Originally Posted by
Gromdal
I thought in lieu of starting a new thread I'd just do an update here - we moved into our new house on 24th March having agreed to sell ours on 18th August and agreed to buy on October 31st, so 5 months to complete.
Where do I start - probably with the young couple who moved into our place, who wrote a very nice letter to us thanking us for cleaning thoroughly before we left, providing a detailed handover document and leaving things like breakfast bar stools and the old garden lawn chairs that they'd found useful. They've wasted no time completely redecorating the whole place to add their style to the place, enclosing pictures for us of the progress. I'm really glad that we sold to first time buyers rather than adding to a landlords portfolio.
Unfortunately, our forever home (despite being only 7 years old) smacked us in the face the moment we walked in through the door. Now, I preface this by saying that I appreciate that as previous owners were both GPs and the NHS has been under incredible pressure this past year and that this last lockdown with school closures has meant that our sellers had little time to themselves to actually do a lot to the house once a sale had been agreed. With that being said, when you move house it is (I thought) customary to leave the house in condition to which you would hope to find it. They moved out about a week before the completion, leaving a removals company to put their bits not taken into storage (they're off abroad). I should also say that naively, neither the sellers or estate agents had chance to come by the house post the removals company taking the contents of the house away and upon reflection I probably should have insisted on a pre-move visit...
I won't catalogue everything as there really is too much, but we walked in to the smell of stale pet urine and it took four of us three days cleaning and a professional carpet steam clean to get the house into a position to even spend a night in and to fix the immediate things that were broken. We're looking at probably a few grand just to get things back to a working state, then maybe another 5 or so to replace or restore everything that's damaged (wood flooring, wood worktops) having only really factored in replacing carpets and a fresh lick of paint. Oh but it's OK, because they'd left us a bottle of champagne.
All of this is of course, caveat emptor and we have no recourse - upon mentioning it to the estate agents that maybe they should have bothered to check between them moving out and us moving in, the reply of 'well you did get a very good price for it, and it's probably still worth another 25k again in todays market' was enough to tell me how bothered they were. They constantly chased me to agree to completion dates from 'the top of the chain who is eager to complete' even though we had said we could do any dates suggested and they needed to speak to our buyers and yet it transpired that our sellers had become the top of the chain having pulled out of their sale in February to move abroad instead so I'd love to know what they were playing at. But hey, stamp duty holiday saved me £14080 (allegedly) and I weaselled out of an ERC as my supplier was exiting the market and couldn't offer a port so our total move costs were less than £5k so silver linings and all that...
Anyway, enough venting - we're now well on the way to making it ours.