What's the worse thing you have found when buying a property and the worse thing you have covered up

s1ipmatt

First House I bought had the down pipe going straight into the ground, didnt go into any other pipe work. So when it rained hard the water backed up into the top gutter and over flowed into the cavity wall. This caused damp issues which the previous owner just painted over.

Toilet not flushing and the shower waste pipe leaking thought the kitchen ceiling. Good times.

ka7e

My Mum's roof started leaking while it was under offer - it was being sold as a doer-upper and the buyers knew a new roof would be needed eventually. They had a full survey done and still proceeded. In the few months before completion the roof deteriorated and there was wet, blown plaster in the loft and a stain appeared on the bedroom ceiling below. My brother repaired the plaster and painted the loft and bedroom ceiling with stain blocker and we were blessed with weeks of dry weather. The weekend the new owners moved in, we had torrential rain and they probably cursed their luck that the roof should fail so spectacularly the moment they took possession.

The worst thing we found in our current house was a trail of stains on the underlay from the main bedroom to the bathroom. The carpet had looked OK and we lived with it for several months before ripping it up.The vendor's daughter visited to drop off some spare keys and commented that she was glad we had replaced the carpet as her mother had been totally incontinent. Ick.

s1ipmatt

My parents bought a house in mid 80s and the bath tub was white in colour but had a big thick black ring going all around the inside. My parents tried everything to get rid of it but would not move. They found out from the neighbors that the person my parents bought the house off had inherited it from from a family member, who had died in the bath tub and was there for over a week before anyone had noticed she was missing. The black ring was from the water line.

gemma.zhang

s1ipmatt said:

My parents bought a house in mid 80s and the bath tub was white in colour but had a big thick black ring going all around the inside. My parents tried everything to get rid of it but would not move. They found out from the neighbors that the person my parents bought the house off had inherited it from from a family member, who had died in the bath tub and was there for over a week before anyone had noticed she was missing. The black ring was from the water line.

This is definitely the worst 😱😰

gemma.zhang

1st place we bought as young twenty sth, we were so disappointed when seeing the state of house looked like ripped apart : all wall lights had been pulled out with huge holes for us to fix, bags and bags rubbish in the loft and garden; some of the rubbish were not even cleaned up. It looked like the sellers just vanished half way through packing… lots of things were not working, the electricity had been a mess we have trying to fix for years afterwards. Eventually we fixed Little by Little…

The latest house we moved to totally opposite (bought it as doer-upper) : house has been professionally cleaned, Radiators / water everything we thought might not work actually works very well. With champagne and 💐. We r very happy and feel very blessed 🥹.

housebuyer143

s1ipmatt said:

First House I bought had the down pipe going straight into the ground, didnt go into any other pipe work. So when it rained hard the water backed up into the top gutter and over flowed into the cavity wall. This caused damp issues which the previous owner just painted over.

Toilet not flushing and the shower waste pipe leaking thought the kitchen ceiling. Good times.

Gosh, that reminds me of the house I moved into recently. Water marks on every ceiling, even when there was no water above 🤣🤦‍♀️ 
Water tank leaking and then the bath, everytime water went on the side, it ran behind the bath panel, through the large gap between the floor and plaster and ran out of all the coving downstairs like a river 😱 how someone lived in the house how I got it is just crazy tbh. A bit of sealant was all it took to stop it. 

Skiddaw1

s1ipmatt said:

My parents bought a house in mid 80s and the bath tub was white in colour but had a big thick black ring going all around the inside. My parents tried everything to get rid of it but would not move. They found out from the neighbors that the person my parents bought the house off had inherited it from from a family member, who had died in the bath tub and was there for over a week before anyone had noticed she was missing. The black ring was from the water line.

Oh my word!! ... That's a truly gruesome anecdote... What did they do? Presumably they replaced the bath?

s1ipmatt

Skiddaw1 said:

s1ipmatt said:

My parents bought a house in mid 80s and the bath tub was white in colour but had a big thick black ring going all around the inside. My parents tried everything to get rid of it but would not move. They found out from the neighbors that the person my parents bought the house off had inherited it from from a family member, who had died in the bath tub and was there for over a week before anyone had noticed she was missing. The black ring was from the water line.

Oh my word!! ... That's a truly gruesome anecdote... What did they do? Presumably they replaced the bath?

It wasn't really gruesome, nothing untoward happened, she died of old age. We lived with it until my parents could afford to change the whole bathroom. As a kid I really hated having a bath as I knew someone had died there. 

AlexMac

Enormous quantity of guano (bird 5h17) and about a dozen dead pigeons in the loft as the roof was so shot on a wreck I bought at auction that birds nested in it.  I put on a boiler suit and filled a dozen bin bags.  I left the wasp nest up there as it was abandoned. 

The buyers, who become friends, never realised how bad it had been, as by the time I sold, three years later, it had a new everything; roof, wiring, central heating, kitchen, bathroom and flooring as well as a full re-dec. so although I doubled my money, they were happy as values locally has rocketed and I marketed it cheap for a quick sale.  So the empty wasps nest I left was way easier than an attic full of bird carcasses and poop!

ProDave

My very first house, a new build 1 bedroom terrace, cleaned me out when I bought it, I really was broke so it was furnished with all second hand mostly gifted furniture.  Mum bought a new carpet downstairs but upstairs was a gifted second hand carpet.  The bedroom was a bit of a patchwork and there was not enough to carpet under the bed.  I sold it like that with a gaping great hole in the carpet where the bed was.

The house I moved to from there was a 1930's doer upper.  I chose this old tired house because if it's location, in preference to another developer box in the middle of an estate so I knew it was in a state.  Windows were draughty, heating almost non existant, damp and cold, wiring was in a state, woodworm etc.

But I did not complain, I just fixed it up.  It was far better to fix that up and have a house in a nice location in a village than buy a modern house in a horrible estate where you can't fix the poor location.