put dinner in the built in fridge/freezer and discovered that wasn't working so we went to the chippy. We then discovered that the built in dishwasher didn't work. In the garden I have found an entire greenhouse worth of glass thrown in the corner along with plastic piping (u bend etc) 3 metal cooker shelves and dozens of boken bricks. In the attic we found a toilet, basin and bits of wardrobes dumped. I wonder why the guys at the tip recognise me?

Davesnave

Hmmm.....where to start!

One of the first things we checked was that the ten tonne lorry really had gone and that nothing obviously problematic like that remained. A Bernard Manning-sized freezer in the garage was a bonus, especially as he wasn't in it.

Then we began noticing the less desirable things, like the smoking pyre in the garden, which is where all the stuff they didn't want had gone. However things like metal chairs weren't consumed, and the wind had changed, so a mature tree and the polytunnel had been damaged. The tree had to come down.

We painted over the blood coloured walls in the bedroom, threw out smelly fitted carpets, changed the locks and breathed a sigh of relief, but that was misplaced optimism......

Tackling the immediate garden, I soon discovered a stash of around 150 wine bottles, but couldn't immediately account for the smell. Then I realised shrews and small voles were going inside them and not coming out.....Smelliest ride to the dump I've ever done. :eek:

Three months in and we found two 15' pig arks in an overgrown orchard, and roughly 150 big bale bags, the latter just buried for no apparent reason.

A further 3 months on and we hit the mother lode. A huge pile of 'manure' which we'd hired a digger and 4 tonne dumper to move, turned out to be only manure on the top layer. The rest was the remains of a former commercial enterprise, which a local landscaper 'disposed of' by bulldozing it all into a big pile and setting fire to it. The remains were then covered with earth. He proudly explained all this a year or so later.

I'm afraid we lost count of the number of dumpy bags filled with the materials sifted from that pile, but we were glad the local council hadn't then clamped-down on people in big vans tipping stuff. They have now! :rotfl:Every time we went shopping, we'd take another couple of 1 tonne dumpy bags.....

We were glad that when we got to them, two more 'long barrows' in the gardens, each over 20' long, contained only innocuous building materials from extension work. We made a car park with those.

That summer the council man turned up to inspect the two horse burials.....The WHAT? Luckily, he had a map. Someone later regaled us with the story of how hard it had been fitting them into the holes because of rigor....We won't go there!

And finally....well, no, I'm not going to be stupid enough to think we are there yet. Even after almost 4 years, I'm sure this place has a few more surprises up its sleeve.

spannerzone

Davesnave wins I think

seven-day-weekend

When we moved into our Spanish house, the biggest surprises were the rat's nest in one of the bedrooms and the stud wall in one of the other bedrooms that moved if you touched it (just as well we were going to remove it anyway!). Also that the roof leaked in a place that meant all the water came through exactly onto the electricity meter.:eek: Not to mention the huge vat of manteca (pig fat with paprika added) that they left in the upstairs sitting room.

When we sold it (repairs all done!), the owners got all the furniture, bedding, white goods, cutlery, pans and crockery -basically all they had to do was open the door, sit on the sofa and open the bottle of Cava that we had left them. We had already agreed to sell fully furnished, but when we left Spain for the final time, the sale had not completed and there was a chance that it wouldn't, so we left it set up as a holiday home.

We also left all the booklets for the appliances, all the gas documentation (in Spain you have to have a gas safety certificate every five years ),details of how to get the bottled gas and the phone number of the guy from whom we got the logs for the woodburner. My husband also left post-it notes on anything that needed an explanation, like how to work the TV and the washing machine.

TDPIX

The garage was (badly) converted into living space and the floor was decaying.

We noticed this on a Sunday evening after lifting the carpets. I lifted a few of the rotting chipboard and made a few other holes to get a sense of what was going on, then we left due to having work the following morning.

It wasn't until the next Saturday that I was back in the garage to continue ripping out the decaying floor - and, since I had started ripping it out 6 days prior - the smell was pretty awful.

Yeah, that was kind of fun...

Nice house overall though.

bluebaron

We are moving tomorrow and my wife's has been cleaning for 2 weeks even on top of the kitchen cupboards! I have got all the manuals for oven,boiler etc and written a list of all operations and bin days etc.

Also left spare paint (for touch-up's) and light bulbs, fuses etc and a bootle of wine and a card. I filled in all the holes where I took down pictures and mirrors and had ll the carpets cleaned.

Just finished mowing the lawn and sweeping the deck.

Hope my seller does the same?

Tomm20

In our first house we found a nice dry rot fruiting body in the corner of the empty fridge space!, luckily at the time I was in the trade and was able to laugh it off. DW still to this day does not know what it was, she would be mortified. She was chuffed with the new kitchen that I had to "surprise" her with!!

We also found a plastic pan behind the toilet catching the waste water leaking when the toilet was flushed.

On our second house, we arrived to witness the vendor wheel spinning, revving, skidding and pulling hand brake turns in a large hire van in the gravel drive!!

On asking him what the hell he was doing, he replied " I just couldn`t help myself, I hate the F****** neighbours and wanted them to know it"

We also found a hole in the lounge wall the size of a fist where a large unit was during our viewing, still to this day have no idea why it was there?

ACG

I found a Singer sewing machine in the loft - worth a few hundred quid on ebay and some 1970's light shades worth another £50-60 on ebay! Speaking of the loft, it was all kitted out, flooring, electric, lighting etc.

No major nasty surprises, although when re-wiring i did find a plug socket under the sink! But re-wiring was always part and parcel of buying the house so not a major problem, but if rewiring wasnt required that would have cost a bit to remove probably.

Davesnave

spannerzone wrote: »

Davesnave wins I think

To be fair, we knew the place had issues, we just didn't expect quite so many!

The latest one, a telegraph pole, mysteriously re-located onto our land by a neighbour in 2007, is on-going, but we are in sight of a resolution...... I think.

And the previous owners, bless them, cannot be blamed, except perhaps for not noticing its arrival! :rotfl: