House stripping redux…

I got to thinking about the topic of home stripping and actually ended up thinking that there maybe some instances where it's OK for the owner to take a few things out of the house. For instance, let's say the owner replaced a rather plain looking, builder-grade chandelier with a very expensive one. If the owner lost the house to foreclosure, wouldn’t it be OK to take the new chandelier and put back the old one? In my mind that would be OK; so long as the owner doesn’t just leaving a dangling set of wires where the chandelier should be. There are any number of similar cases that could be put forth where an owner may have upgraded something in the house and wants that upgrade back. So long as they do not just leave empty holes where they take stuff out, that might be OK.

I’m hard-pressed to find where to draw the line – what belongs to the bank and what belongs to the homeowner. Maybe that is the real problem – where to draw the line and how to avoid stepping over it. Situational ethics is always a slippery slope. There are those who would argue that it is wrong to remove anything that has been attached to or added to the house. Others might argue that the bank mortgage covered the house “as is” at the time of the mortgage and does not include anything new that the owner brought in or added to the house. Of course, one would have a problem with removing the shingles of a new roof that the owner might have added, so some level of common sense needs to apply.

The thing that I cannot justify is the stripping out of items and the failure to replace them, so that the house stays whole as a livable abode. Taking all of the light fixtures and plumbing out and leaving it that way is unacceptable behavior and that is what I see a lot of times. Putting some things back to make the place whole would possibly involve quite a bit of expense and perhaps that is the best guide. If you take the new chandelier, but have the old one to put back, that might work; however, to strip out the new kitchen and then put back the old cabinets and top is both impractical and expensive, even if you saved everything from the update.

So, is it OK to strip the home of fixtures, plumbing and other items? Absolutely not! But, is it OK for a displaced homeowner to take out a few items that he may have upgraded and put back the original items? Maybe. If doing so isn’t prohibitively expensive and it makes sense to even try. What do you think?