To feel sad feeling after this house viewing?

[RainbowsAndCrystals]

Empty for years and still had the items in from the previous owner .. shoes, teddy bears, scrapbooks full of newspaper cuttings. Even an old highchair.

I just got a sad feeling about the place, like something bad happened there.

Aibu? Or has anyone else had a sad/error feeling about a place?

I do understand a bit better now buttercup
Me and my dsis cleared our old family home, it was hard but we had each other and our partners for support.
We couldn't bear to skip the lot though so gave it to charity, they would have preferred that.

Bubble, it is gorgeous. We live locally and it's been empty for years, no idea why.

Welling up at this thread! When OH and I went house-hunting a young woman showed us around and there happened to be 3 small children in the house at the viewing. I noticed that she seemed quite withdrawn and the lo's were unusually quiet not playing with toys, etc. . On making polite chit chat with the woman I made the monumental mistake of commenting on the on a happy family photo in the lounge, saying that I bet her OH leaves everything to her, including selling their home and that he's probably living it up whilst she's doing the donkey work --it was an evening viewing-.

Turns out that he'd had a short illness and died less than a week ago- she was selling the house as she couldn't stand being there a moment longer.

Hasty retreat, very red face and we never bought that house :( .

illuminousopptomist

I had an old neighbour who kept a magnificent and very productive garden - lovely old pine trees in front with daffodils and crocuses among the trees, a little patch of lawn, fruit trees, vegetable garden, lots of shade plants, a fence that he built himself that supported vines, and an ingenious irrigation system that carried water around the property without having to set out a sprinkler or tug a hose around to the far corners. He had only one arm thanks to World War II, but he managed fine.

Then his wife died and he withdrew into himself. He came out to cut the grass but didn't do much else. About three years later he followed his wife. The meals on wheels person was the first to contact the police to check on him as meals had not been deliverable. He had no relatives, no children, and the consulate of his native country had to step in to rescue his personal papers, guided by an old friend of his who knew his work, so they wouldn't be disposed of in a skip by the local authority (he was a prominent academic and poet during his working life).

A developer bought the property and tore it all up, filled in the back garden irrigation trenches and ploughed the vegetable garden leaving only two fruit trees, cut down the fragrant pines from the front, and put down sod all over the flower garden. Yes, a lovely family moved in, and their children loved the new garden, but I often wondered what the old man would have felt.

I had to sell my own house after divorce, and was crushed to see the garden that I had put my heart and soul into was completely destroyed by the next owners and their two St Bernard dogs. They sold the house three years after buying it and I saw it online by accident. I wish I hadn't.

...........
The saddest house I saw was one that smelled like a cross between a public loo and a brewery and had a kitchen sink full of empty cans and bottles, bottles and cans overflowing the bin, bottles and cans and very little else in the fridge, bottles and cans both empty and full in the master bedroom, on the bedside table and on the floor beside the bed. It had once been a family house, with wallpaper from the 70s still on the walls, photos of parents with three children... The garden in the back was overgrown and littered with cans. It was February and the Christmas tree was still up. It was very eloquent in its deadly quiet way.

In a similar vein I find it sad to see things in charity shops that have clearly come from house clearances, like crystal sets or china tea sets. They’ve been someone’s treasures and people are overlooking them when they are priced up at £1. I could weep for the owners. I regularly see things like my grandma had as wedding presents, so been in houses since the 40s or 50s. It just strikes me as a terrible cull.

It is a terrible cull and it's very sad. My mil died at Christmas last year aged 97. No family except dh & me. But 97 years of belongings is a huge task to deal with. After we had kept a few items we tried to sell/give stuff but sadly no one wants it.

There were cupboards full of teasets dating back to 1850, ornaments from all over the world, wedding presents she hadn't even opened after 60 years of marriage. Boxes full of sheet music and a zillion other things that needed a home. No-one wanted any of it. The auctioneer I spoke to said he couldn't sell it and even the charity shops said no to some stuff.

I cried for her. This stuff was her pride and joy and she believed it had worth. In the end it went to the charity shop and the tip. Tragic.

I’m about to start showing people round my lovely childhood home following my Dad passing away recently

I’m dreading it, but I want or do it myself. I want to vet the people buying it as I feel very protective of it, and want the right kind of people to but it. I’ve cleared our all personal possessions a pair from a couple of bookcases and some ornaments to maintain a homely - but not too personal - feel.

Whether that will work out or not, I don’t know! If anyone says anything negative, I may want to lamp them one! I am hoping it goes quickly but will also be devastated when it does. We had such a happy childhood there and my DD (21) spent a lot of time growing up too.

It’s been lovely reading some of these posts from buyers who are happy in previously loved homes.

I went to an open viewing of a very well posited property, expensive, in a desirable area.

The house had stopped in time about 1970, it was like a museum. The living room had very expensive high end furniture all in teak (in at the time) family photos dotted about all very nicely done. The kitchen could of been in Ideal Home of its time all orange and brown with the original cooker etc. All well looked after, and obviously top of the range and expensive when it was originally bought.

The bedrooms were the same, high end furnishings of the time with candlewick bedspreads, thick and perfect (not like the threadbare ones we had had)along the bottom with eiderdowns silk lampshades very luxurious. the owners had very good taste and had been very houseproud.

But then there were more personal photos, a very glamorous couple in various countries , beaches citys and on ships, must of been on a few cruises. I opened the built in wardrobes, and really took a sharp intake of breath, hung up were all the glamorous cocktail dresses with the shoes lined up underneath, and mens dinner suits, black, cream, velvet. All just perfect and beautiful.

I felt like I was intruding on someones memories , but the house was being sold with everything in situ and these were all included in the sale price.

I felt so so sad that this couple (who I later found out had both gone into a home and died with no family) had had such a lovely life and travelled and now their home was open to many strangers just coming and going looking into what was their personal items.

I did not buy said house, and I felt quite disturbed at having viewed it and the way it was, made me very uncomfortable.

Not house viewing, but we buy alot of furniture from our local auction house... mainly old Victorian furniture and you get alot of house clearance stuff there. We got a little french desk and inside the drawers (unlocked) were diaries dating back to 40s. The lady was pouring her heart out about a man she lost in the war and how she thought she ought to take up with another suitor but she couldn't forget etc.

So we rang the auction house to ask if they could let whoever sold it know, as clearly a family had cleared the whole lot out and must have missed such precious things- but the auction house said it came from a dealer who specialised in house clearances and he went around the country pikcing up and selling on whatever and they would never be able to find the family if there had been one.

So we have kept the diaries with the desk (It's mine) and I have left them there safe.

When dh and I were moving to Germany and looking round at rentals, the relocation agent took us to a house, where a person had died and clearly not been discovered for some time. The stained bed was still there and dead flies on the floor. And the smell.

Needless to say we didn’t take the house. We were flabbergasted that the owner would present the house in this way. We were told in Germany you either decorate when you move in or when you move out. Including flooring. In a rental.

We took a house, where you decorate when you leave....

We bought our house after its elderly occupant died, her daughter's hadn't cleared it. There were albums full of family photos which we kept for a while in case they wanted them. The place was in a dreadful state, I'd hate to think of my mother living like that.

The previous owner of our house went into a home. It was empty when we moved in, and his children had started the process of stripping the house but given up half way though. Hence the floor coverings were gone, and wallpaper stripped in some rooms but not others.
The kitchen was very dirty and clearly hadn't been cleaned in years, yet the cooker was imacculate. It was quite sad that he lived in that state. It took 3 solid days to scrub the walls and the one salvageable unit.

We bought a house like that. Slowly renovating it and filling it back up with love and happy memories.

The house we're currently in was sold to us by a lady in her 70's whose husband had died of cancer. He had fancied himself as a bit of a handyman and tried to overhaul the whole house (dated) whilst suffering with his illness.

The thing is, his reputation as a handy man wasn't the best anyway, he was clearly very unwell and they had no money so all of the fittings/materials are the cheapest. In 3 years we've already had to replace/rip so much of it out. It always feels so sad - he might as well have left it and spent his last days doing something else - but equally some of it we really couldn't live with (like the shower with zero pressure).

We viewed a house where the owner had recently died. It was still fully furnished, with quite a few personal things about. Although everything was terribly dated, it was clean and cared for - you could tell it had been a much loved home - it had a lovely warm feel to it.

Dd went on to buy it and the former owner's daughter told her it had been a happy home for 60 years. Dd was very glad when the daughter offered to leave the furniture, since she then had very little of her own.
Interestingly, the estate agent told dd that there had been a slightly higher offer from a buy to let investor, but the daughter turned it down because she preferred a first time buyer to have it. It was so good to hear that there are still such non grabby people about.

Yesterday 20:56 FlouncyDoves Just use it as an excuse to stick a low offer in and see what happens. A few hours with a roll of bin bags and it’ll be as good as new!

Missed the point of the thread there Flouncy

My grandparents died last year and we had to clear their house..my grandad was taken into hospital and my grandma had to go in a home so the house was as if theyd popped out. It broke my heart to see all the things that they had collected and loved be given away or taken to charity. We did have a few bits bit there was so much we couldn't have it all. Just made me think that all the stuff we have is meaningless really.. its made me try to only have around me what's important and not buy things for the sake of it. The house was a rental and it's not been rented again, it's being used as storage. I drive by it a lot and it's makes me so sad to think of it unloved, I have so many happy memories of them and us in that house. I half expect my grandma to peep out of the window as I pass so I always say hi silly I know

Illuminous . I hate to see someone's life literally dumped in a skip. It makes me really sad

I work in property (not an estate agent) and as part of my job I had to go into a home to check something deliberately being vague so as to not out myself . The owner of the home had died approx 15 years previous to my visit in a car crash and his (very wealthy) family chose to never sell the property. It gave me the heebiejeebies to see all his stuff exactly as it was the day he left it.

I bought a house a couple of years ago that needed total renovation. Until 18 months prior the owner had lived there. I have no idea how. The only electricity point was a three pinned plug in the kitchen plus lighting in the bedrooms/bathroom. There was no central heating and the old back boiler in the fireplace was broken. Some of the ceilings were falling down and the house was extremely damp. The chimneys were dangerous and crumbling with missing bricks. Idk if the fireplaces had been used in recent years or how the former owner stayed warm in the winter as it had had a basic clean and all personal belongings removed. As the back boiler was broken, there would have been no hot water either. The locals told me an elderly lady had been living in this squalor until around 2013 (although no one realised just how bad it was) and the house had been a post office at some point in the past.

Getting like my mother we viewed a beautiful house where the owner had wanted it to go to a family not an investor. Sadly for us it was valued as such that unless you were a builder or very good at DIY it was a poor purchase as would've cost so much

@dotdotdotmustdash I think I know the house you mean - just next to a train station?

I passed a house on the way to work belonging to an elderly person. They had placed a very old shabby teddy on the windowsill looking out of the front window and would regularly 'update' and change its look (a new hat, glasses, tinsel at Xmas etc.)
We always looked over each morning.
When the person moved out or passed away, the teddy stayed in the window all through the sale process minus it's outfits.
I actually cried the day the teddy was thrown away left too!!! How soft am I?!
Thankfully, the house has now been renovated absolutely beautifully & is lived in by a young family.

we bought our house 8 years ago, and it had been in the same family since it was built in 1886. When we viewed it, we were shown round by the retired daughter of the owners, one had died a while before, and the other parent had gone into a home, and had recently died. The house was mostly empty of furniture, but the carpets/wallpaper/curtains were like a 1970's timewarp. The daughter told us lots of stories about the house, like her father living there as a child with his parents, their parents, and his 4 sets of aunties and uncles and their children, before the house had a bathroom or inside loo!
The daughter and her siblings accepted our offer as they wanted the house to go to a family, and we are gradually bringing the house into the 21st century......

I’ve name changed for this as it’s identifying.
As a paramedic I went out to a woman in her late 90s who’s fallen out of bed and pressed her alarm button. Went in, checked her over, got her up and put her back to bed. The house was like a time warp, no central heating, all furnishing was from the 1950s, clean and tidy but very dated.
I made her a cup of tea and chatted while she drank it, she’d never married, had no family and she told me all about working at Bletchley Park during WW2. She was found dead the following morning, so sad to think of all her beautifully kept possessions ending up in a skip but I’m glad that I spent some time chatting and that her last human contact was me.

Something awful happened when we sold my grandparents’ house. They’d lived there for 60 years and we all had great memories of our time there. We’d noticed that the buyers hadn’t been keeping it well, the garden was getting overgrown, they hadn’t replaced the curtains or done anything to the property. It was really sad. Then we found out that the house had been raided by police and the people in there arrested for human trafficking. We popped over the day after the event to have a nose and the door was wide open and the house was the same as when we last saw it except there were mattresses on the living room floor and they’d spray painted the walls. The whole thing was awful and it’s still unoccupied now.