See this is the house
I found this last night. This describes the house we’re thinking about to a T. Ask The Old-House Doctor We’re first-time buyers. Does sweat equity pay off?
Look for a middle-aged ugly duckling with good bones in a stable neighborhood with good schools.…
Once you narrow your search to a few neighborhoods, look for houses with peeling paint, ugly wallpaper, outdated light fixtures, dirty carpets and overgrown or non-existent landscaping. Search, too, for houses that offer a lot of space for the money, especially those with a floor plan that makes sense and those with a functional kitchen, even if it’s outdated.
More below the cut again.
We’ve looked at other houses in this neighborhood and some of them have had extensive work done — work we don’t really like. We looked at one that’s $15 thousand more and the location isn’t as good. (It backs right onto the school playground, which could be a plus if you have school-agers. Except that when I say “right on,” I mean you can jump down into the yard from the climber.) But it’s more because they remodled the kitchen with fancy oak cabinets and corian countertops. Except that we don’t like the style of cabinets or the color of the countertops. Why pay so much for work you don’t really like?
And let me add here how grateful I am that all of the upgrades we did were studiously neutral. We were tempted by green flooring but we held strong and put in a nice, boring laminate.
I’m updating this because our mortgage person just called and said that our pre-approval is without selling our house now. Brett said he already figured out how to continue paying this mortgage and pay the other one but it scares me.
Let me just put a shout out to Brett here, by the way.
My husband is smart smart smart with money. Even when we were making very little, he still managed to put aside savings for the inevitable disasters. He researches things to the nth degree so here he already ran the budget without selling this house before we even talked about going on the market.
The one thing he’s bad about is that he sometimes puts money into savings without budgeting appropriately for groceries and he has way too many accounts — when we move, he’s consolidating. If I get paid late, sometimes we end up having a tight week not because we’re broke but because Brett already squirreled the money away anticipating a check that hasn’t yet arrived.
Still, it’s terrifying. This is a nice little house. It’s been good to us. Are we being unreasonable to move? Are we being greedy? We were talking about this last night and yeah, sure, it’d be nice to have an extra toilet and a little more room so I’m not constantly banging into things trying to get around Madison’s high chair. But it has a nice backyard. It has the new kitchen with smooth runners under all of the drawers with their shiny shiny brushed silver drawer pulls.
But we really want Noah to have some friends down the way (and Madison too in the future). We know there are lots of kids in the neighborhood because we’ve seen them and also because the school district is excellent and so people with kids move there. Given that we’ve already decided that yes, we’ll move and yes, we’ll move now then it’s a matter of wrapping my head around the risk of two mortgages. That scares me.
Brett, who is also scared but practical, points out that except for the interest, we will get the equity back when the house sells. And that our house will show really well and is price below similar houses in the neighborhood (all of which have been on the market too long). Finally, he says, this other house is a screaming deal — there’s no way you can get into this neighborhood for what they’re asking unless another house in similar states opens up. So either we pay for upgrades we don’t really want or we get a house that needs work. If we wait, it may be that there won’t be a house available.
Ack. House hunting is such a gamble. And of course we could put in an offer today and they would already be in contract.
If you buy the other house, think how easy it will be to show your current one without clutter underfoot. You could move some stuff to the new house, or move there all together.
We owned this house and our old house for a month. We bought this house for some similar reasons -it was a great price because it needed new carpet (badly) and we knew if we waited it wouldn’t be here. So we made two mortgage payments. We were lucky our other house sold right away.
Since you don’t need to move right this second, you might want to look into an energy efficient mortgage. You can listen to an npr story about it here: http://www.glrc.org/story.php3?story_id=2502
It would allow you to replace the furnace & air conditioner and maybe the appliances and then roll the cost into your mortgage rather than paying cash upfront.
Of course, I heard this story when our furnace was broken, so I was kicking myself for not having figured out a way to replace our furnace before we moved in.
Crossing all crossables for you guys. The new ‘hood sounds really wonderful. The good news for you is, you’re selling during a really great time in the real estate market. And even if the market was down, I don’t listen to people who say you can’t sell because things are tough all over or you can’t do x career because it’s saturated blah blah. The right buyer will come; I believe that. Here’s to squirrelly Brett!
It all worked out for us Dawn and it will for you too, thanks to luck, optimism, friends, frugal husbands and planning, planning, planning. There’s a reason we’re a bit obsessive.
That was the same advice we received from our Realtor in San Francisco. With the crazy market here we were looking at places with holes in walls, old ripped linoleum, ugly dirty carpet and filthy walls. But if the bones were good, no termites, good roof we bid on it. It took awhile but we found a cute cozy place. We knew when we walked in it was the place for us.
Scary yes.
We did the same thing and carried two houses at once. It was tight! In the end it was worth it to us though.
Signing to buy the house I’m sitting in right now, made me feel physically sick. Not a good sign right? Like I said though, turned out better than all right.
The stress of not knowing what to do is so awful.
I empathize with a capital M.