Weirdest thing a house seller has got upset about you changing?

[CruCru]

I’ve just been doing some gardening and was thinking about a woman who dropped by our house a few years ago. We were on our way out so didn’t ask her in. She told us some of the history of the house (interesting) but got quite upset when she mentioned some tiles she’d put in and we had no idea what she was talking about. Presumably the people before us had ripped them out.

We didn’t like to mention all the stuff we did to fix the dodgy electrics.

Another friend had some people get very cross when she changed some things in the garden (not concreting it or putting in that plastic grass). Just putting in some different plants.

What about you?

Our seller came round a couple of weeks after completion to collect some important pieces of post which hadn’t been redirected. We’d started gutting the place because it was an absolute filthy hovel. He indignantly said that he’d left his curtains behind thinking we’d like them and would have taken them with him had he known we’d take them down. The curtains in question were appalling, must have been twenty years old, yellowing and mildewed, thick with dust and grease and god knows what else.

I was a bit upset when I saw my old flat up for sale again on Rightmove and noticed that somebody had painted (badly) the lovely sandstone lions on the building gateposts white, obliterating all their features.

My now exdh and I bought the house I live in 4 years ago. Before we bought it it had been owned by the same family for 42 years. I was 7 months pregnant when we moved in and we arrived to find an enormously long list of the plants in the garden and how to maintain them. If we’d followed their instructions it would easily have taken 25 hours a week. Instead we just hired a gardener to mow the lawn and weed the beds a couple of hours a week as I couldn’t do it due to c section complications and dh working crazy hours. After about 3 months we received a letter from her explaining how we’d broken her heart, she’d spent years cultivating the garden and we’d broken our promise to her to keep it how she had it. We hadn’t ripped anything out or chopped anything down, it just wasn’t the show quality garden she’d got it to be. If she wanted to keep it like that she would’ve been very welcome to come round and do it for us.

Loss of a kitchen item.

Nanny was sent round with the whole pack of kids in tow to request left kitchen item. There was a language barrier and so we assumed the very nice heavy casserole dish that was left amongst some other rubbish.

Great despair at this being wrong item as kids needed it to make their noodle dinner. DP very confused and apologies everything else has been thrown in trash. Nanny wants to go through all the trash. Turns out it was a 99p plastic sieve which looked about a decade old, part melted and now covered in bin juice.

She was very pleased, scuttled off and assume the kids got their noodle dinner 😭

A few years ago I saw that my mum’s childhood home was on the market. I booked a viewing and took her to look at it. She loved it and told me stories about living there all the way round. She wasn’t remotely fazed by the swimming pool that had been installed.

Not different but the same.
My mom moved out of my childhood home 5 years ago. Went past a few weeks ago and saw that they have kept the same blinds that were in the house when we left up! They were cream now they are a dusty grey/beige ew tone.
Surely they would have given them a clean at least! haha

I sold my parents house to a cousin after they died. They had built it themselves and it was quite dated but in immaculate condition. They ripped out maghony closet doors and replaced with thick chipboard planks , probably could have just painted them. My father's immaculate lawn was now covered on bikes and scooters and all things pink. I think it is lovely to see it being a family home .As years have passed they have been able to afford to do more renovation and it looks nice.

Hated the face the entire house was no longer purple.

They like to come over and have a look at the garden from their friends garden from time to time. Talk about how shit it looks now we've had to pay someone ££££ to fix all the stonework that she did that fell down a week after we moved in

They didn't like that we'd out a log burner in .

Not the same, but I got upset when I went to visit my DGMs old house. It was a council house but didn’t look like one, the street was beautiful, it was a long curved street all the houses semis, most gardens were gorgeous with a mix of hedges and walls, all very different but all kept so neat and tidy by families who had lived there for years. My DGMs garden could have been on a cover of a magazine it was stunning. Now all the gardens are ripped up, except for the houses that were privately bought, but they still looked crap, tarmac driveways, metal fences & gates, dustbins everywhere, cars pulled apart on driveways. It definitely looks like a rough council estate now. All the houses had massive back gardens, many with lots of fruit trees I’d hate to see what they looked like now.

Not my house but a neighbours. It was a beautiful Victorian house owned by the same family for about 60 years, with mature gardens and original features. When the new owners moved in they painted it grey, put in dark grey upvc windows, paved the front garden in grey, laid astro at the back, fitted a grey kitchen and ripped out all the carpets and replaced with shiny grey ones instead. It used to be such a stunning family home, now it looks like HMS Belfast 🙁

Why do people care about a house they sold? That they don't live in anymore? It's not yours. I don't think I get it. Surely efforts, thoughts, emotions are better directed to the house you do live in? To make that one the perfect home for where your life is at that moment?

I don't understand either. Very strange to me. I've never even wondered about a house once we've moved on, never mind visited to pass comment.

Must admit that this thread hasn’t gone the way I’d expected. Presumably if you’ve sold a house, you got a reasonable dollop of cash for it? Then it’s no longer yours.

I have lots of happy memories of the house I grew up in but I expect that whoever buys it when my parents die will gut it.

Yes, it’s this sort of thing that gets me. They expected you to live in the house and garden in exactly the same way that they had.

I remember looking round a house which had a terrific garden on four levels. It was awesome but the man selling clearly did things in the garden pretty much all day and we would never have been able to keep it up.

When we bought our current house, the sellers invited us round before completion. We assumed they were going to give us a folder of who the electricity supplier is, where the stopcock is etc. Instead we got a lecture on how they had had their children in the house, it was old and it was important that we maintained it. The annoying thing is that we’ve fixed loads of things that they did really badly.

For the people who dont understand having feelings about a house you sold - clearly lots of people do, so maybe you are the minority? When you have been happy somewhere or have happy memories it is like taking a chip out of them. And yes, I know that may seem weird to some. Fully accept my feelings were irrational. But it made me sad, which I have a right to say. Its not like I had a go at them, created a scene or anything.

Does she creep around when you are out and do the beds? Or are you actually in and are peeping out of the window at her, letting the “secret” carry on?

I bumped into our seller about a year after we moved in and almost completed a full renovation of the house. She said "I've heard you've done a lovely job and modernised everything. We want to buy it back from you as we feel we've made a mistake moving" I gave a little laugh and she told me no she wasn't joking, and everyone knew it was their house really and they would add a little bit for the renovations 😳 (we'd spent about £100k on the renovation)
I made my excuses are pegged it out of there.

Sometimes trees need to be cut down due to disease. Not that I’ve done it, but I know someone who had to (it was a cherry tree, I know a pp has mentioned this).

Thankfully the people that owned our house before us are no longer with us, because I’m sure they’d be devastated at what I’ve done to their much loved home. Every bedroom had built in furniture that they had done themselves, the whole house was very dated and completely impractical but the garden was established and immaculate. Now the garden is a mess and literally everything inside has been changed. I love it just as much as they did though, just differently!

If you sell Something it’s not yours anymore so yes they can be upset but they can’t go and complain things have changed, house, garden, taking trees down.
what ever it is it’s not yours anymore and if you love it that much that you want it preserved forever…. Don’t tell it.

Had the previous owners on the doorstep outraged that we’d chucked a (hideous) pine dresser they’d left behind in a skip.

They were still in the house when we arrived, and told us with the air of someone doing us a huge favour that they’d left it for us. It was wedged tightly into a gap beside the equally hideous stone fireplace. The only way to move it involved a sledgehammer, and we employed such a tool the very next day.

They weren’t happy.

The cheek of the woman!!!

The guy we bought our house off (it had been his mother's before she died) had left it full of stuff (beds, bedding, curtains etc). He moved opposite us and sobbed when he saw us throwing it all in a skip. Said it was his mother's and we should be more respectful

Unfortunately I know the owners of one of our previous homes. They bought it as a BTL and have taken all the character out of it and paved all over the garden.

The day we bought our first house my partner ripped out a sliding door on the kitchen, it was ugly and not really needed. When we viewed the house the owner made a great deal of showing it to us as he had built it himself. That evening the previous owner popped round as they had found another set of keys and nearly burst into tears on the doorstep 🫣

Does anyone remember this? the thread got deleted by the OP I think..the family might have found out about the thread or something I can't quite remember!

That one certainly rings a vague bell.

I can understand people's disappointment and sadness, but what an absolute nerve ordering people how to live in what is now their house. I bet they'd be the first to complain if the buyer demanded full knowledge and decades-long approval rights on what they do with the money you paid them for it!

The guy we bought our house off (it had been his mother's before she died) had left it full of stuff (beds, bedding, curtains etc). He moved opposite us and sobbed when he saw us throwing it all in a skip. Said it was his mother's and we should be more respectful

So you have to be 'respectful' of a stranger's old stuff when her own son couldn't be bothered to do anything with it?! Do some people really think that folk buying houses only do so in order to preserve it as a perpetual museum to a (non-famous) person they never met instead of, you know.... actually living in it?!