Tarek El Moussa has experienced plenty of strange discoveries while flipping homes. In his book, Flip Your Life, the HGTV star revealed that he's seen filthy homes that “go beyond run-of-the-mill unpleasant odors.” From finding knives stuck in walls to being buried alive by cockroaches, the Flip and Flip alum has dealt with plenty of strange occurrences and frightening situations. Naturally, we rounded them all up and asked El Moussa about other flips that have been particularly difficult for him.
As for the strange finds, El Moussa was left with no answers as to the clues left behind and how they got there. In one home, “there were a bunch of fake feet in the closet,” he told House Beautiful. “You'd open the door and a fake foot would fly out.”
He'll never know why the previous residents had a closet full of prosthetic limbs, just as he'll never know the stories behind the other things he's found so far. “I found horse bones buried in the backyard, chickens, pigeons, and once a snake. There were a lot of interesting things,” he added.
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In his book, El Moussa also details how he walked through a number of properties he believed to be former methamphetamine dens, from abandoned “glass pipes, burnt spoons and burnt patches in the lawn.” One house had a knife stuck in the wall. But the real Fear Factor moment came early in his career when he investigated a brown stain on one of the ceiling tiles in one house. He decided to poke at it, and suddenly cockroaches began pouring out of the ceiling. “Thousands of them scurried over my head, down my legs, between my legs and up the walls,” he writes in the book.
Aside from strange and grotesque houses, one of El Moussa's most challenging projects appeared on the final season of Flip or Flop. “We bought a multi-million dollar house in San Clemente, stabilized the foundation, and then the whole house ended up buckling,” he says. “It was a nightmare.”
One has to imagine that El Moussa would now be unfazed by most strange surprises and major challenges, both in his work on The Flipping El Moussas and in his everyday life.
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