Personal Property Left Behind by Seller in Wisconsin

[wi owner]

My wife and I purchased a home in June of 2008...part of the sales agreement was items the seller wanted to take along with their personal property, all items that were fine with my wife and I (washer and dryer, nice swing set, etc). The day we closed on the house we were told that the seller would like to leave the swing set in the yard for a couple of weeks because they didn't have a place to put it yet (I think they were building a home) and we obliged saying a couple of weeks would be fine. We went to the home after signing the paperwork to discover the washer and dryer were still there (kind of irritating because we were having a new washer and dryer delivered that afternoon!) and of course the swing set was still there, as we had discussed.

A few weeks later we spoke to the previous owners and they said that they would need a couple more weeks to move the swing set and we said they could leave there a couple more weeks. This was in the middle of July of 2008.

Middle of Sept., 2009 the owner finally calls to say he is ready to pick up the swing set! My question is can I charge him storage for not picking up the swing set earlier or tell him that the swing set is now our property for not having picked it up earlier. We had no way of contacting (they had moved out of the area and there was no land line listed for them) prior to his message saying he wanted to pick up the swing set. Any help would be greatly appreciated.

[christamcd]

You can ask for anything you want whether he has to legally pay it is a different issue.

If you wanted to charge him storage then you should have told him that upfront when he asked to leave it.