It's very tedious.
It's my mother. She owns the house, I rent it. I pay the bills.
She offered me the house so I could sell mine in September because we had a great cash offer, but I didn't know where DD would be post 16. She lives in Europe and was already planning to rent it out properly (or so she said). After I committed to selling mine, and had part moved, she then announced she would be keeping a room and proceeded to come and stay repeatedly for long periods without asking or even informing me. If she had been open about it being effectively a house share, I would have never have agreed. She used to come here for four days every six weeks which would have been tolerable. Now she is here every two weeks, and for weeks at a time. She is evasive over when she is coming or (even worse) going. She makes no contribution to household bills or chores. She repeatedly tells me it's my home, while treating it as her home. It feels very draining the way she keeps dangling the possibility of selling and almost gloating in her ownership power.
She says that she wants to sell the house, so I have offered to buy it, in cash, for full market value. She agrees, provided I match hypothetical offers then....doesn't gather any offers, won't give any valuation figures and the price she muses on varies wildly. Two weeks ago she said she would be delighted to get £250k for it. I need to liquidise more assets for that, so I checked my figures and agreed yesterday. Suddenly, a friend of a friend has told her it should be a minimum of £400k, snd we're back to matching hypothetical offers that she doesn't have. She clearly doesn't want to sell or rent, probably at all, certainly not to me. That's all completely fine, it's her house, she wasn't obliged to offer it me. I didn't ask or in any way expect her to. She only has to say so and stop all this dicking about.
I know she can't legally come and go as she pleases, but obviously I also can't just change the locks. I'm not prepared to pursue a legal route against my own mother anyway, it's not worth it. I'm looking at other houses now. As soon as my daughter finishes her GCSE's, we will be out and she can go back to Europe and do whatever she likes with it. Probably nothing.
There is nothing to do but laugh at her in the meantime. I bear her no real malice, but I am beyond tired of being kept dangling. I won't ACTUALLY put dead mice in her bed. But plotting to makes me feel better about having to put up with sharing a house with her being quite unreasonable in a situation she deliberately arranged to suit herself, apparently isn't comfortable with and won't change.