Sam Schneiderman, broker owner of Great Boston Home Team (our Monday guy) writes about that important last step in the buying process.

Imagine returning to your new home after the closing and discovering that the house is in unacceptable condition. That is why virtually all Purchase and Sale agreements include a provision that allows the buyer to walk through the property before the closing. The timing of the walk through can be critical.

It’s not uncommon for buyers to do a final walk through and find that floors or walls that were previously covered are damaged or walls were banged up during the the move out. Aside from routine items like that and things that the seller agreed to repair, but did not, here are a few of the more memorable things that my buyer-clients and I have discovered prior to closing:

Movers still moving things out of the house. A boiler belching smoke. A gas leak. Broken or stuck windows. Water leaks. Mounds of trash left for the buyers to put out on trash day; most required a paid junk removal company to remove. Paint in need of proper disposal. Oil. Gas. Leaking water heaters. Old lawn mowers and snow blowers. Vinyl siding. Old workbenches. Leftover building materials and debris. Broken bikes. Asbestos pipe covering and/or tiles. Piles of leftover insulation in the attic. Spools of old wire. Lots of old wood and shingles under porches. Rusty old 50 gallon containers (presumably full). Bags of concrete mix that were solid due to exposure to water. Squirrels in the attic. Sellers that did not understand that they had to be completely out of the property when they closed. Holes in the ground where sellers had removed their favorite shrubs. Appliances that didn’t work. A family member that returned to live in the property after the walk through. A cat in a closet -- and my all time favorite, a live chicken in the basement.

As an attorney recently said to me at the end of a rather challenging day (we’d just had on a couple of transactions): you just can’t make this stuff up!