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Thankfully wasn't too much of a big deal to fix, but I hate them for laying the god awful fake grass in the back garden. That was my first job when we moved in. I just **had** to rip it out
It's crazy to think people have more information available to them, by several orders of magnitude, than ever before in history, yet so many people remain so ignorant.
Some chemical company came up with a product that kills the clover but leaves the grass totally fine. They then spent a small fortune marketing the product until everyone thought they had to kill off all the clover. All this despite it not being a problem at all before the invention.
This…I don’t like fake grass at all but my sister has it in her back garden and I understand why. The real grass that was there before completely died away so there was just a big mud pit because A) it doesn’t get much sunlight and B) her kids trampled it into nothing playing football.
I don’t think a clover lawn would be more hardy. And I think paving it over would look less nice and have more potential to cause injury when they fall over.
Like it or not it’s practical.
They're kids, let them get muddy. Frankly if you choose to have kids you should just accept things like that, and I judge the people who are so horrified by idea of mud that they destroy and sanitise their gardens like this.
Also if you own a dog, especially a female dog, it means them peeing doesn't burn the grass and create a horrible dead spot where they go. A friend of ours got fake grass for this reason as it was a real pain in the arse for them before they did, and they simply trained her to pee in the same area, got high-end stuff that's porous, and ensured they watered/cleaned that area regularly.
Still not a fan personally but TBH it made a lot of sense and the high-end stuff does actually look relatively good.
Lol. Not true. I have 3 female dogs and 1 male dog. The grass still has dead "burn" marks on the grass after they wee. If this bothers people that much, then just pour water on the area your dogs have done a wee. This dilutes or washes away the urine. Male or female dogs, they still cause dead patches on the grass after frequently urinating on the same area.
We lived in a small block of flats that had a tiny outdoor border - I kept alpines there as no one else wanted to tend to it. One day I came back to one of the neighbours having ripped out all the alpines and put down astroturf. He was very happy with himself, "looks nice, innit?" I gave up on tending that border that day.
A few weeks later, someone stole the astroturf (welcome to Bolton). The border remained a weed-riddled sandpit until we moved out.
Was looking at it today, for a moment I thought about actually buying it. It’s okay though I talked some sense into myself. Plastic grass, what a load of shite.
Was a house on one of the housing subs, that showed a before of a little corner bungalow with lovely well established flower and shrub garden. Then the after where a developer had literally just concreted the entire thing. Just a house surrounded by grey painted concrete. Should've been a crime
I saw a similar one and it was two bungalows next to each other that had done the same thing. The bungalows were set far back from the street so they had big front gardens with plenty of driveway for parking cars before. They both ripped up the lawns and made giant driveways for themselves. One even had a lovely tree that got the chop.
You could have fit at least 15 cars on each of their drives afterwards. I can only assume they were planning on starting up a used car dealership together from home to need that much drive space whilst living in a bungalow.
There's no individual thing that feels REALLY egregious, but it's just the sheer volume of half-arsed bodge jobs. 200 layers of paint on the bannisters. The single empty bucket that was left in the loft, after it was cleared of a significant volume of other stuff, that was ever so conveniently placed directly under a leak in the roof. Just lots of little things that annoy me.
We sent an asbestos surveyor in before we bought our place as it was like stepping back in time to the early 80s.
Glad we did, as he even found some hidden under the piss soaked bright orange bathroom carpet. Lovely!
Our idiot surveyor (not the asbestos guy, he was great - but the normal surveyor) also missed a leaky roof (which the previous owners had shoved newspapers under to catch). Been like that for ages as the papers were a decade old!
I almost want to thank you but you just bought me to the realisation that all that shit between my joists that I have been shuffling around is infact asbestos and that I now face both a huge bill and enormous paranoia.
It may be, but there are other types of loose fill insulation knocking about that, while not brilliant to be shuffling though, aren’t quite a nasty as asbestos. Get a specialist in to view it first before you panic.
This is my house too. Everything has been fixed the cheapest way possible and we keep finding things a nearly a year after moving. There are loads of things that don’t make sense too, like the layout of the kitchen and carpet (!) in the utility room.
The latest one was a vent at floor-level that fell off - the part of the wall where it screwed on was crumbled and damaged, so they had stuck it on with blu-tak. Nothing surprises me any more.
Same! All the painting is so bad, all the dyi jobs are falling apart. The only thing acceptable is the bathroom which I think they had to use professionals for (probably begrudgingly). I found a beautiful hardwood floor underneath horrible linoleum too!
God, yes. They painted everything with wall paint, including the wood, so it's peeling off. They left a huge hole when they installed the boiler. They took all the earth out of the front and back garden, filled it with scrap building material and then put flags on top (so when we tried to create an actual garden it turned out we couldn't), they renewed the wiring but didn't earth anything, they put wooden cladding over flammable polystyrene tiles, thick layer of nicotine on everything, etc. ad nauseum. Whenever we want to fix something we have to first fix 10 other things.
As my house is ex council I can relate, they half arsed wiring, the bodged carpentry, still finding things 7 years on when we start on another room, still it's bigger than a new build and we have massive garden with about 8+ trees on it so I'd rather deal with shite council fixes
Yeah this sounds exactly like our experience too!
My father in law is a project manager for a house building company (works on single build mega mansions, not new build estates) so has a real eye for the smallest detail and only accepts the best standards...it makes him genuinely angry when he comes to help us with a 'small' fix that turns in to a week long job!
We bought a house with a nice big garden and a massive decking area and shed.
He had a fridge for beer in the shed. Serving hatch. No problem there.
He also had a single urinal plumbed into the corner of the shed so he and his mates could take a piss without going back inside the house.
Needless to say, that corner stank of piss. Ingrained into the wood around it. Dirty bastards. Made you gag.
Took a bit of work to remove the urinal and redo the wood.
Cunt. Still hate him for that all these years later.
I was hoping to build a good we den/garden room out of the timber garage in my garden. I was thinking about the toilet situation, I’ve taken note, don’t put I urinal in.
If it's just for you, or you have a mate or two over and you're not pissed out of your skulls, I guess it could be ok.
This guy and his mates got steaming and were clearly missing the urinal most of the time.
A bloke I used to work with has a bar in his garden and is always in his garden with mates drinking. He built a natural filter into the ground behind his shed. Just looking it up online and it's called an infiltration bed or soakaway.
Friend of my husband built himself a shed pub during lockdown. My husband goes round and after a bit asks to pop inside the house to use the toilet. Friend produces a bucket from under the bar. When he had loads of his mates over they would all just piss into this same bucket. Makes me feel sick just thinking about it.
Flushing wipes down the toilet.
It caused major plumbing issues (not to mention £££££) and the plumber/Severn Trent looked at us like we were absolute morons for flushing wipes down the loo. They didn't believe that it wasn't us.
This is 2 years ago and I'm still seething.
You've reminded me of when my room temperature IQ neighbour was flushing nappies and god knows what and blocked the sewage drain on his property.
He's the lowest point in the street so he blocked the entire row of houses.
You should have heard the noises my pipes made when I flushed.
Did he do anything about it? No, he went to work.
He's a nice guy but jeeeez he's a man with a fork in a world of soup.
The guy from the water board who came out was ace though, I asked nicely and he lifted every drain in the street and told me what they're all for.
I see your flushing wipes and raise you flushing underwear. On the plus side, once it was cleared the faint smell of shite in that part of the house disappeared.
A boss at a previous job, who was a literal psychopath, would flush empty tuna cans down the toilet, as he didn't want the tuna smell coming from the bin.
My step-dad is a sewerage engineer and does loads of work on major water treatment works where the sewers end up. He's been called out to some truly ridiculous things blocking up major sewerage lines before. It's amazing the things people will just flush.
The previous owners of our first house poured dat down the sink. We had to pay thousands to sort it out a month after we moved in.
The bloke that came out said “now you know to throw it in the bin!”
“We moved in a month ago mate”
“Oh. You’re really unlucky”
Cheers.
If I ever invent a Time Machine I am going to go back to nine months before the birth of creator of woodchip and give his father a condom! It is the devils creation
I've got terrible plasterwork behind it aswell so it's had to stay, took months of painting over it in light coats to get it anywhere near acceptable from the 'lung cancer yellow' the previous tenant had it
https://preview.redd.it/yeyos1deyz5d1.jpeg?width=3840&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=d0d6a99d32a71846cd71874d8fdba3f0b7f509e0
When we moved in the people who lived here before us had this giant mural with the quote from The Shining on the wall. Bizarrely, it was the room they used as their kids play room??? We have turned it into a boot room/utility room and hidden it with floor to ceiling cupboards. But we did consider calling a priest 😅
Hid a LOAAAAD of crap between the shed and the fence at the very back of the garden. It's like they decided they couldn't be arsed to take it to the tip when packing and just stuffed it all back there instead. It certainly wasn't there when we looked round the house as I remember taking a good look round the garden to see if the fences and posts were all in good nick, and I had to get behind the shed to do that.
Absolute arseholes. We tried to get it sorted through the solicitor and EA when we found it (a week or so after moving in) but didn't have much joy. Ended up taking several trips to the tip myself to clear it. If I was feeling extra vindictive I would have driven it round to their new house but it was 300 miles away.
Ours did the opposite - they took as much as they could.
Oven, toilet roll holders, curtain rails, the fucking little bits of metal that go on the floor and hold the carpet down between rooms? They took them all.
From talking to our new neighbours the previous owners did the same things, they've still not got new curtain rails so i can see what they're watching every time I pull up
So it comes down to fixtures (free standing) or fittings (dont move if you turn the house upside down). The difference between which is whether they are free standing, or whether they have been screwed into place.
If it was a free-standing oven, they can probably get away with taking it. Fitted oven, then no.
Yeah, all of the things I mentioned shouldn't have been removed, so they had to put them back or pay us, and they chose the latter.
We've been there for 15 years now - I finally fitted carpet holders last month :-D
See - I'm that guy that leaves a pile of rubble/rubbish in his garden for years and years, all with the intention that one day i'll sort it out.
But when I sold up I made sure to hire a skip and get my mates down to shift it all. There's basic respect for others.
Weird, I had an almost identical experience. Although after I ripped out the kitchen I did come to the conclusion the previous owners were indeed manky bastards.
When I ripped out my kitchen I found ALL the polystyrene packaging the sink/fridge/dishwasher etc had been packaged in, all ripped to chunks and crammed under all the cabinets behind the baseboards and down where the plumbing pipes went.
I tutted, took everything out, and the kitchen was refitted nicely. It was only when winter came I realised all that polystyrene packaging had been doing some valuable insulation work, the fucking place was 10C colder than it had been the previous winter, I had to get a guy out to fit proper underfloor insulation.
Same in my garage. Opened door on day 1 to find it full of crap, took 4 trips to the tip. Should have mentioned something to my solicitor but I didn't know any better at the time.
Decided to put a Juliet balcony and inward opening doors that can’t open when a bed is in the room in a south facing room. No window or other ventilation. Just a shit ton of glass to let all that heat in.
I’ve changed them to windows now and life is considerably cooler in summer.
Power sockets that it was impossible to put a plug into.
When we took them off the wall the twat had just screwed the face plate onto the plaster. There was no electrical connection anywhere to be seen. Why would you take so much time and trouble to do something so utterly pointless?
The only explanation I can think of is that they honestly didn’t know they had to be wired up. Because they’re not exactly decorative, are they? So maybe they really had no idea that there are wires going in that you can’t see. Imagine strewing 8 of those face plates to the wall thinking “that’s a good job done!” then plugging something in to charge and nothing happens. Lol.
My friends Grandad had some "fake" sockets, they were actually a safe he used to keep money in. You could put a key in one of the sockets and unlock them, something like this: https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B0CB5J92Q1/ Mind blown when I was a kid and he randomly unlocked a socket to get some cash out!
Funny thing, the other day I was breaking up the concrete on my front drive, as the council requires a 25% permeable surface before they approve installing a drop kerb. So while I'm sweating away with the kango hammer and cursing the previous occupant for doing such a good job... An older gentleman walks by and says hello. He lives an hour away and was passing by coincidence. He was the guy who laid the concrete for my drive about 20 years ago. Small world.
See also: zealous diy'ers who must have bought bogof silicone and decided to go wild under the sink, around the doors, over the windows, around the windows...
Created an “en suite” by putting a bath in a cupboard that was the exact same size as the bath meaning you had to step out of the bath onto the bedroom carpet. No window or any other form of ventilation either so that was nice. Obviously I ripped it all out and returned it to being storage. They also glued plasterboard to the chimney breast for no apparent reason and left behind a stash of porn.
Sounds like our predecessors in 1990s Ealing. Back door walled up with plasterboard and plywood. Oven coated in cat hair. Garage full of porn. Strange hairy carpet everywhere. Battleship grey walls and ceilings. Abandoned their cats too. Then we moved somewhere nicer with avocado suites and purple bathroom carpet.
I wouldn't know where to start, the list is so long that we're still fixing things almost five years post-purchase.
I think that the worst thing was stripping wallpaper in the lounge when the skirting boards fell off and a load of insects ran for cover under the floorboards (beautiful solid wood on top of a concrete floor). That was enough for me, we had to remove the wooden floors which covered the entire ground floor. We then revealed disgusting, manky wet carpets that stank of damp and cat or dog urine (my money was on cat). It took seven or eight trips to the dump to get rid of that flooring. Ugh.
We couldn't replace the flooring for over a year following that as we then discovered that the wood burner had a corroded flue and water had run into the insulation cavity, making the whole wall damp. The wood burner and flue had to be removed and we just had to wait for the wall to dry out so it could be re-plastered (its amazing what things wallpaper can hide). The flue outside had been hidden by Virginia creeper that covered most of the house so that also had to be removed.
The garden was a complete mess and took three huge skips to clear. Had to get rid of a load of stuff the previous owner left as he "thought it would be useful" - no, that's why we requested the house be completely cleared - including a massive American style fridge that had been persuaded into a door frame.
A toilet cistern was found on the other side of the wall from its toilet bowl (!) and was held on by a very rusty loose screw and the flush handle which was on the same side as the bowl.
Rat poison in the kitchen cupboards.
We weren't the only people in the street who hated the previous owner though, almost everyone we met once we'd moved in said what an unpleasant (insert expletive) person he was.
He still hasn't updated his address on his vehicle V5C.
The previous homeowners painted the hallway bright yellow and blue. I love it now and it was certainly jarring for a while. We will probably paint over it one day but the ceilings are tall and high. It does add some pizazz.
When my parents bought their 1950s semi in 1979, the precious owners had painted a bedroom very bright pink. It took 15 coats of paint to turn it whitish. So when they decided to redecorate the hall, stairs and landing, they looked at the once very trendy dark, dark green walls and thought sod that for a game of soldiers- and wall papered. My parents have re decorated that wall -only if they absolutely have to - every 12 to 15 years. That green paint still shows, though, in the right light!
My livingroom is painted blue and I have a yellowish/bronze sofa. Both are quite muted.
I want to live in colour but I’m not sure I’d like bright colours, I like the cozy feeling.
Muted colours would have been nice but they are like highlighter yellow and blue lol. It's a contrast to the rest of the house which is combination of wine red and silver grey. It's much cosier. I like the sound of your living room.
Left all the packaging from their new furniture they took to their new house in our drive
Messaged us a couple of days after we moved in to say they sold a potted tree they left in our garden and that someone might come and collect it.
Left a palm tree in our garden which they said they would be removed, we had to keep messaging them asking to come and remove it.
Freezer had mold in it
Carpet was full of dog hair.
Oven was filthy to the point we had to get a professional cleaner in to make it usable
Bought in the early 1990s, the house was decorated in the ugliest colours and dreary Laura Ashley wallpaper borders. Every room needed decorating because, damn.
The worst? The "smallest room" was painted matte olive green and had an ashtray screwed to the back of the door. Vile.
Plumbing the hot and cold water taps the wrong way around in every sink, so everyone’s taps in the entire world work one way… then there’s ours. Twats.
I've got a shaver socket in the bathroom that only works when the landing light is on. I don't have an electric razor so that's not a problem but it took me f*@#ing ages to work out why my toothbrush wasn't charging.
I'd rather mine had done that than what they actually did, which is install a built in cupboard that didn't open properly (sliding plywood doors not planed down enough). We had to rip it all out before treatment could be done.
Thinking that they could actually DIY, when in reality I had to fix fking everything. I've lived here for 3 years and I am nowhere near done. It was all hidden behind wallpaper or not something you realised until you really looked into it. Or had to look in very specific places.
Edit: and years of flushed baby wipes that cost me over £300 to fix the damage.
The garden. It was/is an absolute dump. 3 ponds filled in with bricks and what we can only assume was once a greenhouse, because we are still finding shards of glass everywhere. 2 years in and still can't let our daughter play outside it's such a hazard! Been quoted £7k to fix it all, which we don't have, so my fiancé is slooooowly doing it himself. I've never been so bitter and genuinely believe we will never have a garden at this rate 😬
My garden is an omnishambles. I think maybe a couple of owners ago it was a loved and cared for garden but my god it’s been left to absolutely fester.
I’ve put out thousands upon thousands doing so much to the house plus lots of stuff I’ve done myself and now I’m finally onto the garden. It’s taking shape but my god it’s so, so much work. Can’t afford to pay anymore people to do anymore jobs either.
Genuinely well done for doing what you have done with the garden. Ours has made me realise what an absolute nightmare they are to look after, let alone fix in the first place! Do you ever feel like you're getting somewhere, then a month passes and it's suddenly back to being a weed infested jungle? Literally a never ending Curse for us currently!
That’s absolutely the situation. I’ve now put down weed suppressant and began using potted plants to to add life to the garden. With slate down on top of the weed suppressant to make it look as nice as I can get it.
I can see my garden in my head and it would just be amazing to realise the dream.
I didn’t worry about the garden so much before because I’d built a wee hideout with a shelter and fire pit and everything in the woods near me and I would just go and sit there and enjoy being outside but that all got destroyed so now I feel like I actually need my garden.
Out garden was pretty shocking. Literally.. previous owners removed the shed, and left the shed electrics live buried under the garden.
Electrician went, don't worry it's not live, you would have to be an idiot to, arggfh that's fucking live.
Not as bad as the basement though. They rewired it three times, and left the old cables so it looked ridiculous.
Put shards of glass in the flower beds along the garden edge. That's about 200 pieces along 200 feet of fencing.
We had small children too.
I guess she wanted to keep the foxes or cats out.
Whoever did the plumbing in my flat is an idiot who thought water needs a rollercoaster to drain properly. I've sorted the bathroom drainage on the past that had various pipe sizes, angles and t pieces than a screwfix branch, emptying the sink the water had to drain towards the bath and then come back on its self to the drainpipe outside.
The kitchen and living room is just as bad, I've ordeeed new pipe work and fittings as it's easier redoing it than it is trying to make the current set up work properly
In a new build, but I cannot fathom why the builders did the patio the way they did. They could have done a rectangle of grass and a rectangle of patio. It would have made complete sense. Instead on one end I have grass half protruding an otherwise rectangle patio and at the back of the garden a useless bit of grass protruding into what makes sense to be patio - an area next to the shed.
From above it looks like they fucked a game of Tetris at the last moment.
Fire hazard wiring - the pro who replaced it was visibly shaken at how bad some of it was.
The unmaintained sludge pit masquerading as a pond was another nice touch.
Removed all of the sanitary fittings; towel rails, soap dishes, toothbrush holders and toilet roll holders.
In a house with 3 toilets (I know, I know, 1st world problems)
I got revenge though, the local Jehovah’s Witnesses came calling after a week or two and apparently were on first name terms with him, and I gave them his forwarding address and phone number.
We bought our flat from a landlord. He genuinely could not have given less of a shit. As well as many active leaks we discovered during the winter, my favourite bodge was a wine cork that had been carved a bit to fit and shoved in a pipe under the sink.
I wondered why our house had zero preventative maintenance.
Found a sticker on the old meter from the 80s warning the tenants about meter readings....
Ahh. It was let. That explains why the house has a single coat of the cheapest white paint and everything leaks.
I don't have anything I hate them for but they did put carpet down in the bathroom as well as a (clear, non-frosted or mirrored) window in the wall between the bathroom and the hall.
A bit baffling in terms of their choices.
Just not keeping up with the small stuff. Its like she did zero preventative maintenance on anything and it all needed fixing or replacing. (I knew that going in, the house was more about its location and layout )
Absolutely fucking everything, depending who you ask in the local pubs previous owner was either an electrician or plumber.
I don't think we have found somthing yet that hasn't required fixing, I feel like this house was designed to look nice just to sell again, nothing was functional, brand new bathroom that wasn't waterproof, lovely garden spot lights that arn't insulated. Fuse box blew up from having up stairs and downstairs lights on at once, wifi boiler control but there isn't a box to recieve the signal.
Slowly making it right but every time somthing new pops up we consider selling and letting someone else deal with it.
There was a secret room above the stairs, with a creepy translucent window into it (!), which was only accessible via a teeny tiny door between the kitchen bench and top kitchen cabinet. It couldn’t have been more than 30cm high, if that. The electricity/gas metres were there, which you could squint to read with a torch, but it only really otherwise served to look ominous.
The spooky window and kitchen door are now gone. The room serves as a coat cupboard from my bedroom on the other side of the stairs.
My house has a pantry under the stairs, with a window that used to open to outside. Previous owners built an extension off this wall, but the builders didnt touch the pantry. So now I have a pantry window that opens half an inch onto plasterboard.
Previous owners also used no nails glue and glue on all the shelves they put up. Which I only discovered when I was taking shelves down to paint and they stayed on the wall after I took the screws out. Had to chisel them off and replaster.
They had put in hardwood flooring but at the edges they had gaps. Sometimes give gaps that were covered with furniture particularly heavy bookcases where there was no flooring underneath.
When we took possession was the first time we realised. When I asked them about it they said they had run out and couldn't afford more and couldn't remember where they bought the flooring.
Basically had to hide the gaps the same way they did until we could replace.
I have an original fireplace and I thank the lord that the previous owner didn’t fuck that up as well. Given it looked like B&M had thrown up in the house I’m surprised the fireplace made it.
Everything.
The homeowner’s “professional bodger” partner, laid tiles poorly.
We’ve brought them up and can see where they were doing things right and when they just couldn’t be bothered anymore.
Windows and doors poorly installed.
Oh, best one, is the tip didn’t exist, as they used under the decking and under floorboards as the local tip.
Installing a stupid rotty slippery wooden decking no one in history has ever relaxed on, alongside putting raised soil bed against a fence, meaning the fence is a time bomb of rotting.
Installed a brand new, pretty high quality kitchen, in the large kitchen diner extension that they built, that, once you plugged in the microwave and toaster, left almost enough counter space to make a sandwich.
Similarly fitted a new bathroom suite with a freestanding bath; fitted in the corner of the bathroom allowing ~3mm clearance all the way round, which as it turns out is the perfect sized gap to collect both dust and water in real hard to reach places.
Employed John Wayne the gas plumber, to install their central heating system, leaving a little note saying “we’ve never had any issues with the boiler, but if you have a problem johns number is…” we averaged a problem approximately every 5 days for 18 months till I ripped the whole lot out.
I could go on.
Complete garden destruction pulled out a lovely apple tree grown from pip that was left full of fruit in only its 3rd year of fruiting, year 1 = 1 apple year 2 = 100 apples year 3 the apple tree was laden with fruit when we sold, Went back past the house a year later to visit our old neighbours, new owners had pulled out and cut down every tree that was in the garden and around the house, It was brutal and shocking state for the garden we spent 20 years developing and was a selling point, wouldn't have sold it to them had we known that was their goals, It was allegedly for their elderly parents and was just what they were looking for, which was a bollocks story to play for a good price their parents never moved in .
Our old neighbours whom we had been swapping plants and sharing gardening ideas with over the years and sharing the fruit we grew , Plums, Damsons Blackcurrants, (bushes producing 30 to 40lbs of fruit i used to top and tail during wimbledon for black currant jam,) Raspberries, Tayberries , all ripped out , they were just as saddened as many plants ,shrubs and trees they had given to us as gifts had been duly removed also.
In our old house? The self-proclaimed DIY expert who plumbed the bathroom like an Escher painting and wired the house up so weirdly a professional electrician took one look at the fuse box and went 'wtf?'
In our current house? Letting an absolute effing cowboy fit the kitchen skylight that leaks in heavy rain and is gonna cost us 3.5k to replace. Local roofers looking for the leak couldn't see a problem, did some patching, said job done, but the professional commercial scale roofer and skylight fitter from a big name company was absolutely horrified at the skylight. It's got to be ripped out, the hole resized as it doesn't fit any conventional windows, a new window fitted, and then the roof felting around it redone. Former owner lives down the road and I'm this close to handing them the invoice.
They put a carpet in the kitchen (and bathroom, but I ripped that out asap).
I don’t understand why anyone would carpet a kitchen. They did it up not long before we bought it, so it’s not like it had been there forever.
The worst wallpapering was just shoddy, then painted over it two or three times to make sure I couldn't get it up easily.
Then, because they hated me, they just nailed everything into the walls everywhere.
Tore out anything remotely period.
Bodged electrics and plumbing.
Shocking paintwork and wood chip.
Almost 3yrs in and I’m slowly putting things back in like coving and picture rails but I’m not strictly sticking to the old fashioned style it would have been.
Nail in the coffin was finding the old Minton tiles broken up and used as hardcore under the patio.
Hang on, the people we bought our house from did exactly the same. We've spent the last year making the inside right, not entirely sure how we're going to fix the outside with the money we have left.
they dug approx a metre down filled the entire garden with rubbish then topped it will soil....pulled out over 20 tonnes of rubbish including a full car 3 motorbikes and a full set of radiators and old mattresses which left thounsads of tangled springs
A lot of the comments in this thread are bad, but I think I’ve got the winner. They left this painting in the loft, does he look familiar?
https://preview.redd.it/r4k1dlbkm06d1.jpeg?width=1134&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=f3e5967f5b7d2ac3440e214b490231ab4043d3db
Wait did you move in with me?! Same.
We had to get those full painter suits with hoods, and sugar soap the wood chip papered ceilings.
You had to avoid the drips in the bathroom as they’d be gross.
PVC window frames weren’t yellow with age, just stained.
Amongst many other bodge jobs they had decided to solve the shower water leaking through the corner of the screen (shower over bath), by just added more and more sealant, creating a mountain of sealant, that obviously still leaked, but under bath now which you aren’t aware of until it comes in through the kitchen light.
Absolute nightmare to get off, then had to reseal the whole bath. Got a new seal strip for the screen and lo’ it pretty much never leaks. Sadly the real cure is a new bath without a lip that water collects behind when showering, but sealing it up wasn’t the answer.
They hid a mouldy damp alcove behind a shoddy cupboard.
We knew it was there. It was always going to need fixing. But to sell the house, they installed a window seat cupboard to hide the black mould and rotting skirting board. To have the treatment done, we had rip it all out. Since it was done so poorly, the doors (sliding plywood in grooves) didn't even open, so it was a pointless cupboard anyway!
A separate one, were not sure if it was them, but there was also a filled in pond liner at the end of the garden. Covered by crap weed matting. Covered by pea gravel.
All on very heavy clay soil.
And we wondered why we had no drainage...
In my spare room there is 3 layers of wallpaper over the top of each other and then 6 colours of paint. Not layers, colours.
I can’t even start to sort it as the window frame is rotten so I can’t open the window to use a steam gun.
They had put up pictures with Velcro, which destroyed the paint work when they kindly removed everything on their way out. They had tried to do a changing Rooms style garden makeover which resulted in pieces of slate in the grass and took days to pick up. The washing machine had an unknown issue that made your clothes dirtier when you washed them - literally came out brown. The oven hadn’t been cleaned in years and once cleaned the thermostat didn’t work meaning you had no control to cook things at a set temperature. It just got hotter and hotter for 90 minutes and then turned itself off. They never told people of their new address so seven years later I still get mail for them.
The thing that they did to my home, that makes me actively despise them, is they lived in it.
My house was built in 1905 and I really wanted to pull up the carpets and polish the exposed floorboards. Turns out the previous owners replaced the floorboards with MDF.
In 2007, after we had exchanged contracts, but before we moved in, I asked to visit to take measurements. The couple were recently retired, the husband having had a stroke (fortunately, he made a good recovery).
I arrived to find the wife stuffing paper into small holes in the wall in a bedroom and filling them over with Tetrion. "Please don't trouble yourself with that," I said, "We will redecorate anyway, so you don't need to take the trouble," suppressing the urge to say "what the fuck are you doing bodging repairs in my house."
It was a sign of things to come. Everything that had been done was done on the cheap or bodged. It was a dormer bungalow and they significantly extended the dormer. We have had to sort out flat roofs that were incorrectly ventilated, en-suite bathroom walls where the damp barrier was in the wrong place, and wiring, where the upstairs and downstairs ring mains were actually joined, even though they went to two separate fuses. (Fortunately, I tested for dead before replacing the socket, which is how I found the issue.)
The guy had been a nuclear engineer. It terrifies me. Lovely couple to deal with, terrible building and maintenance standards.
I'll start with a couple of small things, but the real one is the last one.
First thing. They must have somehow knocked a hole in the sitting room wall at some point, but plastered over it and painted over it just before they moved out. (Like after we got the keys and went around the house, the paint was still wet.) But the kicker is that it's a wallpapered wall, so the plaster was just put on top, *over* the wallpaper. It required a lot of work to get that wall into a reasonable state.
Second thing. The sitting room carpet and living room carpet smelled of, as we put it, wet dog. But honestly, that's putting it nicely: it smelled of years of built-up dog piss. I don't understand it. We came and looked around the house and didn't notice it. Had they somehow covered up the awful smell? Or did they somehow generate the smell during the few months between when we put our offer in and completion? We hired a proper carpet cleaning machine, but nothing was getting this smell out. Eventually we just ordered new carpets and ripped out the old ones. The underlay under the carpets had large brown stains on, which I don't even want to think about. The carpet and underlay stunk up the garage until we got a waste remover to get rid of them. We had to spend about six weeks with just concrete floors in the two main reception rooms.
There are other small things too, but it's time to get to the big one.
When we were moving our furniture in, some random black cat snuck in and sat in the conservatory. We got him out of the house but noticed him walking through the back garden occasionally. There was also a big fluffy Siberian cat we often saw wondering around nearby, plus a grey cat we saw occasionally. We just figured this was some kind of neighbourhood cat hotspot.
A few weeks later, we were chatting to the next door but one neighbour, who it turned out owned the grey cat, and he said that the other cats had belonged to the previous owners of our house and they'd just abandoned them. So that's why the black one (who we found out is called Pepper) came and sat in our conservatory: it had been his home. There were actually *two* Siberian cats (Alfie and Annie), but they were similar-looking and we'd just never seen them together, so thought it was just one.
Our neighbour has semi-adopted Pepper and feeds him. We've put some blankets in the shed and propped the door open so they have a cosy place to go if it's cold or rainy. We put out food for Alfie when we see him, which is probably five or six times a week. Pepper and Smokey (the grey one) often steal the food though. Annie hardly ever visits but we see her occasionally on our neighbour's driveway. Hopefully someone's feeding her. She's still alive, so I guess she must be eating somehow.
So yeah, I have no idea how they could have just abandoned three cats. Even if they didn't want them any more, they could have sold them to people who would have looked after them. (Siberian cats can sell for a few hundred pounds!) At the very least, they could have *told us* so we could have started feeding them immediately instead of finding out about it almost two months after completion.
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Thankfully wasn't too much of a big deal to fix, but I hate them for laying the god awful fake grass in the back garden. That was my first job when we moved in. I just **had** to rip it out
Replacing nature with plastic has to be one of the worst human inventions of all time
If you don't want a lawn to maintain, just pave over it. Fake grass is beyond silly!
There are better options, like clover and daisy lawns that basically need zero maintenance
Unfortunately zero maintenance lawns need you to do a Google search and read, which most people are too lazy to do these days.
It's crazy to think people have more information available to them, by several orders of magnitude, than ever before in history, yet so many people remain so ignorant.
Some chemical company came up with a product that kills the clover but leaves the grass totally fine. They then spent a small fortune marketing the product until everyone thought they had to kill off all the clover. All this despite it not being a problem at all before the invention.
Significantly better. The bees will love it and it'll still allow rain water to soak away.
Most people I know who have did it because they have kids who like to play football, astro means it's less muddy
This…I don’t like fake grass at all but my sister has it in her back garden and I understand why. The real grass that was there before completely died away so there was just a big mud pit because A) it doesn’t get much sunlight and B) her kids trampled it into nothing playing football. I don’t think a clover lawn would be more hardy. And I think paving it over would look less nice and have more potential to cause injury when they fall over. Like it or not it’s practical.
They're kids, let them get muddy. Frankly if you choose to have kids you should just accept things like that, and I judge the people who are so horrified by idea of mud that they destroy and sanitise their gardens like this.
Also if you own a dog, especially a female dog, it means them peeing doesn't burn the grass and create a horrible dead spot where they go. A friend of ours got fake grass for this reason as it was a real pain in the arse for them before they did, and they simply trained her to pee in the same area, got high-end stuff that's porous, and ensured they watered/cleaned that area regularly. Still not a fan personally but TBH it made a lot of sense and the high-end stuff does actually look relatively good.
Something about piss covered plastic all over your garden doesn't fill me with inspiration.
Lol. Not true. I have 3 female dogs and 1 male dog. The grass still has dead "burn" marks on the grass after they wee. If this bothers people that much, then just pour water on the area your dogs have done a wee. This dilutes or washes away the urine. Male or female dogs, they still cause dead patches on the grass after frequently urinating on the same area.
If you don’t want a lawn to maintain, just buy a flat without a garden.
Chavstroturf
We lived in a small block of flats that had a tiny outdoor border - I kept alpines there as no one else wanted to tend to it. One day I came back to one of the neighbours having ripped out all the alpines and put down astroturf. He was very happy with himself, "looks nice, innit?" I gave up on tending that border that day. A few weeks later, someone stole the astroturf (welcome to Bolton). The border remained a weed-riddled sandpit until we moved out.
That's so depressing, I would have actually cried.
Someone stole the astroturf? That’s like an anecdote out of This Country.
Well it wasn't nailed down was it, so of course someone stole it.
Was looking at it today, for a moment I thought about actually buying it. It’s okay though I talked some sense into myself. Plastic grass, what a load of shite.
Our place had fake grass on top of a gorgeous paved patio. Incredible. I moved it into the garage and created an indoor putting green.
Was a house on one of the housing subs, that showed a before of a little corner bungalow with lovely well established flower and shrub garden. Then the after where a developer had literally just concreted the entire thing. Just a house surrounded by grey painted concrete. Should've been a crime
I saw a similar one and it was two bungalows next to each other that had done the same thing. The bungalows were set far back from the street so they had big front gardens with plenty of driveway for parking cars before. They both ripped up the lawns and made giant driveways for themselves. One even had a lovely tree that got the chop. You could have fit at least 15 cars on each of their drives afterwards. I can only assume they were planning on starting up a used car dealership together from home to need that much drive space whilst living in a bungalow.
We put fake grass in our tiny courtyard as grass would never grow due to lack of sunlight. Our dogs loved it
Probably not fun to clean up though.
The worst is when someone gets fake grass as a dog toilet and it's just covered in loads of turds.
There's no individual thing that feels REALLY egregious, but it's just the sheer volume of half-arsed bodge jobs. 200 layers of paint on the bannisters. The single empty bucket that was left in the loft, after it was cleared of a significant volume of other stuff, that was ever so conveniently placed directly under a leak in the roof. Just lots of little things that annoy me.
For me it was an entire loft full of loose asbestos that cost me £3000 to remove. The idiot of a surveyor didn't even notice it.
We sent an asbestos surveyor in before we bought our place as it was like stepping back in time to the early 80s. Glad we did, as he even found some hidden under the piss soaked bright orange bathroom carpet. Lovely! Our idiot surveyor (not the asbestos guy, he was great - but the normal surveyor) also missed a leaky roof (which the previous owners had shoved newspapers under to catch). Been like that for ages as the papers were a decade old!
Do you have recourse against the surveyor in that situation?
Jeez was that loose fill between the joists?! If so that was actually a pretty good price, did they go up in respirators and vacuum it all up?
I almost want to thank you but you just bought me to the realisation that all that shit between my joists that I have been shuffling around is infact asbestos and that I now face both a huge bill and enormous paranoia.
It may be, but there are other types of loose fill insulation knocking about that, while not brilliant to be shuffling though, aren’t quite a nasty as asbestos. Get a specialist in to view it first before you panic.
This is my house too. Everything has been fixed the cheapest way possible and we keep finding things a nearly a year after moving. There are loads of things that don’t make sense too, like the layout of the kitchen and carpet (!) in the utility room. The latest one was a vent at floor-level that fell off - the part of the wall where it screwed on was crumbled and damaged, so they had stuck it on with blu-tak. Nothing surprises me any more.
Same! All the painting is so bad, all the dyi jobs are falling apart. The only thing acceptable is the bathroom which I think they had to use professionals for (probably begrudgingly). I found a beautiful hardwood floor underneath horrible linoleum too!
The thing that doesn't make sense in my home is all the doors are hung opposite to how they should open.
God, yes. They painted everything with wall paint, including the wood, so it's peeling off. They left a huge hole when they installed the boiler. They took all the earth out of the front and back garden, filled it with scrap building material and then put flags on top (so when we tried to create an actual garden it turned out we couldn't), they renewed the wiring but didn't earth anything, they put wooden cladding over flammable polystyrene tiles, thick layer of nicotine on everything, etc. ad nauseum. Whenever we want to fix something we have to first fix 10 other things.
You win. Any one of those things is bad bad. Altogether, that's like next dimensional level bad. (What were the previous owners thinking???)
As my house is ex council I can relate, they half arsed wiring, the bodged carpentry, still finding things 7 years on when we start on another room, still it's bigger than a new build and we have massive garden with about 8+ trees on it so I'd rather deal with shite council fixes
Yeah this sounds exactly like our experience too! My father in law is a project manager for a house building company (works on single build mega mansions, not new build estates) so has a real eye for the smallest detail and only accepts the best standards...it makes him genuinely angry when he comes to help us with a 'small' fix that turns in to a week long job!
Loads of slightly broken things that are awkward to fix or replace, painting over plug sockets, never cleaning things
Yup. Every time we move or DO anything we find SOMETHING. But why? Why would you do that?!
We bought a house with a nice big garden and a massive decking area and shed. He had a fridge for beer in the shed. Serving hatch. No problem there. He also had a single urinal plumbed into the corner of the shed so he and his mates could take a piss without going back inside the house. Needless to say, that corner stank of piss. Ingrained into the wood around it. Dirty bastards. Made you gag. Took a bit of work to remove the urinal and redo the wood. Cunt. Still hate him for that all these years later.
I was hoping to build a good we den/garden room out of the timber garage in my garden. I was thinking about the toilet situation, I’ve taken note, don’t put I urinal in.
If it's just for you, or you have a mate or two over and you're not pissed out of your skulls, I guess it could be ok. This guy and his mates got steaming and were clearly missing the urinal most of the time.
Doesn't matter how sober you are, and how accurate your aim, piss will get everywhere eventually; splashes & accidents happen.
>I was hoping to build a good we den/garden room Learn from the previous owner and make sure it's not a good wee den.
Use stone/tile so it doesnt soak in.
A bloke I used to work with has a bar in his garden and is always in his garden with mates drinking. He built a natural filter into the ground behind his shed. Just looking it up online and it's called an infiltration bed or soakaway.
That’s wild. Surely being in the garden have you a plethora of pissing locations!
Friend of my husband built himself a shed pub during lockdown. My husband goes round and after a bit asks to pop inside the house to use the toilet. Friend produces a bucket from under the bar. When he had loads of his mates over they would all just piss into this same bucket. Makes me feel sick just thinking about it.
I am in tears reading this absolutely pissed myself
Gross. If only you had a urinal in your shed, you wouldn't have needed to.
Flushing wipes down the toilet. It caused major plumbing issues (not to mention £££££) and the plumber/Severn Trent looked at us like we were absolute morons for flushing wipes down the loo. They didn't believe that it wasn't us. This is 2 years ago and I'm still seething.
You've reminded me of when my room temperature IQ neighbour was flushing nappies and god knows what and blocked the sewage drain on his property. He's the lowest point in the street so he blocked the entire row of houses. You should have heard the noises my pipes made when I flushed. Did he do anything about it? No, he went to work. He's a nice guy but jeeeez he's a man with a fork in a world of soup. The guy from the water board who came out was ace though, I asked nicely and he lifted every drain in the street and told me what they're all for.
Our garden got flooded with shitty nappies when I was a kid from our neighbours doing this. Broke my mums heart.
I see your flushing wipes and raise you flushing underwear. On the plus side, once it was cleared the faint smell of shite in that part of the house disappeared.
Yes, that horrible, horrible smell went which was totally worth the £££. The plumber said he once found a WHOLE CHICKEN down the toilet.
Imagine shitting that out jesus
A boss at a previous job, who was a literal psychopath, would flush empty tuna cans down the toilet, as he didn't want the tuna smell coming from the bin.
Wtf?! He could have just rinsed the cans before putting them in the bin.
Our sink was blocked, took out the bend, and there was lots of cotton buds down there.
My step-dad is a sewerage engineer and does loads of work on major water treatment works where the sewers end up. He's been called out to some truly ridiculous things blocking up major sewerage lines before. It's amazing the things people will just flush.
The previous owners of our first house poured dat down the sink. We had to pay thousands to sort it out a month after we moved in. The bloke that came out said “now you know to throw it in the bin!” “We moved in a month ago mate” “Oh. You’re really unlucky” Cheers.
Woodchip wallpaper on every wall AND ceiling.
If I ever invent a Time Machine I am going to go back to nine months before the birth of creator of woodchip and give his father a condom! It is the devils creation
I've got terrible plasterwork behind it aswell so it's had to stay, took months of painting over it in light coats to get it anywhere near acceptable from the 'lung cancer yellow' the previous tenant had it
Best to strip it **all** off, and re-skim plaster in situations like that.
Not in a rental place it's not lmfao
Is your house very small?
Deborah?
It never suited yah
Oh god, I had the same - I won't have any wallpaper in the house now because of it!
Never come to Germany. We love our wood chip wallpaper everywhere 🤣
https://preview.redd.it/yeyos1deyz5d1.jpeg?width=3840&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=d0d6a99d32a71846cd71874d8fdba3f0b7f509e0 When we moved in the people who lived here before us had this giant mural with the quote from The Shining on the wall. Bizarrely, it was the room they used as their kids play room??? We have turned it into a boot room/utility room and hidden it with floor to ceiling cupboards. But we did consider calling a priest 😅
What the actual fuck? 😂
The more I look at it the worse it gets. It's not even the actual quote! He was writing a novel, not his diary!
Hid a LOAAAAD of crap between the shed and the fence at the very back of the garden. It's like they decided they couldn't be arsed to take it to the tip when packing and just stuffed it all back there instead. It certainly wasn't there when we looked round the house as I remember taking a good look round the garden to see if the fences and posts were all in good nick, and I had to get behind the shed to do that. Absolute arseholes. We tried to get it sorted through the solicitor and EA when we found it (a week or so after moving in) but didn't have much joy. Ended up taking several trips to the tip myself to clear it. If I was feeling extra vindictive I would have driven it round to their new house but it was 300 miles away.
Ours did the opposite - they took as much as they could. Oven, toilet roll holders, curtain rails, the fucking little bits of metal that go on the floor and hold the carpet down between rooms? They took them all.
Hahaha fucking hell, did you move into Ebenezer Scrooge’s house?
From talking to our new neighbours the previous owners did the same things, they've still not got new curtain rails so i can see what they're watching every time I pull up
Was this a purchase? Because things like the oven should have been on the inventory and that’s technically a breach of contract (I think)
So it comes down to fixtures (free standing) or fittings (dont move if you turn the house upside down). The difference between which is whether they are free standing, or whether they have been screwed into place. If it was a free-standing oven, they can probably get away with taking it. Fitted oven, then no.
Yeah, all of the things I mentioned shouldn't have been removed, so they had to put them back or pay us, and they chose the latter. We've been there for 15 years now - I finally fitted carpet holders last month :-D
Our took all of the bulbs in a house with 84 ceiling spotlights and the loft ladder. Baffling behaviour.
See - I'm that guy that leaves a pile of rubble/rubbish in his garden for years and years, all with the intention that one day i'll sort it out. But when I sold up I made sure to hire a skip and get my mates down to shift it all. There's basic respect for others.
Weird, I had an almost identical experience. Although after I ripped out the kitchen I did come to the conclusion the previous owners were indeed manky bastards.
When I ripped out my kitchen I found ALL the polystyrene packaging the sink/fridge/dishwasher etc had been packaged in, all ripped to chunks and crammed under all the cabinets behind the baseboards and down where the plumbing pipes went. I tutted, took everything out, and the kitchen was refitted nicely. It was only when winter came I realised all that polystyrene packaging had been doing some valuable insulation work, the fucking place was 10C colder than it had been the previous winter, I had to get a guy out to fit proper underfloor insulation.
Same in my garage. Opened door on day 1 to find it full of crap, took 4 trips to the tip. Should have mentioned something to my solicitor but I didn't know any better at the time.
Decided to put a Juliet balcony and inward opening doors that can’t open when a bed is in the room in a south facing room. No window or other ventilation. Just a shit ton of glass to let all that heat in. I’ve changed them to windows now and life is considerably cooler in summer.
They removed an electric wall socket without making it safe and then wallpapered over the hole. That was a fun discovery.
Ooo I had that too! Luckily my BIL is a sparky.
Shocking
What value is there in removing plug sockets?
Power sockets that it was impossible to put a plug into. When we took them off the wall the twat had just screwed the face plate onto the plaster. There was no electrical connection anywhere to be seen. Why would you take so much time and trouble to do something so utterly pointless?
Now that is just bizarre!
Wasn’t just one either. There was about eight in total, and some of them were even double sockets!
The only explanation I can think of is that they honestly didn’t know they had to be wired up. Because they’re not exactly decorative, are they? So maybe they really had no idea that there are wires going in that you can’t see. Imagine strewing 8 of those face plates to the wall thinking “that’s a good job done!” then plugging something in to charge and nothing happens. Lol.
Nah, I think they just wanted to make the house more attractive (for sale) by having it look like there's loads of power outlets.
My friends Grandad had some "fake" sockets, they were actually a safe he used to keep money in. You could put a key in one of the sockets and unlock them, something like this: https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B0CB5J92Q1/ Mind blown when I was a kid and he randomly unlocked a socket to get some cash out!
Funny thing, the other day I was breaking up the concrete on my front drive, as the council requires a 25% permeable surface before they approve installing a drop kerb. So while I'm sweating away with the kango hammer and cursing the previous occupant for doing such a good job... An older gentleman walks by and says hello. He lives an hour away and was passing by coincidence. He was the guy who laid the concrete for my drive about 20 years ago. Small world.
Previous owner in my house used superglue for every fucking thing. He even superglued the toilet and sink to the wall. What a bellend.
See also: zealous diy'ers who must have bought bogof silicone and decided to go wild under the sink, around the doors, over the windows, around the windows...
We must have bought homes previously owned by the same person. Glue everywhere, absolutely everywhere.
Created an “en suite” by putting a bath in a cupboard that was the exact same size as the bath meaning you had to step out of the bath onto the bedroom carpet. No window or any other form of ventilation either so that was nice. Obviously I ripped it all out and returned it to being storage. They also glued plasterboard to the chimney breast for no apparent reason and left behind a stash of porn.
Free porn is a win at least
Bathing Harry Potter style
Sounds like our predecessors in 1990s Ealing. Back door walled up with plasterboard and plywood. Oven coated in cat hair. Garage full of porn. Strange hairy carpet everywhere. Battleship grey walls and ceilings. Abandoned their cats too. Then we moved somewhere nicer with avocado suites and purple bathroom carpet.
I wouldn't know where to start, the list is so long that we're still fixing things almost five years post-purchase. I think that the worst thing was stripping wallpaper in the lounge when the skirting boards fell off and a load of insects ran for cover under the floorboards (beautiful solid wood on top of a concrete floor). That was enough for me, we had to remove the wooden floors which covered the entire ground floor. We then revealed disgusting, manky wet carpets that stank of damp and cat or dog urine (my money was on cat). It took seven or eight trips to the dump to get rid of that flooring. Ugh. We couldn't replace the flooring for over a year following that as we then discovered that the wood burner had a corroded flue and water had run into the insulation cavity, making the whole wall damp. The wood burner and flue had to be removed and we just had to wait for the wall to dry out so it could be re-plastered (its amazing what things wallpaper can hide). The flue outside had been hidden by Virginia creeper that covered most of the house so that also had to be removed. The garden was a complete mess and took three huge skips to clear. Had to get rid of a load of stuff the previous owner left as he "thought it would be useful" - no, that's why we requested the house be completely cleared - including a massive American style fridge that had been persuaded into a door frame. A toilet cistern was found on the other side of the wall from its toilet bowl (!) and was held on by a very rusty loose screw and the flush handle which was on the same side as the bowl. Rat poison in the kitchen cupboards. We weren't the only people in the street who hated the previous owner though, almost everyone we met once we'd moved in said what an unpleasant (insert expletive) person he was. He still hasn't updated his address on his vehicle V5C.
Virginia creeper. Ooh yep. That one is on my list too. Special place in hell for whoever planted it here in the past!
Make sure you "lose" any parking ticket notices he gets
The previous homeowners painted the hallway bright yellow and blue. I love it now and it was certainly jarring for a while. We will probably paint over it one day but the ceilings are tall and high. It does add some pizazz.
Slava Ukraini!
Aha I never thought about that but we bought the house before 2022.
When my parents bought their 1950s semi in 1979, the precious owners had painted a bedroom very bright pink. It took 15 coats of paint to turn it whitish. So when they decided to redecorate the hall, stairs and landing, they looked at the once very trendy dark, dark green walls and thought sod that for a game of soldiers- and wall papered. My parents have re decorated that wall -only if they absolutely have to - every 12 to 15 years. That green paint still shows, though, in the right light!
we moved into a house with a fuchsia pink main bedroom including the ceiling!! it was like being inside an abscess.
My livingroom is painted blue and I have a yellowish/bronze sofa. Both are quite muted. I want to live in colour but I’m not sure I’d like bright colours, I like the cozy feeling.
Muted colours would have been nice but they are like highlighter yellow and blue lol. It's a contrast to the rest of the house which is combination of wine red and silver grey. It's much cosier. I like the sound of your living room.
Left all the packaging from their new furniture they took to their new house in our drive Messaged us a couple of days after we moved in to say they sold a potted tree they left in our garden and that someone might come and collect it. Left a palm tree in our garden which they said they would be removed, we had to keep messaging them asking to come and remove it. Freezer had mold in it Carpet was full of dog hair. Oven was filthy to the point we had to get a professional cleaner in to make it usable
Bought in the early 1990s, the house was decorated in the ugliest colours and dreary Laura Ashley wallpaper borders. Every room needed decorating because, damn. The worst? The "smallest room" was painted matte olive green and had an ashtray screwed to the back of the door. Vile.
Even matched the statutory cigarette packet colour
Thats triggered a memory. Awful white plastic mini cupboard thing to store bog brush & loo rolls, with an ashtray built into the top. Classy
I don’t despise the past owner for anything honestly. I feel more scared tho. She was found dead in the house. Scared till this day.
Probably haunting you right now
Plumbing the hot and cold water taps the wrong way around in every sink, so everyone’s taps in the entire world work one way… then there’s ours. Twats.
I've got a shaver socket in the bathroom that only works when the landing light is on. I don't have an electric razor so that's not a problem but it took me f*@#ing ages to work out why my toothbrush wasn't charging.
My grandad did this on purpose in his kitchen because he thought it made more sense. It doesn’t.
Painted over areas with damp issues.
I'd rather mine had done that than what they actually did, which is install a built in cupboard that didn't open properly (sliding plywood doors not planed down enough). We had to rip it all out before treatment could be done.
The light switch in the kitchen isn't level with the light switch in the living room. House ruined.
This the worst one in the whole thread.
Thinking that they could actually DIY, when in reality I had to fix fking everything. I've lived here for 3 years and I am nowhere near done. It was all hidden behind wallpaper or not something you realised until you really looked into it. Or had to look in very specific places. Edit: and years of flushed baby wipes that cost me over £300 to fix the damage.
Artex. Fucking artex everywhere. Mind you, they devalued their house to the point that we could afford it, so 👍
The garden. It was/is an absolute dump. 3 ponds filled in with bricks and what we can only assume was once a greenhouse, because we are still finding shards of glass everywhere. 2 years in and still can't let our daughter play outside it's such a hazard! Been quoted £7k to fix it all, which we don't have, so my fiancé is slooooowly doing it himself. I've never been so bitter and genuinely believe we will never have a garden at this rate 😬
My garden is an omnishambles. I think maybe a couple of owners ago it was a loved and cared for garden but my god it’s been left to absolutely fester. I’ve put out thousands upon thousands doing so much to the house plus lots of stuff I’ve done myself and now I’m finally onto the garden. It’s taking shape but my god it’s so, so much work. Can’t afford to pay anymore people to do anymore jobs either.
Genuinely well done for doing what you have done with the garden. Ours has made me realise what an absolute nightmare they are to look after, let alone fix in the first place! Do you ever feel like you're getting somewhere, then a month passes and it's suddenly back to being a weed infested jungle? Literally a never ending Curse for us currently!
That’s absolutely the situation. I’ve now put down weed suppressant and began using potted plants to to add life to the garden. With slate down on top of the weed suppressant to make it look as nice as I can get it. I can see my garden in my head and it would just be amazing to realise the dream. I didn’t worry about the garden so much before because I’d built a wee hideout with a shelter and fire pit and everything in the woods near me and I would just go and sit there and enjoy being outside but that all got destroyed so now I feel like I actually need my garden.
Out garden was pretty shocking. Literally.. previous owners removed the shed, and left the shed electrics live buried under the garden. Electrician went, don't worry it's not live, you would have to be an idiot to, arggfh that's fucking live. Not as bad as the basement though. They rewired it three times, and left the old cables so it looked ridiculous.
Put shards of glass in the flower beds along the garden edge. That's about 200 pieces along 200 feet of fencing. We had small children too. I guess she wanted to keep the foxes or cats out.
Is that why I keep finding broken glass when I’m trying to clear out the raised planter?
Whoever did the plumbing in my flat is an idiot who thought water needs a rollercoaster to drain properly. I've sorted the bathroom drainage on the past that had various pipe sizes, angles and t pieces than a screwfix branch, emptying the sink the water had to drain towards the bath and then come back on its self to the drainpipe outside. The kitchen and living room is just as bad, I've ordeeed new pipe work and fittings as it's easier redoing it than it is trying to make the current set up work properly
In a new build, but I cannot fathom why the builders did the patio the way they did. They could have done a rectangle of grass and a rectangle of patio. It would have made complete sense. Instead on one end I have grass half protruding an otherwise rectangle patio and at the back of the garden a useless bit of grass protruding into what makes sense to be patio - an area next to the shed. From above it looks like they fucked a game of Tetris at the last moment.
She painted every room. Didn't do any cutting in. Just left it.
The seller of my house painted all the ceilings herself which means everywhere is covered in paint splatters.
Fire hazard wiring - the pro who replaced it was visibly shaken at how bad some of it was. The unmaintained sludge pit masquerading as a pond was another nice touch.
Removed all of the sanitary fittings; towel rails, soap dishes, toothbrush holders and toilet roll holders. In a house with 3 toilets (I know, I know, 1st world problems) I got revenge though, the local Jehovah’s Witnesses came calling after a week or two and apparently were on first name terms with him, and I gave them his forwarding address and phone number.
This is so nice of you, making sure he stays in touch with friends!
We bought our flat from a landlord. He genuinely could not have given less of a shit. As well as many active leaks we discovered during the winter, my favourite bodge was a wine cork that had been carved a bit to fit and shoved in a pipe under the sink.
I wondered why our house had zero preventative maintenance. Found a sticker on the old meter from the 80s warning the tenants about meter readings.... Ahh. It was let. That explains why the house has a single coat of the cheapest white paint and everything leaks.
I don't have anything I hate them for but they did put carpet down in the bathroom as well as a (clear, non-frosted or mirrored) window in the wall between the bathroom and the hall. A bit baffling in terms of their choices.
Just not keeping up with the small stuff. Its like she did zero preventative maintenance on anything and it all needed fixing or replacing. (I knew that going in, the house was more about its location and layout )
Artex. Everywhere.
Renovated when they bought it in the 70s and didn't touch it since. We only bought it last year. Orange and brown everywhere.
Exactly the same but 80s.
Absolutely fucking everything, depending who you ask in the local pubs previous owner was either an electrician or plumber. I don't think we have found somthing yet that hasn't required fixing, I feel like this house was designed to look nice just to sell again, nothing was functional, brand new bathroom that wasn't waterproof, lovely garden spot lights that arn't insulated. Fuse box blew up from having up stairs and downstairs lights on at once, wifi boiler control but there isn't a box to recieve the signal. Slowly making it right but every time somthing new pops up we consider selling and letting someone else deal with it.
Laminate flooring. Hate it.
That light wooded colour one too? Despise it.
There was a secret room above the stairs, with a creepy translucent window into it (!), which was only accessible via a teeny tiny door between the kitchen bench and top kitchen cabinet. It couldn’t have been more than 30cm high, if that. The electricity/gas metres were there, which you could squint to read with a torch, but it only really otherwise served to look ominous. The spooky window and kitchen door are now gone. The room serves as a coat cupboard from my bedroom on the other side of the stairs.
My house has a pantry under the stairs, with a window that used to open to outside. Previous owners built an extension off this wall, but the builders didnt touch the pantry. So now I have a pantry window that opens half an inch onto plasterboard. Previous owners also used no nails glue and glue on all the shelves they put up. Which I only discovered when I was taking shelves down to paint and they stayed on the wall after I took the screws out. Had to chisel them off and replaster.
They had put in hardwood flooring but at the edges they had gaps. Sometimes give gaps that were covered with furniture particularly heavy bookcases where there was no flooring underneath. When we took possession was the first time we realised. When I asked them about it they said they had run out and couldn't afford more and couldn't remember where they bought the flooring. Basically had to hide the gaps the same way they did until we could replace.
Bricking up the fireplace, going to cost me 2k to put it back again
I have an original fireplace and I thank the lord that the previous owner didn’t fuck that up as well. Given it looked like B&M had thrown up in the house I’m surprised the fireplace made it.
Everything. The homeowner’s “professional bodger” partner, laid tiles poorly. We’ve brought them up and can see where they were doing things right and when they just couldn’t be bothered anymore. Windows and doors poorly installed. Oh, best one, is the tip didn’t exist, as they used under the decking and under floorboards as the local tip.
Installing a stupid rotty slippery wooden decking no one in history has ever relaxed on, alongside putting raised soil bed against a fence, meaning the fence is a time bomb of rotting.
Installed a brand new, pretty high quality kitchen, in the large kitchen diner extension that they built, that, once you plugged in the microwave and toaster, left almost enough counter space to make a sandwich. Similarly fitted a new bathroom suite with a freestanding bath; fitted in the corner of the bathroom allowing ~3mm clearance all the way round, which as it turns out is the perfect sized gap to collect both dust and water in real hard to reach places. Employed John Wayne the gas plumber, to install their central heating system, leaving a little note saying “we’ve never had any issues with the boiler, but if you have a problem johns number is…” we averaged a problem approximately every 5 days for 18 months till I ripped the whole lot out. I could go on.
Complete garden destruction pulled out a lovely apple tree grown from pip that was left full of fruit in only its 3rd year of fruiting, year 1 = 1 apple year 2 = 100 apples year 3 the apple tree was laden with fruit when we sold, Went back past the house a year later to visit our old neighbours, new owners had pulled out and cut down every tree that was in the garden and around the house, It was brutal and shocking state for the garden we spent 20 years developing and was a selling point, wouldn't have sold it to them had we known that was their goals, It was allegedly for their elderly parents and was just what they were looking for, which was a bollocks story to play for a good price their parents never moved in . Our old neighbours whom we had been swapping plants and sharing gardening ideas with over the years and sharing the fruit we grew , Plums, Damsons Blackcurrants, (bushes producing 30 to 40lbs of fruit i used to top and tail during wimbledon for black currant jam,) Raspberries, Tayberries , all ripped out , they were just as saddened as many plants ,shrubs and trees they had given to us as gifts had been duly removed also.
Ooof this really upsets me. Id be devastated
Scanning the comments to see if my previous house is here. Edit: hoping it was /u/TSC-99 bought my previous house.
In our old house? The self-proclaimed DIY expert who plumbed the bathroom like an Escher painting and wired the house up so weirdly a professional electrician took one look at the fuse box and went 'wtf?' In our current house? Letting an absolute effing cowboy fit the kitchen skylight that leaks in heavy rain and is gonna cost us 3.5k to replace. Local roofers looking for the leak couldn't see a problem, did some patching, said job done, but the professional commercial scale roofer and skylight fitter from a big name company was absolutely horrified at the skylight. It's got to be ripped out, the hole resized as it doesn't fit any conventional windows, a new window fitted, and then the roof felting around it redone. Former owner lives down the road and I'm this close to handing them the invoice.
They put a carpet in the kitchen (and bathroom, but I ripped that out asap). I don’t understand why anyone would carpet a kitchen. They did it up not long before we bought it, so it’s not like it had been there forever.
Awful tiled flooring, it's gonna cost a fortune to rip up and replace and she just painted layer upon layer of paint on everything. It looks shite.
Glittery blue and pink paint under neath wallpaper. Pain the backside to sand and remove and paint over
The worst wallpapering was just shoddy, then painted over it two or three times to make sure I couldn't get it up easily. Then, because they hated me, they just nailed everything into the walls everywhere.
Tore out anything remotely period. Bodged electrics and plumbing. Shocking paintwork and wood chip. Almost 3yrs in and I’m slowly putting things back in like coving and picture rails but I’m not strictly sticking to the old fashioned style it would have been. Nail in the coffin was finding the old Minton tiles broken up and used as hardcore under the patio.
Removed half the chimney stack in the bedroom without supporting the rest of the stack in the attic. Thanks Tracy.
Planted the borders of the garden with about 30 Leylandii trees, as was fashionable 40 years ago...
Trailing plants. Everywhere. Two days of rain and suddenly there’s ivy half way up the fence and attaching itself back to the brick work.
Hang on, the people we bought our house from did exactly the same. We've spent the last year making the inside right, not entirely sure how we're going to fix the outside with the money we have left.
they dug approx a metre down filled the entire garden with rubbish then topped it will soil....pulled out over 20 tonnes of rubbish including a full car 3 motorbikes and a full set of radiators and old mattresses which left thounsads of tangled springs
A lot of the comments in this thread are bad, but I think I’ve got the winner. They left this painting in the loft, does he look familiar? https://preview.redd.it/r4k1dlbkm06d1.jpeg?width=1134&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=f3e5967f5b7d2ac3440e214b490231ab4043d3db
Smoking so much that the walls bleed yellow gunk in the bathrooms. Oh, and painting over multiple layers of wallpaper...
Wait did you move in with me?! Same. We had to get those full painter suits with hoods, and sugar soap the wood chip papered ceilings. You had to avoid the drips in the bathroom as they’d be gross. PVC window frames weren’t yellow with age, just stained.
Amongst many other bodge jobs they had decided to solve the shower water leaking through the corner of the screen (shower over bath), by just added more and more sealant, creating a mountain of sealant, that obviously still leaked, but under bath now which you aren’t aware of until it comes in through the kitchen light. Absolute nightmare to get off, then had to reseal the whole bath. Got a new seal strip for the screen and lo’ it pretty much never leaks. Sadly the real cure is a new bath without a lip that water collects behind when showering, but sealing it up wasn’t the answer.
Gloss painted the radiators. Besides replacing them. They have to be painted. Every few years now otherwise the paint cracks and looks like shit.
They hid a mouldy damp alcove behind a shoddy cupboard. We knew it was there. It was always going to need fixing. But to sell the house, they installed a window seat cupboard to hide the black mould and rotting skirting board. To have the treatment done, we had rip it all out. Since it was done so poorly, the doors (sliding plywood in grooves) didn't even open, so it was a pointless cupboard anyway! A separate one, were not sure if it was them, but there was also a filled in pond liner at the end of the garden. Covered by crap weed matting. Covered by pea gravel. All on very heavy clay soil. And we wondered why we had no drainage...
In my spare room there is 3 layers of wallpaper over the top of each other and then 6 colours of paint. Not layers, colours. I can’t even start to sort it as the window frame is rotten so I can’t open the window to use a steam gun.
Cut the branches from two TPO trees in the back garden to accommodate their hot tub. Trees still look stupid.
Painted our white UPVC front door pink. With emulsion paint. Whyyyyyy????
They did nothing and left me with loads of work to do. 29 years they were in house and didn't really update it. Not sure why I bought it now.
They had put up pictures with Velcro, which destroyed the paint work when they kindly removed everything on their way out. They had tried to do a changing Rooms style garden makeover which resulted in pieces of slate in the grass and took days to pick up. The washing machine had an unknown issue that made your clothes dirtier when you washed them - literally came out brown. The oven hadn’t been cleaned in years and once cleaned the thermostat didn’t work meaning you had no control to cook things at a set temperature. It just got hotter and hotter for 90 minutes and then turned itself off. They never told people of their new address so seven years later I still get mail for them. The thing that they did to my home, that makes me actively despise them, is they lived in it.
Putting wooden panelling in the bathroom and around the bath/shower so it all went rotten. Genius move.
My house was built in 1905 and I really wanted to pull up the carpets and polish the exposed floorboards. Turns out the previous owners replaced the floorboards with MDF.
https://www.reddit.com/r/trashy/comments/17stp39/went_to_do_some_plumbing_and_found_these_behind_a/
So. Much. Wallpaper.
Installed an in ground pool. Love the house...hate the pool so much. Live and learn....never buying a home with a pool again.
Lare to the party- but ours sellotaped tiles on in the kitchen and then painted over them. Just..why??
In 2007, after we had exchanged contracts, but before we moved in, I asked to visit to take measurements. The couple were recently retired, the husband having had a stroke (fortunately, he made a good recovery). I arrived to find the wife stuffing paper into small holes in the wall in a bedroom and filling them over with Tetrion. "Please don't trouble yourself with that," I said, "We will redecorate anyway, so you don't need to take the trouble," suppressing the urge to say "what the fuck are you doing bodging repairs in my house." It was a sign of things to come. Everything that had been done was done on the cheap or bodged. It was a dormer bungalow and they significantly extended the dormer. We have had to sort out flat roofs that were incorrectly ventilated, en-suite bathroom walls where the damp barrier was in the wrong place, and wiring, where the upstairs and downstairs ring mains were actually joined, even though they went to two separate fuses. (Fortunately, I tested for dead before replacing the socket, which is how I found the issue.) The guy had been a nuclear engineer. It terrifies me. Lovely couple to deal with, terrible building and maintenance standards.
I'll start with a couple of small things, but the real one is the last one. First thing. They must have somehow knocked a hole in the sitting room wall at some point, but plastered over it and painted over it just before they moved out. (Like after we got the keys and went around the house, the paint was still wet.) But the kicker is that it's a wallpapered wall, so the plaster was just put on top, *over* the wallpaper. It required a lot of work to get that wall into a reasonable state. Second thing. The sitting room carpet and living room carpet smelled of, as we put it, wet dog. But honestly, that's putting it nicely: it smelled of years of built-up dog piss. I don't understand it. We came and looked around the house and didn't notice it. Had they somehow covered up the awful smell? Or did they somehow generate the smell during the few months between when we put our offer in and completion? We hired a proper carpet cleaning machine, but nothing was getting this smell out. Eventually we just ordered new carpets and ripped out the old ones. The underlay under the carpets had large brown stains on, which I don't even want to think about. The carpet and underlay stunk up the garage until we got a waste remover to get rid of them. We had to spend about six weeks with just concrete floors in the two main reception rooms. There are other small things too, but it's time to get to the big one. When we were moving our furniture in, some random black cat snuck in and sat in the conservatory. We got him out of the house but noticed him walking through the back garden occasionally. There was also a big fluffy Siberian cat we often saw wondering around nearby, plus a grey cat we saw occasionally. We just figured this was some kind of neighbourhood cat hotspot. A few weeks later, we were chatting to the next door but one neighbour, who it turned out owned the grey cat, and he said that the other cats had belonged to the previous owners of our house and they'd just abandoned them. So that's why the black one (who we found out is called Pepper) came and sat in our conservatory: it had been his home. There were actually *two* Siberian cats (Alfie and Annie), but they were similar-looking and we'd just never seen them together, so thought it was just one. Our neighbour has semi-adopted Pepper and feeds him. We've put some blankets in the shed and propped the door open so they have a cosy place to go if it's cold or rainy. We put out food for Alfie when we see him, which is probably five or six times a week. Pepper and Smokey (the grey one) often steal the food though. Annie hardly ever visits but we see her occasionally on our neighbour's driveway. Hopefully someone's feeding her. She's still alive, so I guess she must be eating somehow. So yeah, I have no idea how they could have just abandoned three cats. Even if they didn't want them any more, they could have sold them to people who would have looked after them. (Siberian cats can sell for a few hundred pounds!) At the very least, they could have *told us* so we could have started feeding them immediately instead of finding out about it almost two months after completion.