Surprise! What did the seller take with them that you expected would stay with the house?

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Friend, as seller, did not take the drapes. The buyers put them in the trash, I noticed and retrieved them. My friend should have stated in the contract she wanted them. She was so grateful when I brought them to her. She was a professional seamstress, long hours making them herself and they were gorgeous. Just not someone else's taste obviously. If you want something ... have it in the contract.

I took down my custom drapes before we listed and replaced with sheers. I didn’t even want to think about some basic bitch trashing my drapes. All window treatments that were up for open house, stayed with the house.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:We sold and took the thermostat, but replaced it with one of equal value that just wasn't as user friendly for us. Buyer said that the thermostat we took was one of the reasons they bought the house, so they'd like to have it back. Of course we gave it back, but thought it silly that anyone would buy a house for a thermostat.

They didn’t buy the house for the thermostat. They told you it was one of the reasons they bought your home (vs others ). Why wouldn’t you just buy the same damn thermostat for your new home instead of taking theirs? By the way, you may say it was of equal value but I bet it cost less and you thought you could get away with it. Otherwise, again, you would’ve just bought yourself the type you liked for your new place. Stingy and you got caught- good!

Not sure why you think it's great that I "got caught." I'm already sharing a story that doesn't cast me in a favorable light, so I'm not sure why you'd pile on with nonsense. We had an Ecobee in the house when we showed it and replaced it with a Nest. We had intended to take it off the wall for the open house, but the buyer gave us about 1 hour of notice the day it went on the market and gave us an offer 3 hours later. We never got to the open house, and they buyer really didn't want the Nest. I think that's weird, but ymmv

If you loved the Ecobee and the Nest was the same price, why didn’t you just buy another Ecobee? Your story doesn’t make sense.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:We sold and took the thermostat, but replaced it with one of equal value that just wasn't as user friendly for us. Buyer said that the thermostat we took was one of the reasons they bought the house, so they'd like to have it back. Of course we gave it back, but thought it silly that anyone would buy a house for a thermostat.

They didn’t buy the house for the thermostat. They told you it was one of the reasons they bought your home (vs others ). Why wouldn’t you just buy the same damn thermostat for your new home instead of taking theirs? By the way, you may say it was of equal value but I bet it cost less and you thought you could get away with it. Otherwise, again, you would’ve just bought yourself the type you liked for your new place. Stingy and you got caught- good!

Not sure why you think it's great that I "got caught." I'm already sharing a story that doesn't cast me in a favorable light, so I'm not sure why you'd pile on with nonsense. We had an Ecobee in the house when we showed it and replaced it with a Nest. We had intended to take it off the wall for the open house, but the buyer gave us about 1 hour of notice the day it went on the market and gave us an offer 3 hours later. We never got to the open house, and they buyer really didn't want the Nest. I think that's weird, but ymmv

If you loved the Ecobee and the Nest was the same price, why didn’t you just buy another Ecobee? Your story doesn’t make sense.

We actually had one of each. Bought the Nest first, then were gifted a second hand Ecobee

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:They took the garage door openers.

I forgot to turn one of these over at the closing because we only brought one of our cars with us and the one for the other side of the garage was in our other car which we had already shipped to our new home. And I didn't even realize it until we got to our new place a week later. I felt awful. I shipped it immediately and sent a fruit basket to apologize.

[Anonymous]

Previous owner took a beautiful flowering shrub in the front yard. She specifically mentioned it, I was fine with it, and that was that. No other surprises.

[Anonymous]

deck furniture. It matched the deck exactly and I am pretty sure it came with the house when they bought it.

[Anonymous]

The chandelier and a cherry tree

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:They took the garage door openers.

I forgot to turn one of these over at the closing because we only brought one of our cars with us and the one for the other side of the garage was in our other car which we had already shipped to our new home. And I didn't even realize it until we got to our new place a week later. I felt awful. I shipped it immediately and sent a fruit basket to apologize.

That is really nice- you are a good person!

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Door knocker

We took our door knocker, because it was engraved with our family name. But we also noted that the door knocker did not convey in the contract.

I would have removed it and replaced it with a generic once before the open house, but honestly forgot about it. My neighbor (who came to snoop during the open house) said something about it, so we noted it in the contract.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:deck furniture. It matched the deck exactly and I am pretty sure it came with the house when they bought it.

Why would you expect deck furniture to stay with the house?

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Did anyone here ever have an issue with the sellers taking the fridge? In CA, it's customary for the fridge to go with the sellers. Many apartments don't even have a fridge and I was surprised that it wasn't the case when I moved here. I can see that being a culture-clash in a home sale!

My husband is from CA and normal is bring your own appliances. Here they generally come with the house.

That wasn't my experience there, but CA is a big place. My friends had their own washer / dryer that moved from house to house with them because that was normal in TX but in CA those typically conveyed.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:deck furniture. It matched the deck exactly and I am pretty sure it came with the house when they bought it.

Why would you expect deck furniture to stay with the house?

My house CAME with stuff I didn't expect like the deck furniture and the front porch chairs and some basic lawn tools. Very nice! The deck furniture, I'm almost positive, was made by the deck-maker...and heavy AF

[Anonymous]

The kids' bathroom had a hand-held shower with a special hanger at like the 3 or 4 fout height, so that a kid could hang the shower nozzle up. I thought it was great and was so excited for it. Sellers removed the whole thing, oddly. I always meant to have it re-done but never did and the kids keep growing, so maybe the moment is passed.

They took a lot of weird heavy stuff, even though they were moving to another country, including a natural gas grill that hooked to the gas line outside. I even offered to pay extra for it as I didn't want to have to buy one and have it hooked in, but they insisted on moving it thousands of miles. So weird.

[Anonymous]

I wish our sellers would have taken all their junk, but instead we were left with their: old basement couch, old basement refrigerator, 3 crappy/cheap area rugs bought for the express purpose of staging to sell the house, and their metal outdoor furniture. Except for the area rugs, all of this stuff was too big to be taken with the regular trash, so we had to pay extra for separate pickup or had 1800 Got Junk get it, in the case of the refrigerator.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:We did a 1 month rent back to our sellers after settlement and found out they had removed all the closet shelves and a built in shelving system in the office. Thing is these were those metal cut to size custom fittings and I cannot believe they would fit any closet easily as the closets were really weird sizes-and just that ugly plain white metal. As this was a 6000sf house (Atlanta so big but not the mansion it would be up here!!!) replacing everything for the 5 bedrooms, 2 linen closets and laundry and office was a total PIA. The sellers moved from Georgia to Washington state and anything legal (as it really was a theft of $$1000's in materials and labor) would have been ridiculously complicated so we did nothing but 10 years later still burns. Made the move in so crazy as we were so "nice" to let their kids finish the summer with their friends and we moved in 2 weeks before school started and had to set up closets before we could really unpack bedrooms/set up my office (WOH)

There was an entire thread here once where people were arguing that buyers shouldn't expect sellers to leave their Elfa (or similar) closet systems. I think it's nuts, on top of being tacky. Those things are cut to fit -- why would I want to take a system that isn't going to fit in my new house?