We complete tomorrow - Garden is a quagmire

DiscoCat9

Good morning all

We are completing on our sale tomorrow and I'm worried about the state of our garden. The beautifully manicured lawn that our buyers saw in September had been replaced by a mud bath due to the heavy rain over the late autum/winter.

It has been totally churned up by our dogs (we tried to stop them running but to no avail) and it is very wet and muddy. I considered turf but the conditions aren't suitable yet and grass seed seemed to be just a drop in the ocean.

Can I be sued? Would a token gesture of grass seed be seen as more insulting than helpful?

Any advice would be appreciated.

DigForVictory

Things change, especially in gardens.
Let it roll & give the new owners a chance to make it their garden.

Sit tight, exchange & see if the yelling starts at all.

Best of luck with your new place!

DiscoCat9

Thank you very much DigForVictory

p00hsticks

when did you exchange ?
Or are you exchanging and completing at the same time ?

My understanding is that legally the property should be in the same position at completion that it was at exchange (i.e. if boiler was functioning at exchange, it should be at completion etc) although obviously the state of a garden will vary by season.

So if you are yet to exchange, then I wouldn't worry about it.

DiscoCat9

Hi. We exchanged 10 days ago when the garden was in the same state. The same thing happens every year, we live at the bottom of a hill so the garden gets very wet. By April the lawn will be lovely again.

GDB2222

I'd blame it all on the rain, rather than admitting liability. If you feel bad about it, you can offer to come back and help get things sorted out in the spring. A bag of grass seed is a bit of an insult, quite frankly.

monkeyman1974

Leave a bottle of wine, and a good luck card - gestures are important to people

GDB2222

DiscoCat9 wrote: »

Hi. We exchanged 10 days ago when the garden was in the same state. The same thing happens every year, we live at the bottom of a hill so the garden gets very wet. By April the lawn will be lovely again.

You can't be sued, successfully. The only issue is how you feel about it.

DiscoCat9

I feel horrible about it and would like to make it right. Bottle of wine and card are already waiting for them, I just feel bad about the garden. We are moving 450 miles away so coming back to help sadly won't be an option.

moneyistooshorttomention

It was something that was going to happen when selling the house at this time of year - ie the buyer would realise that none of the previous owners of the house had sorted out the drainage situation. Followed by buyer groaning loudly that no-one had said about that (including their own surveyor). Yep - that happened to me on my current house - ie finding that, though there had been several previous owners, none of them had sorted out the drainage situation properly:(. Cue for me having spent a noticeable amount of money on doing that overdue work and I'll be spending some more to finally get it completely sorted out - a total of a 4-figure amount...

It might soften their feelings about realising they've got an extra task/expense to do (ie sort out that drainage situation) if they're left a nice card and bottle of champagne.

DiscoCat9

It's a good point about the drainage, there were originally two lawned areas, one of which flooded badly literally every time it rained. We had a French drain system installed under that part of the garden and gravelled it but left the lawn as it was