What is the worst house or flat you have Bought/rented?

Miniminter

And why

The worst was a flat I rented , always tried to change the rent and always problems with the place , left after six months

dunroving

OK, I'll bite. My worst house purchase was my first. I was living 4,000 miles away at the time and thought I'd buy a house in the UK for when I moved back. I'd just passed my 30th birthday and decided I should start being responsible (though I didn't have enough money to even think about buying a house before that - sound familiar?)

I *should* have bought a solid house close to transport links with rental potential and needing no work, as I wasn't going to return to the UK for at least a couple of years (it ended up being over 20 years!).

Instead, I bought a rambling old Victorian semi in the countryside, and project managed a complete renovation from 4,000 miles away, before the days of the interWeb. The builder who was carrying out the work was a complete cowboy. Halfway through the project, I came back during the school holidays (I was a teacher back then), to find the place a complete shambles. Everything came to a head when I discovered he had repaired a hole in the sewage pipe (that he had caused) by wrapping it in polythene! At one point, we had a Mexican standoff on the stairs, me with a big lump of wood and him with his jackhammer, threatening to rip all the new plaster off every wall, unless I gave him "his money". When he realised I wasn't backing down, he p1ssed off and calmed down.

Long story short, the work got finished, he got paid, I decorated the whole place in one summer, and then became an absentee landlord to two awful tenants who trashed the place over the next two years.

All this time the dollar was dropping through the floor and interest rates went through the ceiling! I had to take on three extra jobs and was sending home about 90% of everything I earned. I was barely managing to make the mortgage payments.

LUCKILY, I ended up selling the place just before the last-but-one crash in the late 80s. I didn't make a profit but did make back everything I put into the house, so it ostensibly ended up being an enforced savings plan. All the money I got back was used to pay my way through grad school, which changed my life. So all in all, a great, if painful, life experience.

Davesnave

The worst place was probably a hostel in South Kensington, where I only had one corner of a room shared with 3 others.

However, the last time that floor of the building sold as a flat, it fetched £5.3m, so my corner was worth roughly £250k in today's money.

So, not too shabby, after all.

Nobbie1967

I'll always remember the house we rented as students in the late eighties from Mr Kalirae in Portswood, Southampton. It was part of a terrace that was subsiding backwards down a hill and had a massive crack in the main front to back party wall and the bedroom at the back had a slope on the floor so if you lost anything you just looked in the lowest corner.

Previous tenants had lit a fire in the middle of the lounge and the kitchen floor was so rotten that the Lino was the only thing stopping your feet going through. I had the lower front room which had slugs visiting from the garden on a regular basis.

On the bright side, it only cost £16 each a week and we even got some housing benefit to offset that (those were the days). We moved in at the start of the summer and completely redecorated after the landlord said he would pay for materials. I think he was a bit suprised when we spent £800, but fair play to him, he honoured the agreement.

It had gas fires in each room and one day there was a smell of gas and someone called the gas board who came out and condemned every gas appliance in the house:eek:

It's amazing what you can get used too.

[Deleted User]

Worst was the one private rental I lived in. Dumbo DIY renovation before I moved in, LL to whom truth and 'his word' were incomprehensible concepts.., would say anything to get his way and was quite forceful (verbally). Initially felt he could inspect on a bi weekly basis, without even a phone call to warn me. Usual 'blame any issues on the tenant', boiler that broke down frequently, bad repairs done on that but by gas safe engineer so nothing I could do.I frequently was sent notice by text, which always knocked the floor from under me as it was always going to be difficult to find another place (on benefits in area with less properties than tenants).

Was the most stressful time of my life. And the above is just a summary lol.

Although moving out left me in temporary accommodation (and the council were only slightly better than the private LL), it was still a huge relief to leave.

And, as sod's law always rules my life, the temporary accommodation had cockroaches. I am not normally known to scream but I did a fair bit til they finally stopped popping out on every surface (the council did call in an expert, twice). But it was still better than dealing with the private rental LL. Insect Cockroaches you can kill (with cillit bang I discovered ha ha), human sized ones are more difficult.

Waterlily24

Our worst one was one we bought, we knew it needed to be refurbished completely. It had holes in the floor ie missing floorboards and lots of quite big holes in the ceilings. We did it up while we still lived in and I think it was my favourite of all the houses we've had. Apart from one they've all been doer uppers.

thethirdbar

our first flat together was really targeted as 'student' accommodation (i'd just graduated and husband was in uni) so was generally a bit worn and naff but overall ok. but we had a somewhat dodgy (though perfectly friendly and generally helpful) landlord who insisted on cash payments and received letters addressed to the property under various different names...

we negotiated upfront for bills included and spent time forwarding on letters from npower addressed to a name similar-but-not-quite-the-same as said landlord. came home one day to find the place had been forcibly entered into and prepayment meters installed for non-payment of bills :O

eventually the landlord got them switched back for credit meters & he reimbursed us for money we'd spent topping them up so we were generally happy with that!

it was a top-floor flat in an old victorian four-storey terrace. when we moved in all the other flats were occupied but during the course of our four-year tenure the other flats' tenants all moved out and weren't replaced. students lived next door which is what we assumed was the source of the distinct marijuana smell on the ground floor. until one evening all our electrics stopped working and we discovered smoke pouring out of the basement flat... turns out there was a weed farm in there which had been hooked up to the electrics somehow, which caught fire. it apparently destroyed all the wiring - he did put us up in alternative accommodation (shared student HMO *shudder*) "while it was being fixed" - but we found somewhere else pretty sharpish after that and only ever went back to get our stuff.

no real idea whether he had any involvement with the weed but we're still on the same street, so we saw it go up for sale a several months later and now (four years on) has been nicely remodeled and looks like pretty nice flats.

overall not the worst experience but it was tremendously stressful to live through ! (good entertainment value in the retelling though)

Ogriv

There was the rented flat which was so damp that it had the atmosphere of a swimming pool changing room.

And then there was the room in a shared house which I slowly figured out was a converted bathroom (only a single bed could fit in the room, there were frosted windows, and there was a toilet next door).

Annie35

Worst purchase was a shared ownership flat, completed 2 hours before the market crash in Nov 07, set the tone for the whole sorry affair !!!55357;!!!56881;

Worst rental was a brand new persimmons, could of done better with a cardboard box & roll of duct tape & it was slap bang in the middle of a building site/war zone

lincroft1710

Another inane thread by the spambot Miniminter

troffasky

lincroft1710 wrote: »

Another inane thread by the spambot Miniminter

...in your opinion. I quite enjoyed reading the well-written posts.