Tuesday, March 27, 2007

Home buying and selling: Horror stories anyone?

My friend Richmond deserves some sort of prize or medal or nap for trying to sell a house, buy a house, and battle illness all at the same time.
Her recent post about dealing with this woman got me thinking of horrible things to hear just as you are buying/selling a house.

While signing closing papers on our house, the sellers told us a lovely story of finding their father having a stroke on the livingroom floor.
That's right, it's now our livingroom floor.
Nice.
Thank you.

Got any stories?

Also wondered, if you are buying someone else's old house, would you want to know if they've buried pets in the yard? Would that creep you out, or would you want to know before you started digging for new landscaping?
Just wondering...

**Sorry, comments are closed due to spam.  Feel free to send me an email if you have a good story you'd like to share.

7 comments:

Lemon Stand said...

I don't have any horror stories, THANK YOU GOD! But we did find out at our closing that the previous owner had the same last name as us... AND the first owners too! This house is almost 25 years old and has only been owned by someone with our last name. 3 times. And no, we are not related. Weird. I wonder if our kids will sell it to someone with the same last name? Because the next move I make will be to the cemetery. I am NOT moving again!

Anonymous said...

Once upon a time we rented a house. I loved that house. While we lived there, my beloved Betta fish died (yes, you can love a fish). It was around Easter. I put my dead fish into a plastic Easter egg and buried the egg (not very deep) in the back yard. It was a lovely funeral service. I believe my exact words were, "Psycho (the name of the fish) will someday be dug up by a child, excited to find an Easter egg, and scare the crap out of the kid when the kid opens the egg and discovers bones."

Anonymous said...

LS: I so don't want to move again!!

WB: You are so twisted!

Anonymous said...

Last house I was in had 2 horses buried in the front yard. not exactly what you want to hear when you have well water...

Richmond said...

Holy crap - horses??? That just isn't right!!

And hey, if that old saying "what doesn't kill you makes you stronger" is true, Superman better be on the lookout for me. I'll be better than bullet proof when this is all said and done.

Anonymous said...

VW Bug: I'm with Richmond. Horses!?!

WritersBlock: I'm sorry for your loss, but dang, that's funny!

Lemon Stand: Too weird. But in a "warm-fuzzy" way.

Anonymous said...

I owned a house in Wyoming, Michigan. When remodeling, we found letters in the ceiling of the basement that had come from the school, but never made it
to the parents. One day, this nice young man was walking by our house and said to his two little girls, "Daddy grew up here." I struck up a conversation with him, and told him about the school letters we had found.
He then shared a story of the house. He was a teenager asleep in the basement bedroom window when a man came crashing through the kitchen chasing his wife (he had just caught her with another man in the house across the street). The young man's brother ran into the couple, the guy told him, "Run!" and he did, to the back window of the basement window where he climbed in to be with his brother. The gunman shot his wife, dead, IN OUR KITCHEN. Then, called the police to report himself. The police said what
saved the teenage boys was probably the fact that the man had only one bullet in the chamber... and had already decided a use for it. Creepy...yep.
I never quite looked at my kitchen the same way again after that. We did not share this story with the new owners. Some things are better left unsaid.