David Viggiano and his partner bought a bungalow on the Far North Side of Chicago a decade ago, and gradually made it their own.
They added a bedroom and a bathroom, finished the basement and tamed the urban jungle outside, brightening the exterior with a rose bush, a mass of lilies and Russian sage.
Even after the couple split up in 2019, with Mr. Viggiano’s partner buying out his interest in the property, Mr. Viggiano was a frequent visitor since they remained friends and shared care of their dogs.
“You know,” he said, “there was just something about that house.”
Then, in 2023, that house was sold.
A while after the new owner moved in, Mr. Viggiano, 61, a media relations director, went by to say his private farewell to the house, a stop that included a visit to his former neighbor’s home. What he saw when he looked into his old backyard was upsetting. It was overgrown, and all the plants were dead. “I don’t know how the owner was keeping things inside,” he said. “But outside was bad.”
As a home closing approaches, some sellers may get a sentimental tug or two about the place they’re leaving but, really, just a small tug. When they move out, they move on and don’t look back. But plenty of others, while happy to have found a buyer, and eager for their next chapter, still feel an attachment to their former residence.
They walk or drive by regularly to see if there have been changes — a room added, a driveway relocated, a pool covered over — and to monitor how diligently the new owner is watering the lawn. Never mind that it isn’t their business. Never mind that, ahem, it isn’t their house anymore. It is the real estate version of Googling your ex.
“Our houses are extension of who we are. It’s human nature to want to check on them even after they no longer belong to us,” said Kathy Braddock, the co-owner of the real estate consulting firm Braddock and Purcell.
It’s also human nature to have territorial feelings about a property even after — long after — you’ve relinquished the deed, she said: “You bought it presumably because you loved it and you put time and money into it.”
“If you find that the new owner has lopped off the front porch or moved the kitchen, it’s very personal,” she added. “You thought that certain things about the house were wonderful, and you feel insulted that the new owner doesn’t feel the same way.”
Dana Kraus was more sad than insulted about what happened to her 1920s farmhouse in Sharon, Conn. When she and her husband, Robert Kraus, bought it in the ’90s as a place to raise their two children, the house “needed everything,” said Ms. Kraus, the chief executive of an estate jewelry business.
It was meticulously restored down to the hardware. The 10-acre property, which included a barn, a copper beech tree, an apple orchard and pear trees, was given similar unstinting attention.
When the couple divorced almost 20 years ago, they sold the house. And unfortunately for them, they sold it to people who didn’t seem to think much of what had been left for them. The screened-in porch — “we loved sitting out there,” Ms. Kraus said — became a sun room. The “wavy glass,” also known as restoration glass, which the Krauses had taken great pains to find and install, was replaced by modern windows. Ms. Kraus said she was informed of such changes by local tradespeople who had previously worked for her.
Other changes, like the apple trees being in a state of neglect, she could view for herself when she drove by. “You have to prune them to keep them healthy,” she said. And she could also see, to her horror, the addition of a gate and a stone wall.
“It looked more like Greenwich, Conn., than rural Litchfield County,” said Ms. Kraus, who still lives in Sharon. “It looked like a gated community. I’m just grateful that they didn’t subdivide it.”
Nancy Pelz-Paget feels her pain. When she and her husband, Dennis Paget, sold their weekend home in southwestern Connecticut a few years ago, after more than three decades in residence, “the new owner seemed admiring of the garden,” said Ms. Pelz-Paget, a retired education policy program director.
Accordingly, she arranged to meet the buyer at the house before the closing to walk around the many beautifully kept flower beds and to explain what each plant liked and needed.
“But instead, we ended up reviewing the workings of the appliances,” Ms. Pelz-Paget said. “So it occurred to me that she already knew about gardening and didn’t need me to tell her. Or maybe she didn’t care as much about gardening as I did.”
One of the first times she drove by her former home, Ms. Pelz-Paget, who had moved with her husband to a retirement community nine miles away, noticed that the old apple tree was missing from the front yard. So too were the clematis that had long wound around the front gate.
“I was disappointed,” she said. “The flowers were like my babies.”
The second or third time she passed by — it was right on her way to the dentist — Ms. Pelz-Paget saw that the decrepit stable next to the garage had been razed. “It was funky. I loved it,” she said. “I was — disappointed. But my husband keeps telling me, ‘Nancy, it’s not your house anymore.’”
“I guess I thought whoever was buying our house was buying it because they liked the way it was, but people are entitled to do their own thing,” Ms. Pelz-Paget continued.
For his part, Mr. Viggiano has continued his drive-by peeks at his old house, sometimes once a week, though he barely has to go a block out of his way to do so.
At first, he said, he tried hard to make excuses for the new owner: Perhaps she was busy and just slow to get around to things. (Though as he recently learned from his neighbor, she had sufficient time to take down the crown molding.) Then, during one of his more recent trips to the old neighborhood, the grass in the front yard looked to be a foot tall. “I was like, ‘seriously?’,” Mr. Viggiano said.
Further, he and his former partner had erected a long fence near the alley, “and now it’s falling apart and there are massive weeds around it,” he said. “We were really hoping that someone would love the house and take care of it as much as we did,” he added.
Mr. Viggiano fantasizes about getting out of the car one day, going up his old front walk, banging on the door and dressing down the owner. “But what would I tell her? ‘You should be ashamed of yourself’?”
To spare them some aggravation, Ms. Pelz-Paget urges her home-selling friends to keep away from their old property so they can remember it just as it was.
Clearly, she has troubling following her own advice. “I can’t help myself,” Ms. Pelz-Paget said. “I go by whenever I can.”
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