There’s nothing more thrilling than the anticipation of moving into a new home. The contracts are exchanged, the furniture is in the van and you’ve got the keys in the your sweaty little fist. And then you get there and discover the previous owners have left you something, and it’s not a bottle of champagne and a bunch of flowers.
Over on the AskUK subreddit, user Scrot123 posted about their own experience:
What gift did the previous owners of your house leave you? My house was previously owned by an overzealous and under-experienced DIY’er and seems to have done everything in their power to make my ownership of it as expensive as possible.
They converted the loft and did the roof themselves, so we needed a new one putting on. Then they built their own decking and left all the rubble underneath, meaning it’s always wet and is kindly dismantling itself. The icing on the cake is that they’ve got their mates Bodgeit & Scarper™ in to build an extension without any lintels above the windows, then painted the bricks with latex paint to hide it.
What horrors did your previous owners leave for you to discover?
At least they can take heart from the fact that they weren’t the only person this happened to, as the replies showed.
1.
‘A massive ornamental stone cat that needs some sort of machinery to move, it’s in the middle of our lawn and makes mowing a fucking nightmare.’
–Voodoopulse
2.
‘A loin of pork in the freezer, which had been switched off for about a fortnight.’
–ConfusionAgreeable64
3.
‘A utility cupboard full of prescription drugs and painkillers. I filled a large heavy duty black bin bag with them and carried it all to a pharmacy for disposal like narcotics Santa.’
–elchet
4.
‘Live 13 amp oven cable that has been cut off flush with the wall and cowboy-foamed and painted over.’
–scrotalsac69
5.
‘A big wodge of cash behind the bathroom sink. Was an older person sadly passed away. We returned it to the family.’
–sconebore
6.
‘All of the light switches were installed upside down for whatever fucking reason and kinda the opposite of a present… They took all the lightbulbs and garden tap.’
–NoAvocadoMeSad
7.
‘The previous owners of a house we moved into when I was a kid left us a WWII German incendiary bomb in the shed.’
–Educational_Worth906
8.
‘A shed load of CCJ’s tied to it, so I had several years of bailiffs turning up.’
–RevellRider
9.
‘Nothing too terrible, but I did view a house once where they’d knocked a hole into an attached garage to allow a fridge to recess. The fridge was included in the price, probably because the hole wasn’t lintelled and the fridge was a tight fit – I think possibly they’d invented the structural refrigerator.’
–sanehamster
10.
‘At our previous house we found some lovely wood chip wall paper had been attached to the wall using poly filler rather than paste. We also found a live socket, with the faceplate removed and the wire coiled inside it, which the idiots had wallpapered over and left.’
–Mystic_L
11.
‘A horrible greasy kitchen and a homemade machete wedged into the rafters in the loft.’
–topjockin
12.
‘Ours just buried anything they didn’t want in the hedge. We’ve been here nine months and have only managed to clear about three metres so far. Latest find has been a fireplace and we’re going to have to remove that section of hedge to get it out since it’s grown through it.’
–vikingdhu
