We had that happen with the first house we bought. It was a rental, and the renter wouldn’t leave.
It needed roof work, so we showed up at 6:00 a.m. and started tearing the roof off over the master bedroom. We told him we’d also have to shut off the water the next day to fix some plumbing.
He left.
Nicely put. I enjoy remodeling but having been through the phase where you are living in the remodel at the same time, I would not want to go back. Best of luck to you and your bones.
Thanks for your response, which makes sense - if you have as much as a week’s notice. What I was wondering is a slightly different scenario, where I show up at my new house with a moving van full of stuff and see that the previous owners are not even begun moving out.
One of the scariest parts of my last two house purchases was that we closed on our old house at about 10:00am, and didn’t close on our new one until 2:00pm. We had no backup - we were homeless for those four hours, with the disadvantage that all our belongings did not fit into a shopping cart. What would we have done? Find a motel, and have the movers store our stuff for 48 hours while the previous owners got off their duffs and began packing?
Add to that my suspicions that the sort of people who don’t bother letting you know that they aren’t ready to move out until the scheduled day are likely to be the sort who don’t pay their rent on time either.
None of this ever happened to us, thank God, but I did waste some time worrying about it.
Regards,
Shodan
Well, is it really really cheap shitty laminate? My apartment has that in the dining room (We have discovered that it’s cardboard. cardboard. freaking cardboard!) and the lazy moron who installed it didn’t cut the lengths properly, so the pieces started sliding around once people started walking on it. And we don’t even wear shoes inside, so it’s not like it’s heavy wear and tear. Of course, that led to gaps that show up and attact stray chair legs and cause stupid ugly cracks in my floor. Maybe they installed it badly on your floor.
(We’re still fighting to get it in writing that we won’t be charged for their POS floor and shoddy work…but I’m not bitter.)
Ah, laminate. Another Bronx cheer to the sweet little old lady who had new laminate laid in my kitchen prior to listing her house. Whoever laid it didn’t get all the tiny pebbles off the slab before putting it down, so now I’m getting those cracked little pillocks where, from people walking on it, the laminate has been broken over tiny rocks. They look like little nail pops, in about six places on the floor, some of them pretty noticable. I want to replace the laminate with tile, but who knows when that will get done and in the mean time I’d prefer it if it didn’t look like crap.
My husband and I like to watch all the home shows on tv, and we were saying the other day someone should create a new one called “What Were You Thinking” where homeowners are able to confront the previous owner of their house.
Think of the drama!
That’s a show I would DVR every week!
Would you let the new owners use weapons?
Oh, crap. Someday a few years from now, someone will be looking at my doors wondering the same thing wondering why we did.
Our excuse is fairly simple. When we bought the house, the upstairs bedrooms had the really cheap hollow doors that you can buy for $25.00 at Home Depot. They had mismatching hardware as well and one of them was hopelessly not square.
Around the time I was having work done in the house, they were renovating an office in the building where I work and it was cheaper for the contractor to install new prehung doors there than reuse the solid wood six panel commercial thickness doors. The building manager asked me if I wanted them and I took them. As an added bonus, they came with the hardware on them. Said hardware was glass doorknobs, brass fixtures and office locks with the locks on the outside. I took them and had my carpenter install them along with new trim on the doors. He had to reframe some of the doors anyhow. It looks much nicer than what was there.
Velma, I would watch this show. I would love to get the last three owners and ask them what the fuck they were thinking. The last owner in particular. When they sold the house, they owed five grand to the gas company because the heating bills were so high. One of the things we discovered is that the house didn’t have insulation in the attic. Once we installed it, the house got more comfortable and the bills decreased dramatically.
Now, THAT is a good idea! 
I have a better one (among many).
When my wife and I bought our house, we found that the dishwasher had about 4 inches of stagnant, stinky water in it, along with a bunch of the previous owners’ dishes.
After some wrangling, and the summoning of an appliance repairman, I came to find out that the previous owner hadn’t bothered to pop out the punch-out plug in the garbage disposal under the sink, so that the water never really drained.
Supposedly they changed it in 2005, so we can’t figure out how they handled it.
Other incompetence discovered:
[ul]
[li]Neglected to actually put the nuts onto the new bathroom faucet that holds it in place[/li][li]Put godawful texture over wood paneling[/li][li]Painted everything with gloppy oil based white paint and a cheap-ass brush, leaving brush marks, drips and thin spots EVERYWHERE[/li][li]Cutting a big-ass hole in the sliding door to the backyard for a second-rate doggy door[/li][li]Installing the front-door lock so that it’s not quite plumb (it’s about 3 degrees off of vertical)[/li][li]Had generally ugly-ass 50’s retro decor; in a house built in 1969.[/li][/ul]
I wish I’d found this thread earlier. My home purchase disaster story is actually my brother’s and not mine, thank god! To sum up, it all came down to the fact that the previous owners were disgusting pigs who wallowed in shit, piss and filth. Literally.
More details (with photos!) in this Flickr thread. I think I look particularly handsome in a sanitation suit.
When we bought our house, the sellers couldn’t afford a U-Haul truck or the deposit on their new apartment until their money came in from the sale. There was some sort of estate or lein on the house, so their proceeds were going to be delayed until Monday or Tuesday (we closed on a Friday). We were ready to move our stuff in immediately, but they weren’t going to get out until Monday afternoon at the very earliest.
Taking a chance, I loaned them the money to get their stuff moved out on Friday. I had to replace the side door to the garage, as the whole door frame was almost completely kicked out, and the rest of the house was in shambles, so we put all of our stuff into the garage.
We spent the rest of the weekend tearing out carpets, hauling away a huge debris pile that covered half of the side of the house (and was filled with spiders), and trying to make a portion of the house habitable.
Thankfully, they showed up on Tuesday with the money I loaned them, and everything turned out OK. We had to live in the family room for a month or two, since we had to install new carpet before closing per our lenders requirements, so it was the only floor covering left in the house.
I won’t get into all of the crazy things they had tried to remodel or paint. Suffice it to say, that it took a good five years to clean up the messes.
Reminds me of what happened many years ago to some friends of mine who bought a cheapo tiny bungalow house off of these people who, I guess, decided that since they were moving out in a few months, there was no point in cleaning up after the deal was made … and there were for various reasons 4 months between that and moving day.
Man, that got ugly. The place was a shithole to begin with (a fact reflected in the price), but by the time they got it, it was overflowing with trash. There were trails in the garbage into and out of rooms; the stink was terrible.
Such people always have a minimum of 5 indoor only cats and never change litter, of course.
What was worse, it was infested with roaches.
It took a good few days of solid labour to clear the place out. I helped initially but I was out of town for the last few days of that (not by design! 
), and so when I got back, the place was spotless - all of the piss and garbage stained broadloom was gone, the floors and walls had been scrubbed - you could have eaten off them.
There was however as yet no furniture other than toolboxes and a milk carton used as a table for work. We were all sitting on the floor, me complementing my friends on the amazing amount of work done, when one grinned and lifted the milk carton - and out scurried about a hundred roaches. I jumped up with disgust and out scurried about five from under me. :eek:
Thing is, all the garbage had gone, so the roaches had no-where to go; there were so many that every cranny and crack was full. The place had no stuff, because they were waiting on the exterminators.
My parents bought their house during the last housing crunch in the early 1990s. It was bought at auction, a foreclosure. My father bought it without seeing the inside, figuring it was a good deal regardless. First he had to get the people that were living there out, which took many months, the sheriff, going to court and changing the locks. Then we finally got to move. The house was bought in April. We moved in over Thanksgiving. The inside was hideous. All harvest gold, burnt pumpkin, avocado and dark chocolate. And every room had a different shag carpet. It was truly lovely. And so out of square it isn’t funny.
The heat was all screwy, so after that first, very cold winter, my father had to run all new gas piping.
With all of these stories, I am wondering a couple of things. I’ve been involved in about 2 or 3 real estate transfers, one our own, and one that was my in-laws’.
Don’t the buyers know all this stuff before they plunk down hard cash? Surely the horrible paint jobs, rooms full of garbage and filth, etc. at least are known ahead of time. As far as the structural stuff, didn’t the buyers get an independent inspection? When it comes to general cleanup, etc., isn’t there a pre-closing walkthrough, with checklists and requirements for specific fixes or deductions from the cost for unrepaired items?
I know that in the cases my family dealt with, the property had to be “broom clean” before the closing. If certain requirements were not met, the cost of those fixes or cleanups were taken off the price at closing.
In my case, I already knew about the visible stuff (the wierd wallpaper, etc.) but some stuff was more hidden and only revealed itself over time (the nice radiator cover built without access to the valve, etc.).
A few years ago the house that I pretty much grew up in (from ages 6-18 in the 70’s and early 80’s) was on the market and I took the opportunity to have a wander through. The decor and fittings hadn’t been updated since the time I’d lived there… very nostalgic. 
It was originally (when we moved in) a single storey weather board house of late 60’s design which my parent renovated by raising and building a lower storey from concrete block (US: cinder block?), putting in an internal staircase, complete with terribly fashionable concrete pipe porthole window, and with the (internal) walls coated in a sort of rough cast plaster (with a big sweeping pattern to it). The ceilings were sprayed with a textured plaster with glitter. The bathroom was still papered with a purple vinyl wallpaper with an enormous flower pattern, while the lounge had terrible wallpaper and curtains (with a contrasting terrible single “feature” wall), and the pièce de résistance: my mother had upholstered the wardrobe doors (yes, red vinyl, padding, gold plastic stick-on surround, and complete with buttons).
I must say in my parents’ defence that while somewhat tasteless (let’s be fair – completely tasteless) from a viewpoint past 2000 (the 70’s truly were the decade that taste forgot) all of the work was very high quality, which probably explains why the decor was still there 20 years on – my mother went into business for herself as a professional painter and decorator after doing our house… putting up any amount of vinyl, foil and flocked wallpapers that were all the fashion at the time.
In the real estate advertisement for the house, where they have the witty little copy such as “Room for the kids”, or “Views forever”, they chose: The Munsters. :eek:
We always do the walkthrough and get an inspection (we’ve purchased 5 houses and sold 4). Sometimes there are items you just plain miss (e.g., neither the inspector nor I noticed the nails on the back deck), and sometimes there are items you forgive (e.g., we’re getting a good deal, so I don’t mind if I have to spend $50 fixing a sink).
It’s rather silly to not buy a house because of ugly paint or wallpaper, since those things are easily fixed. Covering ugly paint is maybe a couple of hours’ work per room.
Rooms full of garbage and filth can be easily fixed, too, unless pet urine or something has soaked into the floors. A lot of cities have bulk trash pickup, or you can rent a Dumpster.
You can fix bad paint jobs or garbage in rooms. You can’t fix stuff like the house being a block away from a pulp mill or being in a neighborhood that is notorious for its open-air drug market and gang activity.
You probably had a little more leverage with the sellers than some buyers do, especially buyers in a seller’s market. If you were buying a house in San Francisco five years ago, there were probably multiple bids above the asking price, and it wasn’t uncommon for a buyer to waive the inspection for fear of not getting the house if they insisted on one.