Celebrating!

[El Condor]

Amigos,

A wee bit of personal sharing: me and La Señora are celebrating a major event today.  We just learned that we'll be able to move into our new house at the beginning of December.  This wouldn't be that noteworthy if weren't for what we went through to get to this point.  Background: we closed on this house at the end of June, but with an agreement to allow the sellers to rent until as late as December 30 while they searched for a house themselves.  Yeah, not ideal, but we loooooove the house and needed to strike a deal to get to the closing table.  The sellers were assuring us at the time that they were "this close" to signing a purchase agreement.  So the saga began.....

We had a rent-back agreement on our just-sold condo until the end of August, so we thought we'd be just fine with a place to stay.  June passed...then July....and then August came without word from our now-tenants.  Honoring our agreement, we arranged to stay with my aunt for the duration and called the tenants to explain that we'd be storing some of our boxes in a corner of the basement.  They went....MENTAL!!!  :wacko:  Insisting that it was a liability concern for them, they told us that they didn't want us to do this.  Trying first to resolve this in a collaborative way and failing, we had our attourney call them to explain the legal safety to them as well as the rights we had to access our own property.  This made them even more resistant, and they threatened to pack the basement (which is huge and mostly empty) with their own stuff before we could bring our boxes in.  Weighing the choices (find other storage vs. go at them with a court order and police escort), we decided that this was not the battle to wage.  So me, the wife, the dog and the ferret moved into my 82 year-old aunt's two-bedroom condo in a burrough of Boston.

Two weeks later we called our tenants to inform them of two urgent repairs we were going to conduct.  One was to fix a broken dormer roof, the other to update a dangerously overloaded circuit box (both of these their fault).  Within hours of leaving my nicely worded, matter-of-fact message, we got a call from their lawyer demanding that we not do the repairs and, furthermore, only have our attournies communicate and to never call them directly again.   :blink: We proceeded to spend the next several weeks explaining their inability to prevent the work (which actually would make the house safe for them to live in), then making special arrangements to actually do it.  I'll not bore you with further details, but suffice it to say that they continued to resist, complain, obfuscate, and delay as much as they could the entire way.  Their final jab at us just came in a letter that detailed how they only wished to search for a house and enjoy the property in peace, and how "untenable" we made it for them and their three little children (who they exploitively waved in our faces whenever they got the chance).  Included was a list of hyperbole, legal inaccuracies, and plain incorrect facts.  The most precious words, however, came at the end of the letter and said "... as a result of this, we will be vacating the premises on November 30".  Huzzah!!!  :yipee

So the end of this mini-opera that has compromised my family's life in so many absurd ways is finally drawing to a close.  There is only one major annoyance left to tie up: the tenants are witholding their final month's rent.  They've not stated that they are doing this, but no rent has yet arrived where they had always sent it a week in advance in the previous months.  So we may have to conduct one last battle.  <_<  But, at the very least, we'll actually be in our beautiful new home in time for Christmas, and I can't begin to express how giddy we are about this.

Thanks to anyone who read long enough to get this far!  I know it turned out to be more than a "wee bit" of sharing, but this was truly the hyper-condensed version of all the madness that's transpired over the past few months.  I just had to share a little bit of my joy with the FR peeps!

Be well....

EC

[captainspud]

We didn't open our pool the last year before we moved, so it was kinda mungy when we moved. We let the new people know up front what the state of the pool would be, and they cheerfully replied that it wasn't a big issue.

So of course, four months after the deal went through, when they tried to get the pool ready for the summer, SHOCK HORROR the pool was in the exact state we told them it would be, the state that the contract they signed said it would be in.

And they wanted ten thousand dollars to clean and repair it.

>_<

Long story short: a year of fighting later, their lawyers stopped sending us letters, so I guess they've accepted that they're not getting any money.

[Podmark]

Man that is one crazy story. People can be so weird sometimes.

[Dweomer Knight]

It's unfortunate when people act like that.  When my father passed away (many many years ago), a variety of companies and organizations tried to bilk my mother out of money (< the really short version).  Fortunately, my brother, his wife, an his wife's sister are all lawyers.  Between them and their veritable wave of lawyer acquaintances (who were all happy to help at no expense to my mom) they hammered out the problems very quickly. 

Property exchanges seem to bring out the worst in some people.  If you do nothing, it validates their behaviour.  But fighting can be time consuming and/or costly.  The latter is probably why some people raise such a fuss; they hope you won't do anything.

Anyway, grats on the upcoming new digs.  I assume the condor-shaped jakuzzi is already bubbling.

DK

[Tomato]

Oh, buying/selling a house is always fun, ain't it?

We had a house down in Georgia that we'd bought while we were stationed down there (My dad was military, and we were told that was preferable to living on base) that we had rented out up until about a year ago. However, the then-current tenants, a single mom, her boyfriend, and her son, were behind several months on the rent, and the mom was on several types of drugs. I don't know the exact circumstances, but eventually we had to ask them to leave.

But by this point we've got the place pretty much paid off, and having it was of no benefit to us, so we decided to sell it. Go down the list of things we need to fix- replacing wallpaper, paint, the usual shindig. Now, the whole house was almost all wallpaper, some really good and some really cheap. We hired a company to estimate how difficult it would be to replace the cheapo stuff which was dying when we were living there. They inflated my bill, so my dad decides the entire family is going to fix up this house.

Upon arriving, we found some interesting things in our former home:

-The former tenant's boyfriend had covered our shed in demonic symbols as a "clubhouse" for the son
-No attempt at any kind of upkeep had been done by the former tenants, so the back yard had become a forest of grass, thorns, and ant hills
-The guy who had come to give an "estimate" on replacing the wallpaper had torn chunks of wallpaper not only from the rooms where we wanted it replaced, but also in the rooms with the pricy, valuable wallpaper.

So yes, it was a fun summer for us all.

[Uncle Yuan]

Ah, the joys of home ownership . . .

El C, I hope you find everything in the house to your satisfaction when they vacate.  I'm glad this has worked out for you in the end.

[El Condor]

Property exchanges seem to bring out the worst in some people. 

It's so true.  These people had such the "suburban Winnie-the-Pooh" image draped all over them at first, but morphed into Cruella DeVille at the flip of a switch.  Hopefully, this story can serve as a cautionary tale: the people you spend your life surrounding yourself with are the ones you can give your trust to.  Things like buying and selling a house should really be all business. Sad, yes.  :(

I assume the condor-shaped jakuzzi is already bubbling.

With two champagne flutes right next to it!  :)

EC

[Glitch Girl]

Oh man, that beats my house buying experience by a long shot.  (I never met the seller, he didn't even show up to the close)  Glad to ehar the ordeal is finally over.