House Drama

Please read if you have the time!
I've got to write this post to vent, and I also want honest input.

We were able to close on our house Monday after a long wait (yay!) The situation was a short sale and a divorce situation. Everyone had already moved out but there was a lot of stuff still left in the house. After we got the house on Monday, we went over Monday night to start working. The first thing that had to be done was clearing the upstairs so John Paul kindly came over and helped Nathan cart stuff from the garage and almost every bedroom to the basement. They spend about 5 hours doing that and we cleaned up. We really didn't look through the stuff closely, but a lot of it was in good condition, there was some furniture that we could use, baby things, etc. Tons of clothes and other stuff that we just barely looked at and threw in trash bags and figured we could go through later and keep some, have a garage sale, and/or donate to a charity. In the meantime, it was all stacked neatly in the basement. I should mention that Claire (our real estate agent) had warned us to change the locks b/c of the situation. We were planning on doing this, but weren't able to on Monday.

So Tuesday we pull up to the house around 3:00 and see a Uhaul parked in front of it full of stuff. After looking closer, we discover that it is the stuff from the basement. We find out that the previous homeowner told this local charity that they could have the stuff and she came over and let them in the house. Now I was absolutely appalled. I am still mad when I think about it. Nathan was about ten times worse. They had almost loaded everything, including a lot of the furniture that we were going to use, and we told them we were sorry but that it was our stuff and it needed to go back in the house. We ended up letting them keep about 10 trash bags full of stuff. We donate to charities regularly but I like to get a tax deduction for it when we do. Also at this point we had no evidence that they were even from a charity. We also found out later that about $50 worth of our stuff had been taken as well. The whole time I am thinking to myself "what is the Christian thing to do here?" But still feeling very violated. We immediately pulled off all the doorknobs and took them to get the locks changed. In the meantime while I was gone, the previous homeowner showed up. Nathan talked to her and she claimed that she thought she had until Wednesday to get the stuff out, which I think was a lie. First of all - how do you not know when your house has gone from your possession? Secondly, everything had obviously been moved and cleaned. It was in nowhere near the condition it was left in.

Now we go to today. I had calmed down but I'm mad all over again. Nathan went to the charity which I won't mention at this point but may later and asked to get some things back that they had taken which actually belonged to his dad. They said that they didn't have them, the previous homeowner had those things. Then the lady who owns or runs the place starts into Nathan telling him how her guys spent all day working on this and it cost them money and he was greedy to take stuff back from a charity! Until that point we had been sympathetic to the charity knowing that it was an unfortunate situation, but not really our fault! Nathan listened to her rant then asked her how she would feel if she went home and saw two guys coming out of her house that she didn't allow in, loading stuff into a truck?! She didn't have much to say about that. She did say she was going to notify the papers about the whole thing. HA! I'm sure they'd get a twisted view of it too.

So I sincerely want to know what you think. What would you have done?