I imagine most sellers will clue buyers to certain things about their house - like where to find the circuit breaker box, where the water cutoff is located, quirks about light switches (“We still have no idea what that one does…”) and tips about how to unlock the back gate or the best way to jar the pantry door loose when it gets stuck. But some have more, um, unique information to share. At least they have in our experience.
Right after we married, my husband and I bought a house. The sellers told us (not asked - told) not to cut down a certain tree in the yard because it had a special meaning for them. :dubious: I honestly don’t recall if we removed the tree or not, but the way I see it, once the deed is in our name, we’ll do whatever we want to do.
In our current house, the sellers bragged about the dining room chandelier - it cost them $700!! They’d considered taking it with them, but decided to leave it for us. Let me tell you, $700 buys a whole lot of ugly. It was replaced within the first 4 months.
They also showed us the box that controlled the fire detector in the garage - I guess they worried that their cars might spontaneously combust or something. The whole mess was removed in pretty short order. We’ve been here nearly 13 years, with nary a fire in the garage.
Not the seller, but a new neighbor warned us about the “illegal aliens” living next door to us. They were from Puerto Rico, yanno. :rolleyes: That was the last time I talked to that neighbor - what a whack job.
Anyone else get interesting tidbits when buying a house, or anything else for that matter? Do tell…
We’ve bought 3 houses during our marriage and I have never once personally met the sellers of the houses we’ve bought, nor the buyers of the houses we have sold.
My second house was new and the one I’m in now I had built so no weirdness there. The owner of the first house I bought died in the house. The seller (the dearly departed’s daughter) and the realtor didn’t tell me that because they thought it would be a deal breaker. They even went to far as to try their best to keep me from talking to the next door neighbor because they were afraid she’d let that fact slip. Well, she did. Not a big deal at all and I told the seller and realtor that. Turns out the reason they wanted to keep it a secret is because two previous prospective buyers backed out after finding out she had died in the house.
My first question upon learning was about which room she died in so I could point the fact out to all my friends.
I saw some Hollywood director interviewed (can’t remember his name) & he bought Orson Wells’ house. Orson Wells keeled over in the front entryway and the director who bought the home had a painter paint a white outline in the shape of the body (he had a police photo of the chalk outline of the dead body).
But people do get freaked out over this. We have rental property and must legally disclose that someone died in the home & you wouldn’t believe how many people back out once they learn this.
I agree, of course, that you’re not expected to share whatever sentimentality the previous owners had. Still, when I sold my last house, I gave the buyers lots of the back story about the house and about the neighborhood, which I think they very much appreciated. It included the story of one particular small tree in the back yard. That was it, just a story, not an order to do anything or not do anything. Some years later they rebuilt the entire house and most of the property was substantially re-landscaped. The tree is still there.
We have one of those! But since we haven’t said word one to the seller since we toured the place, and she is long gone, we have just decided to live with the mystery unless the electrician can figure it out when he comes to put in the new porch lights.
The last time I sold a house, I left a pile of manuals/warranties along with a notebook with info on the house. When is garbage pickup. Where is the circuit box. What is the meaning of that impression in the basement wall (the house was built by a vo-tech class, and they put a stamp in the pours concrete wall). That kind of stuff.
I wish the previous owners of our house had done the same. There are some real head-scratchers. Why does the door to the furnace room have a deadbolt, but not door knob? What is the weird bump under the carpeting? Is there a reason for the strange dead space behind bathroom wall? And a host of other questions.
I wish we’d been able to ask the previous owners why they put dates on everything - like the trash can lids and the snow shovels. I also wonder why, next to the garage door, there’s a list of dates and temperatures - written on the wall!!
They were odd people. Big chains with padlocks on the 3 gates, key locks on the windows, plus bolts drilled into the frames, locking storm doors, a barrel bolt on the master bedroom door, a deadbolt on the front door that can only be accessed by key from the outside… No surprise they also had a gun cabinet on the basement stair landing. I’m thinking not a little paranoia. In our 13 years here, we’ve often forgotten to lock our doors, and we’ve gone off to work leaving windows open. I had a computer delivered, and it sat on the front porch, unmolested, while I was at work. yeah, it’s a pretty safe neighborhood.
I knew a rather eccentric woman who had a doorway in her kitchen covered in pencil marks. Any visitor was asked to stand against that wall, and she’d mark their height. The marks were dated, had the person’s name, and sometimes remarks pertaining to their visit.
Seems to me they should have cut the tree down themselves and used the wood to make some sort of memento they could take with them, rather than trying to tell other people what to do or not do with their own property.
I was helping some friends move into their new house and the previous owner was there. It was a bit sad, the guy and his wife had built their dream house but the husband was forced to sell it when his wife left him for his best friend. The house was only 2 years old.
It was clear he didn’t want to let it go. He kept saying things like “Next spring we should re-seed this part of the lawn” and “I’ll come back in June to help you seal the concrete on the back walk”. I had to pull him aside and gently say “This is not your house anymore, my friends will decide whether the lawn needs to be re-seeded, and they will take care of it themselves.”
The weirdest request, which my friends agreed to, was that they allow his elderly semi-feral cat to live out her days at the house, with a litter box and cat bed in the garage.
When I bought my house, the sellers (who were my neighbors at the time – I literally moved across the street) showed me their special stash hidey-hole. That’s come in handy a few times.
I also inherited a cat that they neglected to mention. He lived on my front porch/in my driveway for years until he just stopped showing up. I think someone else in the neighborhood started feeding him or he got smooshed by a car or something.
ETA: The sellers had three little boys all under the age of 10. The first Halloween after I bought the place, they brought the youngest by for trick or treating. He was about 4 or 5 and when they walked him up to my front porch, he started crying, “YOU STOLE OUR HOUSE! WAAAAAAAAAAHHH!” Poor little guy.
We moved in to our house in mid-April. It had stood empty for about 4 months as the previous owner had been suddenly transferred to Toronto (and we got a very good deal as a result). A neighbor had been tasked with watching the house, cleaning snow off the driveway, etc. Along about late June, said neighbor came to our door and explained that he had forgotten to tell us about the rose trees. “What’s a rose tree”, I asked. He explained that it is rose bush grafted onto a very long piece of rootstock. It had to be dug up every fall and buried a foot down in a trench, then dug up in the spring and planted. I think there were three of them. Neighbor showed me where they were and I dug them all out and planted them. Two of them never came back to life. The third turned into a wild rose. Obviously the top had died but the rootstock survived. We still have the wild rose growing, even 45 years later.
Yeah, if I hadn’t been so stunned by the idiocy of his comment (among several others) I might have mentioned that. He also told me that someone was walking thru our yard at night to get to the road that paralleled ours.
Um, our house is on the corner. There is no reason on God’s green earth for anyone to force a path thru the underbrush and fallen trees to walk along our shared fence line when there’s a flat, smooth paved road on the other side of the yard. But this whack-a-doodle of a neighbor knew, because he was “retired law enforcement” - since he didn’t specify that he worked for the police or the sheriff, I have to assume he was more than likely a mall cop.
He was also upset about all the younger folks moving into the neighborhood. How dare the older ones (like the 80-somethings we bought from) move away and let all these whippersnappers come in!! Of course, by now, he’s probably dead himself, for all I know. I haven’t seen him since that first year.
I helped purchase a new family home after the original was destroyed in a house fire. I don’t live in the new home ( yet, I plan to move back in when I retire in a few years) my Mom lives there, as does my brother. His daughter lives there although she’s away at college most of the time.
The new home is new construction on a new block in an existing subdivision. Shortly after they moved in, my brother was approached by a security system salesperson, who attempted to sow a little fear by asking him if he knew how many black people lived in this new neighborhood.
Now my brother may look like an ignorant good old boy, but he’s not and he promptly ejected the sales guy with a few choice words.
And there are surprises even in new construction homes. When I was home for Christmas, we got up on Christmas morning to discover that the gas fireplace wasn’t working. The fireplace is like everyone’s favorite feature in the house and everyone was very annoyed by this development.
Everyone tried, with increasing frustration, to turn on the fireplace using the switch to the right of the fireplace. Then I said…what about the switch on the left side, I think I used it to turn off the fireplace last night". My brother said the builder told him during the walk through that the switch to the left of the fireplace didn’t do anything.
But the builder was wrong. The switch on the left was a cutoff for the fireplace and the fireplace won’t work unless that switch is on. Now, that switch can’t be used to turn ON the fireplace- that has to been done from the switch on the right - but the fireplace won’t work unless the mystery switch is on.
And the builder didn’t know this and I have no idea why they felt a secondary safety cutoff was needed less than 4 feet away from the main switch.
When I was sixteen, my parents sold my childhood home. I did not meet the buyers then but I befriended their son on Facebook 45 years later, our only connection is we lived in the same house at different times. Facebook is weird
After we signed the contract on a house I purchased about 15+ years ago, the current owner when we were visiting with them, said come on I want to show you something. He proceeds to take me downstairs to one of the guest rooms in the basement, into the walk in closet. He pushes against a panel in one of the walls in the closet and the panel slides away and he turns on a light switch in the small alcove. In this alcove is a floor to ceiling gun vault capable of holding 8 long guns and shelves for several handguns, ammo, etc. Nice little bonus to go with the house.
Years later, when I sold the house, I actually made the realtors aware of the safe so it could be shown to prospective buyers.
I had my basement finished and had the door to the furnace room closed with a deadbolt but no door knob. Reason is that the door is extremely close to the furnace (or parts of it, anyway), and the using a deadbolt instead of a handle saved a couple of inches.
