What do you wish the seller of your home told you?

April 11, 2013 1:07 PM

When you bought your home were there things you wish the seller(s) had left instructions or notes about?

When I bought my home in 2008 the sellers had already moved out of state and had left behind a couple of sheets of paper with notes about pond/koi maintenance (didn't help, I accidentally killed them) and various other tidbits.

Fast forward five years and we are under contract to sell our home in Denver to a couple who are returning to Denver from a couple years abroad. They haven't even seen the home other than through their Realtor's lens and words. They will arrive in Denver after we've already departed so we were thinking we might leave behind a "Welcome to your new home... here's the stuff you will need to know" manual.

We're planning on using a brown moleskine notebook to jot things down more or less as we think of them but it's been five years since I bought this place and I'm willing to bet that we'll forget some things but this is where we're starting:

Pond details (complete with who we use to maintain it)
Sprinklers (and drought watering schedule)
Recycling schedule
Details on the landscaping/garden (and who we used to use to maintain it)
Tips on good food and beverage within walking distance
Neighbors who are awesome (and a couple who they may or may not want to avoid)

What else can you think of that would have been awesome to be tipped off to in this situation?

posted by FlamingBore to Home & Garden (44 answers total)

- What was planted in the garden and how to care for it.
- That weird door in the kitchen. Seriously—what was the deal with that?
- That weird light switch that seemingly didn't control anything.
- The fact that the folks next door had made the stained-glass inserts in the front door.
- When certain modifications had been made to the house.
posted by adamrice at 1:11 PM on April 11, 2013 [2 favorites]

A binder with all of the instruction manuals for built-in equipment
Contact info for the folks who maintain it and related stuff (septic system, sprinkler system, alarm, etc.)
A map of the garden annotated with the names of the plants
posted by carmicha at 1:12 PM on April 11, 2013 [5 favorites]

Heating/cooling advice. In my house (forced hot air), you have to completely shut some vents to get anything like consistent temperature throughout the house.

Circuit map: I went through our entire house identifying which breakers corresponded to every single outlet, appliance, and light fixture and then color-coded them on a sketch of the house floor plan. It's awesome.

If there are traffic patterns in/near the neighborhood that might make a big difference in a commute. E.g., is there a place where it's impossible to take a left a certain times of day and how can they avoid that.
posted by that's candlepin at 1:14 PM on April 11, 2013 [2 favorites]

Leave your manuals for any appliances in the house you will be leaving behind. Tell them about any quirks or tips about your appliances, water softener, etc.
posted by MeatheadBrokeMyChair at 1:15 PM on April 11, 2013 [2 favorites]

Any manuals/warranties/receipts for appliances or work done to the houses. If you don't have that, a list of who did what when in terms of major work (roof/siding work, basement cracks, etc.).
posted by ndg at 1:16 PM on April 11, 2013 [1 favorite]

When were the last updates to the various appliances, and who did them: Hot water heater, furnace, A/C, pesticide treatments. Which is just expansion on adamrice's comment about modifications made to the house, but...
posted by straw at 1:16 PM on April 11, 2013 [1 favorite]

The names and numbers of any service people you have used that you recommend.

Label all the circuit breakers with labels meaningful to people who haven't yet lived there. (so stuff like "Small Bedroom" or "Small room by kitchen" rather than "Bob's room" or "TV room".)

Any photos that might show how the house used to look before renovations or major landscaping.

Maps of the neighborhood, especially historical ones.

Any cool history of the neighborhood.

A small rundown of the neighbors, though let them make up their own mind about who is good and who is bad.

Manuals for any mechanical systems. (garage door opener, HVAC, etc)

The make/model of any consumables they might need, such as heating filters.

The location of anything buried in the yard, whether it's a pipe or a dead cat. Best to avoid any surprises if they dig.

A sheet of random, meaningless numbers that look like they might be some sort of code that contain clues to a buried treasure but are actually just random, meaningless numbers.
posted by bondcliff at 1:17 PM on April 11, 2013 [7 favorites]

Also... drop by the visitors bureau and pick up info/maps, e.g.,bike routes, art galleries, transit schedules, etc.
Label the circuit breakers
If you have a fireplace and there's any chance of confusion, note how to open/close the flue, heatilator, etc.
Provide the names/manufacturers of the paint colors you used inside and out

Oh and a bottle of champagne in the fridge would be a nice touch too.
posted by carmicha at 1:17 PM on April 11, 2013

I wouldn't include which neighbors to avoid. You just never know - they might get along with them great. Unless they're an actual danger to them? Let it go and stick with 'if you can't say something nice...'

As far as the house itself - if there are any weird quirks or anything that requires a non-obvious method to open/start/turn off, that kind of thing is just gold.
posted by lemniskate at 1:19 PM on April 11, 2013 [2 favorites]

We left info about:
- how much we loved living there and how we hoped they would too (I'm sentimental like that)
- garbage day (and recycling, green bin, etc.)
- the appliances and their various quirks
- how nice the neighbours are
- our favourite local pizza place (and the menu)
- all the warranties and info about the fencing, skylight, etc.
- a copy of the land survey
- the name of the various handy-people we'd employed over the years (who would thus be somewhat familiar with the house)
- info about the alarm system (the temporary code, battery replacement, etc.)
posted by VioletU at 1:21 PM on April 11, 2013 [1 favorite]

All the keys with labels as to what doors they go to.

(Previous owners of my house left a cup filled with 35 keys. 20 of them went to a single door and 3 doors had no keys at all. I have no idea what was going with that....)
posted by Jacob G at 1:22 PM on April 11, 2013 [4 favorites]

How to get to the bulbs in any light fixture where it's not obvious.
posted by COBRA! at 1:23 PM on April 11, 2013

When I bought a house last year, I loved getting all the left over paint cans, including wall and trim interior paint and exterior paint in all colors, as well as the siding and deck stains. Makes touch-ups and buying additional paint in different colors but the same brand and sheen so much easier.

I also got a binder with the brand and models of the hardwood floors, all the tiles used throughout the house, light and bathroom fixtures etc. and names and contact information for the contractors who had installed everything from water heater and radiant heating system to fireplace. Had an easy time when I needed things like additional towel racks or a replacement kitchen cabinet hinge.

We also got all the blueprints for the house and the manuals for everything.
posted by halogen at 1:26 PM on April 11, 2013 [8 favorites]

What plants/bulbs etc are in the garden and where, I had some lovely and not so lovely surprises the first spring when bulbs started popping up in the weirdest places.

When garbage day was and what they will and won't take. Same with recycling and garden waste collection.

Some of the history of the house, the house we just bought is over 100 years old and we know nothing about it. The last house I owned was 140 years old and I knew a lot about it from researching and old owners that would come and visit it to see how the house was doing and some very old neighbours in the area filled me in on other details, when I sold it I left a copy of old photos and documents I had about the house for the new owners and got a lovely thank you letter for it. I also explained that pigs, rabbits and chickens had been kept in the back yard by the owners before us and not to freak out when they found bones and weird things when digging in the garden. My current house has a tendency have lego bricks appear in the garden in random places after it rains, I have almost to build something but don't know why they keep appearing.

Which circuits will blow a fuse if you put more than 2 things on at the same time.

When smoke alarm batteries, water and air filters etc where last changed.

Name and number of the guy who serviced the furnace and A/C.

I would love to have known, paint colours and supplier, cabinet supplier, carpet brand etc. This would have been easy for them to do, as they flipped the house and so had all the info on file.

I did get all the warranties and manuals for all the new appliances etc which was nice though.
posted by wwax at 1:30 PM on April 11, 2013 [1 favorite]

For my old house: that water would seep up through the basement during heavy rains and that I'll need to install a sump pump at great cost and jack hammer through ancient concrete to do so. Of course, I probably wouldn't have bought it if they'd told me that.
posted by Kurichina at 1:31 PM on April 11, 2013 [1 favorite]

The seller for my house gave us his email (along with a warning that he'd probably be switching providers in a few months, which may or may not have been true but was presumably to let us know that contacting him was a limited-time offer), and that was among the most useful things. He mentioned some stuff about needing to manually operate the sprinklers at the closing table, but once we had the house we couldn't figure out where in the hell the sprinkler system controls actually were. A quick email saved us from a dead lawn, which was great.

Other things he left that were useful:

*Extra lightbulbs (especially non-standard sizes) that he didn't want to move with him
*Three rolls of toilet paper in the bathroom
*All of the documentation for various furnace/hot water heater/humidifier installation and repair (some of which went back 2-3 owners, very useful!)
*A cold six-pack of Fat Tire in the fridge (much appreciated after moving in all day)

If you have any "hidden" stuff in your house that wouldn't be apparent from just walking around--in ours, there are outlets connected to the light switch near the front door way up in the window wells--it's nice to mention that stuff. Also where to turn off the water to outside spigots or the sprinkler system in the winter; they're not thinking of that now but will definitely want to know come October.
posted by iminurmefi at 1:36 PM on April 11, 2013 [1 favorite]

Nthing landscaping information, especially if there are particular quirks -- like, the people we bought our house from let us know that our camellia tree is susceptible to spider mites, and what they used to treat it, and that crabgrass is common in the sunny patch of the side yard, so it would need to be treated more than the rest of the yard. That kind of thing.

Any information on previous owners, if they still live in the area (which is the case with our house and is a huge benefit).

Is there a neighborhood listserv? Neighborhood association? If so, the name of the person who runs those, and their contact information.

If they and you have kids, share information on nursery schools, playgrounds, neighborhood pools, recreation centers, etc.
posted by devinemissk at 1:38 PM on April 11, 2013

Where the connections are to turn off the main water/gas/electric/etc. supply to the house. Some of these you may find on your own, some you may find through the inspector, some you won't find.
posted by Blazecock Pileon at 1:42 PM on April 11, 2013 [1 favorite]

Also, if the house has any oddities, it's worth passing them along, to save the new folks headaches. For example in one house I owned the renovations appeared to have been done in a stupid-yet-effective way, but it turns out that there were structural constraints due to the age and nature of the house that one wouldn't have foreseen. I did some work that probably perplexed some other people too (e.g., painted a wooden floor that was made of a virtually unsandable kind of wood and patched with nonmatching types, meaning it could never be the "beautiful finished wood floor" of your dreams) -- might as well share your hard-won wisdom. My current house has some inexplicable sorts of light switches . . .
posted by acm at 1:45 PM on April 11, 2013

-- What size A/C filter you need, plus when it was last changed
-- YES PLEASE TELL US what all the light switches control. We've been in our house almost 2 years and still haven't identified what two switches in the garage do.
-- The previous owners of our house let us know what store all the kitchen & bathroom hardware came from, so we could match if we wanted, and gave us a list of the paint brands and colors, which was handy

We'd also really have loved to know why on earth they removed the cords that raised the blinds, thus rendering us unable to open them, and why they ran interior-rated coax across the entire attic and down the outside wall of the house to hook up their TV for the living room when they went to the trouble to install proper coax connections on the back porch (!) and in the garage (!!), but they didn't tell us why so we've had to just mark it up to "people be strange, yo." (The next owners will probably wonder why we put Ethernet and surround-sound in the dining room, but we wanted a media room and we didn't need a dining room, so there you go.)
posted by telophase at 1:53 PM on April 11, 2013 [1 favorite]

In a city place, information/caveats about parking: you'll get a ticket parking there, the music school down the street steals all the parking on this side, the street sweepers come on this day, etc.
posted by scratch at 2:01 PM on April 11, 2013

I did a detailed list of all the contractors/tradesmen we used, which ones were good, which weren't.

Ditto Gutter Cleaners, Lawn Guy, Gardener, HVAC maintenance dude, anyone who comes on a regular basis.

I downloaded all of the manuals for the appliances.

I would explain that if you turn on the hose bib for the drip system outside, that if you don't also turn on a faucet INSIDE, that there will be an ungodly whistling sound from the copper pipes in the basement.

I also did who delivers and provided menus. I wrote out a list of my favorite places and their locations.

Most importantly a list of what was done, and when it was done. Mine would look like this:

1. Upgraded electrical panel from fuse box-2006
2. Replaced sewer pipe from house to street-2008
3. Re-Landscaped garden and planted Crepe Myrtles 2008
4. Roof-predates my ownership of the house
5. HVAC system-predates my ownership of the house

So if something breaks, they can say, "Well, we were living on borrowed time with that," or converseley, "That was replaced only 4 years ago! No way it needs to be replaced!"

Lots of great ideas here!
posted by Ruthless Bunny at 2:14 PM on April 11, 2013 [2 favorites]

Which bits of the yard do what at which time of year. We closed on our house January 31 and are just finding out that one side of the yard is tiled to drain the field behind us. So we have an oddly flat river on our property. You can't tell otherwise.
posted by checkitnice at 2:39 PM on April 11, 2013

I'd be careful with some of this stuff. If it's anything that the buyer might reasonably consider a fault or defect, they probably would have preferred to have known about it before the sale, so they may be quite displeased. For example: which circuits will blow if you run more than two things at once. If you tell them after the sale, then it means you knew about the problem, didn't tell them, and didn't fix it. If you'd told them about it before the sale, they could have made you fixing it a condition of the sale, or bargained the price down accordingly, and they didn't have that chance. Worst case, you could get sued over it. There's being nice and informative, and there's opening yourself up to serious headaches.
posted by kindall at 2:40 PM on April 11, 2013 [4 favorites]

I sold my house last year, and reading some of these responses I feel kind of bad I didn't do more.

We left them all of the manuals, a list of things we updated, extra carpet and tile from work we had done, a copy of our home inspection report (which was a ginormous binder detailing all of the maintenance needed to be done while theirs was 3 pages long), and I left a note telling them it was our first house and it meant a lot to us, and I hoped it did to them.
posted by hrj at 2:45 PM on April 11, 2013

Paint colors & which lightswitches control what. We've been here 2 years & I still don't know what half the switches by each door do. We also have lots of external light fixtures that don't seem to have control switches anywhere.

We ended up calling the guy who owned the place 2 owners ago to ask 1) why there was a trapdoor in the front deck and 2) how on earth the hydraulic lift for it was supposed to work.
posted by belladonna at 2:45 PM on April 11, 2013

Light switches, absolutely. Where the emergency shutoffs are for oil/furnace/water, definitely. When I moved into my house last fall, I managed to combine discovering the two of these - it turns out that unidentified light switch in my bedroom I flipped experimentally? Inexplicably, it's the emergency on/off for the oil burner. That wasn't fun, when we woke up the next day with no heat or hot water and no idea why...

The previous owner left us all her appliance manuals, which was great. I wish she had also left us intstructions on how to do things like change the lightbulbs in the ceiling fans (that was an adventurous day, when we tried to do that on our own...). Previous owner did not leave a list of people who had been providing services on the house (septic, oil delivery, propane delivery, etc), which we would have loved to have, but did leave us a set of town services numbers (sanitation, animal control, tax assessor), which was nice.

I would have loved to be left takeout/delivery menus and any non-standard lightbulbs.
posted by badgermushroomSNAKE at 3:07 PM on April 11, 2013

If you have underground cables (phone/cable) let them know where they enter the house.
posted by NoraCharles at 3:19 PM on April 11, 2013

You know that mystery closet in the basement that is full of assorted cans of paint and chemicals and the like: Yeah it would be nice to know what they were used for.
posted by mmascolino at 3:40 PM on April 11, 2013 [1 favorite]

1. You get the water to come out of the showerhead by pulling down the "foreskin" of the lower faucet. (There's really no other way to phrase it.)

2. Oh, yeah! There's no electricity going out to the garage, even though it has a light switch and two light bulbs. Here's what happened!

3. Guess what? You've got a wee bit of asbestos in the basement. Wheeeee!

4. That ornamental crab tree that looks so pretty in May loses it's leaves by July and looks like hell.
posted by BostonTerrier at 4:06 PM on April 11, 2013 [1 favorite]

Funny you should ask. If you've done any pest mitigation that might leave any sort of poisonous residue or other hazards, let them know.
posted by town of cats at 4:22 PM on April 11, 2013

Our seller left warranties for various things (the dishwasher, the oven), but didn't realise she would have to phone the companies to ask them to switch them into my name. The first time something broke down under warranty we had to try and track her down via our lawyer and did a ridiculous game of phone tag before finally giving up and impersonating her to the manufacturer.

So yeah, check the details of warranties, or at least leave the buyer a way to contact you.

Also helpful would be a list of local tradespeople you would recommend. Especially if you have any sort of ongoing issue that needs regular repair or maintenance. It's much easier to get someone in who has been working on that house in the past.

Details of any verbal agreements with the neighbours. The buyers may or may not want to keep to them, but it would be helpful to know, for example, that the right-hand neighbour's cat is often looked after and fed by you, and that's why it is yowling outside the door all night, or that the kids at the back are allowed to climb the tree on the boundary and pick the apples that are technically yours, or whatever. Or maintenance arrangements, e.g. next door pays for trimming of the hedge that bounds your properties, but you rake up the leaves that falls on their yard from your oak tree.
posted by lollusc at 5:15 PM on April 11, 2013

Maintenance records. Specifically, I'd like to know the last time the fireplace was cleaned and what kind of (if any) routine maintenance was done on the boiler.
posted by mchorn at 5:41 PM on April 11, 2013 [1 favorite]

A brown moleskin notebook is a terrible idea, sorry. You want a binder with plastic sleeves with

- info about rubbish and recycling collection
- info about the gas and water stopcocks, in case everyone in the house is about to die
- info about local public transport routes and car parking
- info about all the utilities
- all of the manuals for every appliance in the house

Everything else is irrelevant, or I will work it out myself.
posted by goo at 6:22 PM on April 11, 2013

Location of shut offs if not obvious.

If I was leaving a note like this for my house I'd include that the red cap at the front edge of the property is so the city can come and auger the roots every year and that I cover the cap with a shovel of dirt so I can tell when they've been there (the workers never replace the dirt) as a check to make sure it gets done as sewage backing up in the basement is unfun.

My shop has a two inch hole 6' above the ground next to the bathroom door jam covered with a blank electrical cover plate that has a slot cut into it. The hole leads to a 4' high length of 4" sewer pipe embedded in the wall. It's purpose is safe disposal of single edge razor blades, snap off olfa/box cutter blades and utility knife blades. In 50 years you might need to cut into the wall, remove the pipe (conveniently capped on the bottom) and install a new receptacle for the blades).

Diagram of all the trees on the property with type and variety listed and pruning instructions. We didn't get this and the first couple years it was a hoot see what kind of fruit showed up.

A write up of the rotation schedule of the garden and also what perennials are planted where. Stuff like asparagus can be hard to identify.
posted by Mitheral at 7:01 PM on April 11, 2013

The previous owners of our house did a lot of this, which was great. They also wrote a note on the wall of the crawlspace wishing us a happy home--as the previous owners did to them, and the ones before did to those people. It's a lovely reminder of the history of the house.

What I wish I'd gotten was a forwarding address. I know they filed one with the post office, but it expires after one year and even during that first year, the odd piece of personal mail (cards, etc) wound up in our mailbox.
posted by peanut_mcgillicuty at 7:43 PM on April 11, 2013 [2 favorites]

It's nice of you to do this - but you can never know how the buyer will react. Years ago my family sold a summer house which was in good shape, but being an older beach house that had been added onto, it had some quirks. As I walked the buyer through I tried to be helpful in pointing out things one needed to do - yearly, and in the face of bad storms. Numbered boards for windows, electrical shutoffs... He did not react well. In fact, the lawyers and realtors had to talk sense into him. Sadly, I think there is an arguement for saying very little.
posted by R. Mutt at 7:46 PM on April 11, 2013

One thing that I haven't seen mentioned: the location of the sewer clean-outs. I lived in one house where when the sewer main backed up, you had to dig at a certain spot in the middle of the front lawn. Not obvious, and not something you want to spend a lot of time on when the toilet won't flush.
posted by Daddio at 7:50 PM on April 11, 2013

I would add notes about season maintenance routines. The house I live in now, for example, has a handful of numbered storm window and screens. Never realized these weren't interchangeable except by trial and error. Any notes about which circuit breakers control what outlets can be helpful. I also try to keep left-over supplies from past projects. The person that buys this house in the future will receive a few boxes of floor tiles (from the distant past - hey, maybe they want to fix that one square in the bathroom done incorrectly in the 1930s that I've never gotten around to fixing!), some aluminum siding, and other random things.

It's funny also that several things left behind here are now redundant, such as turn keys for valves, several sets of door keys, and poles to support clothes lines!
posted by kuppajava at 6:38 AM on April 12, 2013

Information about paint!

My sister and her husband moved into a house last year with awesome paint everywhere and no leftover cans anywhere. They went through all kinds of matching at a variety of stores in order to try to touch up a few spots, and could not get it right.

(Finally, a neighbor clued them in that the former owner worked for Sherwin-Williams, so when they went to the store he had worked at, the new employees were able to pull the record and get them everything they needed. So they eventually got lucky.)

I would have loved to have had the numbers for the service people who worked on the house, especially since the sellers did disclose a sewer issue.

The other thing we didn't get in the envelope full of manuals that I wish I had was any info on the non-working security system, so we have no way of knowing what precisely, it is supposed to do.
posted by pixiecrinkle at 8:23 AM on April 12, 2013

The faucets open and close European style--so they seem backwards.
We don't know why the switch in the upstairs bedroom doesn't work.
Keep the fencing on the little garden or else the bunnies will snack on it.
posted by luckynerd at 10:00 AM on April 12, 2013

I wish I'd told the buyers of my last house that all those dead sticks in the front yard were actually raspberry canes that would be so productive and delicious every summer. I walked by recently and it looks like they've removed them.
posted by The corpse in the library at 11:28 AM on April 12, 2013

I wish I had the instructions on how to reprogram the code on my garage door.

Delivery menus and other info about local shopping/amenities would have been awesome as well (especially ones that weren't as obvious - the Target 10 blocks away from me on the main road is pretty apparent. Anything off the two main roads that run through my part of town are still unknown to me, I'm probably missing loads).
posted by triggerfinger at 7:59 PM on April 13, 2013

Nthing instructions for every fixture and appliance you have installed. We have a fan in the living room that is controlled with a remote, and it took us over a year after moving in to discover how the dimmer worked. We kept wondering why the 60 watt bulbs weren't brighter. As a corollary, fresh batteries in everything (it's how we figured out the dimmer), and info on how to replace the ones in the smoke alarms.
posted by kyleg at 9:00 AM on April 14, 2013