What happens if I can't empty house by completion day?

[competion]

What happens if there are still things in the house when the new owner arrives? Going as fast as I can but unlikely to be done by tomorrow...

@Momtotwokids did he start ripping out the kitchen whilst they were still there? That was a brilliant thread

What's happened then? If it's an emergency or unforeseen circumstances as the new owner I'd be pissed off but I'd go some way to helping. I would expect you to work through the night tho to complete.
If it was just poor planning on your behalf I'd be raging. Depending on your attitude I might offer to help for a fee. I'd also he expecting you to get paid help ASAP. I'd be dumping stuff in the garden at best, or the street.
How did you get into this mess?

The council would charge the new owner though surely?

Oops, just read all posts....I was so angry when I first read I cudnt resist replying.....
I'd think seriously about helping your sister. The time to help would have been whilst they were at soft play...which should have been cancelled.
Make it absolutely clear you're not bailing them out again....bet you do tho!

We knew our vendors would be like this so we deliberately got our completion date for a Thursday and as we were in rented arranged for our removals on the Friday.

The week before we were due to move we asked to come to measure for blinds and curtains and they’d not packed a thing. Not one toy, nothing in the spare room, garage or garden. I was gobsmacked. My house was packed. I’d got rid of everything we didn’t need, stuff had been sold. We had 2 chairs in the living room and I’d given away the sofa.

When we got the call to say the house was ours we went to the estate agent to pick up the keys, we’d driven 1hr and a half from where we lived, but the vendor said they had a “little bit left to do” so we came to the house. All furniture was still in downstairs, the beds needed disassembled, the garage was full and their cats were still roaming around the house. They blamed the fact that they were waiting on the funds to be released. It was a joke. This was at 1pm. At 4pm they collected the child from nursery and gave him an ice cream in the house, which dripped all over our carpets. Fortunately we were replacing them all. I was fucking fuming.

At 6pm DH told them enough was enough and they needed to go so they said they’d leave all their rubbish in the garage. He said absolutely bloody not and they were to get it all out, sharpish. Fortunately they realised they’d well and truly taken this piss by this point and got their finger out.

Shameless placemarking

I was a bit behind when I sold my first house. I think keys were handed over at midday and I finally shifted my last lot and did the rest of the cleaning (as best I could) about 4. I moved myself so was just doing lots of car journeys with the last bits towards the end, but couldn't eg clean the understairs cupboard until all the stuff was out.

I think I just misjudged how long it would all take. Friends etc had already moved the big furniture so it was just piles of stuff, but I felt awful.

I don't suppose the buyers were very happy but they were fairly tolerant, and I kept apologising. Their removal people could still bring all their stuff in while I was faffing so it wasn't too major, while not ideal. But if you are still there with huge amounts of furniture it won't be great......

Yes! The OP was a clueless idiot! 🙈🤣

SOFT PLAY , are they as mad as a box of frogs!! Who goes to soft play when they have a house to pack up and move. I would not lifted a finger to help with the packing but would have said drop the baby off with me and get on with packing up your own house.

When we moved we went in and loads was still left to pack. they had some older people there to 'help' but as we all stood awkwardly, and the removal men started unloading the van into the garden as there was no room in the house to put our stuff. The older people just seemed to be stood in MY kitchen repeatedly telling us how they'd come all the way from Leeds to help. But didn't actually do anything to help.

When it started raining so our stuff was getting wet enough was enough and we told him to get his stuff out now as we'd had enough.

Moving day is stressful enough without that on top.

Well when we moved 15 months ago, we got the keys at 12 but the family were still packing u till 9pm and we had to help them load their vans or it would have taken longer. Then they barely managed a thank you. To top it off the house was DISGUSTING they had seriously not cleaned for years let alone a moving out clean! Dog poo in the utility room the lot!

back to you lol, You can ask your estate agent first thing in the morn re time but is usually.midday in my past experience. Put a post on Facebook offering a few hours cash in hand for some muscle!

Your sister and her husband have a bit of a rude awakening coming but I think 14 pages in you know that. Completion times aren’t set it depends on how long the chain is and where they are in it as money moves up the chain and solicitors do the completions one after another. Over the years the earliest I have completed is 11.30 and latest 4pm.

We have had one experience with people a bit like your sister, using small self hire van to move themselves, no concept that there was an issue with keeping us waiting. They finally vacated at 5pm leaving both light fittings and potted plants they had wanted to take. They just ran out of time and their solicitor had warned them we would look for them to cover our costs if we couldn’t move in on completion day. Our solicitor told us given we did not worth trying to pursue for removal people’s overtime.

Last time we moved we completed a bit earlier than expected at 12. We said we would be out by 2 and we were. Their removers arrived 1.30 and went off in search of food. Our buyers hadn’t arrived when we left. So all ok. People give you a bit of leeway if you haven’t been an idiot. Not sure your sister is going to get much sympathy from her buyers!

In all honesty it had never occurred to me that people could be such twats as to do this! I feel lucky that we've never encountered it.

So what's the partners excuse then?

If everyone continues to constantly pick up the pieces there is absolutely no reason for the op's sister to try and improve is there.

usertaken · Today 19:01

Don't mean to be harsh but if she has acopia why hasn't anyone in the family pre-empted this struggle before and done something to help before, instead of the last minute?

Not sure anyone could have possibly pre-empted that the idiots would go to soft play instead of packing up their house the day before moving ...

Or may the sister is so used to people picking up the pieces for her and her husband's uselessness that this is the reason for their terrible choices. Time for a bit of learning for them!

NC for this as I’m sure I’ve told everyone in the world about it.

I’m currently preparing to sue my vendor, as my legal completion was delayed for a week as she had a “crisis” and hadn’t packed anything (there had been a month since exchange on her insistence so hardly a surprise).

(I’m single mum to small child, downsizing on divorce, not exactly having the time of my life but paying packers, cleaning old home within an inch etc etc)

So instead of moving in, we had a week in the Premier Inn from 5pm on the Friday, after I spent hours crying in the estate agents and being made hot sweet drinks. I found myself on alleged completion night buying clean knickers and T-shirts in 24hr Tesco because all mine were on the van. I was legally homeless for a number of days as the actual completion didn’t happen until after the weekend.

I tried to be charitable and thought well, everyone has their struggles, and at least she’ll legally have to pay me my costs (approx £2k by that point).

Reader. SHE FUCKING DIDN’T.

She emailed her solicitor words to the effect of “I’ve decided not to pay Livid and that’s that”.

And apparently her spineless solicitor can’t just make her. Turns out I have to actually take her to small claims court to try to get the money I paid on emergency accommodation, storage, cleaning etc, and even then she might refuse to pay and it’ll end up going to bailiffs or whatever.

And it’s a whole other thread the state the house was left in and the bullshit communications I’ve had since. I’m easy £10k down on where I “should” have been, thanks to everything.

I had some good friends who said they needed help moving house. They were only going a mile up the road, and said they needed someone to keep the kids occupied while they did the move (hired a van for self move due to near proximity, and going from a small house to a larger family house with garage etc.). Good friends so I took a day off work. Well…

Turned up early to find hadn’t done a thing to prepare. No decluttering, no organisation, certainly no packing, absolutely nothing. No boxes or packing cases or paper or parcel tape. They somehow imagined by bedtime they’d be magically in their new house. I’ve no idea what they’d been thinking because normally they appeared to be sensible people. Anyways, more and more friends and family got frantic calls and turned up during the day and after work with large cars and vans and pizzas and somehow by bedtime the old house was empty and (sort of) clean. I’d put in a 14 hour shift and was knackered and knew far more about what my friends kept under their beds and the state of their kitchen cupboards than is reasonable for anyone to know.

Very luckily their buyer was not moving in that day and was extremely tolerant and said they were ok as long as the house was emptied by nighttime. But they used up a lot of favours that day, and I looked at my friends in a different light afterwards.

When we sold, we packed a fair bit up even before the EA took photos to list the house. We went down to 4x plates /bowls/ sets of crockery. All books packed apart from a few left for decorative purposes, all spare linens and Christmas stuff and camping stuff. Boxed the lot and borrowed my DMs loft for a couple of months.

Still ended up with a van load of stuff to move on the actual day (we used movers but we pre packed everything in the week leading up). We dismantled the beds and slept on the mattresses on the floor etc.

I couldn't imagine being so unprepared that I hadn't packed on the day I was supposed to be leaving.

I had this, completed at Noon on a Friday and got a call off the Solicitors asking if we could give them a couple more hours as they weren't packed. By 5pm we told their Solicitor that we had given them long enough. She thought we were been unfair! Tough, it was legally our house. Thing was, I'd driven past the house 2 days previously and saw that nothing had been cleared. Vases, Photos and ornaments were all still on the windowsills. In the end they threw a load of stuff into the recycling and we found it later - the sealed bottles of Champagne and Baileys were very welcome.

Completion day is sometimes not the moving day. You may wish to consider storage for a couple of weeks so you only have the essentials to move on the day if you think you may struggle.

A friend of mine bought a house. Previous owner had divided the house into two and had been renting out the other half.

on moving day, they discovered the tenant was still in her side of the house watching telly. She had been given notice weeks before and had stopped paying rent.

My friend had no clue she was still there and couldn’t understand why the door was locked. Eventually, he took a sledge hammer and knocked a big hole in the dividing wall (the wall was coming down anyway) and stuck his head through. There she was, tea and biscuits, feet up.

She pretty soon realised the game was up and and moved out.

Still laughing about this ten years later.

Unless it's due to an unexpected emergency I find it very difficult to have any sympathy for people who are this disorganised. It's self obsessed, inconsiderate and just plain bloody stupid.

Agree!

I’d be tempted to sit opposite and watch the proceedings tomorrow.

It won't be ALL the belongings now will it? There might be something nice!