In contrast, though - and clearly not appropriate for this thread - when we visited the vendors of this house (from the UK) for the first time, they needed to be out when we arrived. They left the door key under the dustbin for us so we could go in and look around on our own, and had made us sandwiches and left out the teapot etc. A neighbour had baked us an apple pie...
Since 2019 I've lived in east Clare, in the west of Ireland.
Still nice, though. Never got the baking bread coffee smell thing. I don't like the smell of coffee. I bake my own bread but I'm not particularly keen on the smell
We didn’t put an offer in on the house we viewed where there were so many strips of fly paper hanging from the ceiling that it was hard to move. Also put off when the ‘dad’ arrived home for lunch while we were being shown round, and proceeded to strip to the waist and have a wash at the kitchen sink. Another property we looked at seemed really nice, although we were having some difficulty communicating with the extremely deaf elderly owner. Didn’t realise that there was the opening to a rail tunnel at the end of the garden, until we were being shown round it. Extremely loud and sudden, OH and I nearly fell over when a train emerged. The owner didn’t bat an eyelid, we always wondered whether she had lost her hearing before she moved in, or whether the noise had contributed.
We'd already decided we wanted to buy the house, @JennyJ, so it wasn't what my mum would have described as "cupboard love". They're just lovely people - they now live a mile away in the house he inherited from his parents, and we chat often.
Since 2019 I've lived in east Clare, in the west of Ireland.
When we sold our previous house the market had been pretty slow for some while and although we had quite a few offers no one was in a position to proceed. We took the house off the market (Christmas) but got a call from the agent 27th December, they had a very keen buyer. These people had sold their house in France and expected to exchange and complete on the english house before Christmas, it had been withdrawn at the last minute. They had all their possessions in a shipping container and nowhere to go. We were able to put our stuff into store and the whole thing was done within 6 weeks. When the sale was agreed we hadn't seen a house we liked but were able to pull out all the stops and only had a gap of a week between. We haven't regretted our hasty decision and, as they are still there 9 years later, I don't think they have either.
My sister bought a house that had been home to a hoarder. He'd filled the upstairs rooms floor to ceiling and then filled the landing and stairs as he retreated and no one had been in there for years. The lounge was full apart from a corridor to a single bed in the corner with a commode chair next to it. The heating was from a coal-fired Aga and he'd had cats so the place didn't smell great. The guy left everything behind when he went into sheltered housing, including the cats, and we were left to clear it all out which was no small task. Luckily he didn't hoard anything too disgusting but if he found a free offer by post he'd apply with multiple different names and never actually use the things he got. He had mountains of junk mail made out to hundreds of different names. Every now and then the guy would ask us to find something he'd left behind as if he'd left her a hoard of treasure and expected her to move in as it was. She knocked half the house down and gutted the rest.
If you can keep your head, while those around you are losing theirs, you may not have grasped the seriousness of the situation.
My brother was a hoarder and although we managed to get rid of masses of stuff when he had to move to supported accommodation after Mum died, he still quickly got back into the habit in his new home. He had been living there 7 years when he died, and it was only one bedroom flat. Despite the limited space he'd managed to keep every newspaper which had any offers in. Thankfully that was only a couple of times a week, but you do the maths! We tried to convince him to just keep the pages with offers, but that lasted about a month. He pretty much lived on ready meals and kept all the containers despite the packaging saying they couldn't be recycled. He also taped just about every film that came on TV but never watched them again. That amounted to somewhere between 600 and 700 VHS tapes, most of which were stashed in his wardrobe and in a storage area which came with the flat. Those are just the items I recall, but it took a couple of dozen trips to the tip, if not more, to get rid of everything.
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Never got the baking bread coffee smell thing. I don't like the smell of coffee. I bake my own bread but I'm not particularly keen on the smell
There's a sport section. Why don't they use it?
Another property we looked at seemed really nice, although we were having some difficulty communicating with the extremely deaf elderly owner. Didn’t realise that there was the opening to a rail tunnel at the end of the garden, until we were being shown round it. Extremely loud and sudden, OH and I nearly fell over when a train emerged. The owner didn’t bat an eyelid, we always wondered whether she had lost her hearing before she moved in, or whether the noise had contributed.
We haven't regretted our hasty decision and, as they are still there 9 years later, I don't think they have either.
These are people that have the vote, sit on juries and raise children. What hope is there?