Tarek El Moussa Reveals the Weirdest Things He Has Found While Flipping Houses
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Tarek El Moussa has endured more than his fair share of weird discoveries while flipping homes. In his book Flip Your Life, the HGTV star revealed he’s seen nasty houses that are “beyond your run-of-the-mill disgusting smells.” From finding knives stuck in walls to basically being buried alive by cockroaches, the Flip or Flip alum has dealt with plenty of oddities and terrifying scenarios. Naturally, we’ve compiled them all—and asked El Moussa what other flips stand out as particularly challenging to him.
When it comes to strange findings, El Moussa has been greeted with leftover clues and no answers as to how they got there. In one house, “there were all these fake legs in the closet,” he tells House Beautiful. “You opened the door, and the fake legs come flying at you after.”
He has no idea why a previous occupant had a closet full of fake legs, just as he’ll never know the story behind the other things he’s discovered. “I’ve found horse bones buried in a backyard before, chickens, pigeons, a snake once—a lot of interesting stuff,” he adds.
Flip Your Life: How to Find Opportunity in Distress—in Real Estate, Business, and Life
amazon.com
$15.99
In his book, El Moussa also detailed how he’s walked onto many properties that seemed to be former meth houses based on abandoned “glass pipes, scorched spoons, and burn marks in the lawn.” One house had knives stuck in the walls. But what really turned out to be a Fear Factor-level situation, early on in his career, was when he investigated a brown stain on a home’s ceiling tile. He decided to poke it, and cockroaches suddenly poured from the ceiling. "There were thousands of them, skittering all over my head, down my legs, between my feet, and up the walls," he wrote in the book.
Apart from the freaky and gross homes, one of El Moussa’s most challenging projects appeared in the last season of Flip or Flop. “We bought a house, a multimillion-dollar house in San Clemente, and stabilized the foundation but ended up making the whole house crooked,” he says. “That thing was a nightmare.”
We have to imagine El Moussa is now unfazed by most bizarre surprises and big complications, whether it's in his work on The Flipping El Moussas or in his everyday life.
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