What have you done to my lovely home!

You adored it. Now new owners have ripped out everything – and LIBBY PURVES feels your pain

DESPITE the kerfuffle of the big vote, this is traditionally the time of year when thoughts turn to moving house.

Summer is when sellers show off the roses round the door and let the green leaves mask the dodgier bits of the view. For buyers it’s the time to fall in love with a fireplace, or the way sunshine slants on a balcony and you experience that moment when a stranger’s house becomes somehow your own – even before you’ve offered, haggled and gone through the angst of mortgage agreements, surveys and disappointment when the shimmering dream dies.

Homes are channels for a lot of emotion; even if you are the kind of cool-hearted person who thinks they sell and buy for investment or social status, once you have lived somewhere for a while the memories seep into the brick.

You have seen children grow, felt marriages mature or wither, watched generations of pet cats find favourite windowsills. A house becomes as familiar as a pair of well-worn shoes. It may be the most expensive thing we ever buy, and a lot of it may still belong to the mortgage company — but emotionally it’s yours.

And then you sell it: with luck for a happy move to a new place you’ll learn to love as well. But here’s the hitch: unless you move a long way and have a heap of self-discipline, there will come a day when you notice what the new people have done to it. And goodness, it can be a jolt. Not always a painful one, but something you feel deep in your gut.

It is like that wonderful moment in Cold Comfort Farm when Flora Poste hears the awful Mr Mybug quoting her favourite poet Shelley and muses that it’s like ‘seeing a drunken stranger wrapped in one’s dressing gown’.

Even hearing about it can be enraging. When we moved to Suffolk, we sold our tiny cottage near Greenwich Park. It was our first proper house, the place where we had felt grand having a real dining room, with rooms whose walls we painted on long nest-building weekends.

Here we brought our newborn home. I arrived from the hospital and found that for a surprise, my husband Paul had rebuilt the basement kitchen with s mart new units.

WE PUT it on the market to move northeast a year later, fondly hoping for a buyer who would love the little house.

Along came a nice lady, a primary headmistress. She hummed and hawed at the price, saying she could only just afford it. We reduced our asking price, not because she was the only interested party, but because she felt like a good and deserving person for a friendly sale.

Weeks after the big move, we ran into a former neighbour, who told us that, as soon as she arrived, our buyer ripped out Paul’s kitchen units — installed only a year before — to put in flash new ones. Not so broke, then.

Even though it has probably changed hands twice since, I have not been able to walk past for fear I would chuck a vengeful brick through the window.

The flat before that was pretty cute, too: on the ground floor of a Victorian house, it was a minute one-bed cubbyhole, but we had done our best with it — its crowning glory was a sweet iron balcony, on which we tried to grow geraniums and pansies.

We moved on; I have no idea what the new people did inside, but one day I went past and not only were there no flower pots on the balcony, it was filthy. The inhabitants had tacked on a cheap screen with stick-on plastic daisies. Outrage!

Other moves? The first farmhouse in Suffolk looks much the same outside, and the first buyers, to our delight, had grandchildren and even kept the crazy rainbow mural in the playroom.

The second Suffolk house has been smartened up so the wall on the west side no longer bears the multiple marks of having tennis balls bashed against it. Our last house is so far off the road the buyers could have put up Palladian columns for all we can see from the end of the track. So no painful things to contemplate.

Friends, though, were not so lucky. One gets into a terrible state when she remembers that her old cottage windows with wonky bars that rattled in the wind on her wedding night have been replaced, with PVC windows with no bars. Another, who sourced authentic dyes to mix in old-fashioned whitewash, now drives past a blandly Duluxed pinkish frontage, which she says makes her characterful 18th-century end-of-terrace ‘look like a varnished Haribo’.

There can be an upside, though. My childhood home went to an elderly couple, and quietly decayed. Its most recent owners are younger. The first time I visited, it was not just the tactful renovation that delighted me. It was the sight of four young children racing around it again, as we once did. They brought it back to life. So sometimes, the wheel swings round again to happiness.

have you ever returned to your old home and been shocked at how it’s been changed by new owners? Tell us at inspire@dailymail.co.uk