The advice above is all pretty good, so you want horror stories to make you feel better?
When I moved into my flat, the old lady (and her late husband) who had previously lived there had been heavy smokers, apparently with a penchant for chainsmoking in bed, and another for just painting over smoke-stained woodchipped walls. When we steamed the woodchip off, three layers of different colours of paint came off too, along with three thick dark brown layers of nicotine stain. It took three days of steaming just to get the walls in my new bedroom clean of smoke.
Not only that, but when we lifted the carpet in the living room and hall we really thought there was garden soil on top of the floorboards. No, it was just several decades worth of Shake'n'vac, with bits of disintegrated carpet thrown in for good measure. Just that stuff from one room and the small hall filled a whole black bin bag.
And I don't even want to go into the state of the tops of the cupboards in the kitchen! I don't think they'd been cleaned since they'd been installed, and I think she cooked with a lot of oil!
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