Buying A House: C or D?

I love old suburbs full of 100-year-old trees, including the ones in my yard. Some of them are dying; all of them need trimming. Every time the tree people come out, it is at least a thousand dollars. Current estimate is $1,500 for the things we should do immediately, and an additional $2,400 for the things we ought to do sooner rather than later.

("We need to call the tree people" sounds way cooler in fantasy novels than it does in homeowning btw.)

Many of our biggest trees are slightly straddling the property line, but my neighbor will not share costs. There is a part of me that wants to wait for something to die then gently nudge it into his den, but that would probably cause more problems than it solves.

Painting, gah, another "a thousand dollars every time you call a professional" thing. Personally I would rather DIY paint outside than inside, because we can't shut down life inside during the drying time. We have no extraneous rooms (four people in 1,000 sq ft), it smells awful for days, and a mischievous preschooler cannot be kept away from wet paint or painting tools.

When was the last time you used new interior paint? It doesn't really have much of an odor anymore.

Low/no-VOC interior paint solves the interior odor issue, but I've never been in a situation where I couldn't leave a room alone at least overnight.

Exterior would always go to pros for me - odds are their spray job will look better than brushed on paint and I don't have to get up and down a ladder a million times (or rent/borrow a rolling scaffold).

When I was working in construction, the number of people in an office who'd mysteriously fall ill when we painted a room on the other side of the office with modern latex paint was hilarious to me. No one is using oil-based paint on an interior anymore.

the previous owner PAINTED THE CEILING BLUE. and the walls.

Previous owners of my home mercifully left the ceiling white, but installed blue high pile carpet to match the sponge-painted walls.

http://i.imgur.com/n4fkCCc.jpg

whoa

they sponge-painted the baseboard heaters

wowee

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L9-PN1sftaI

I actually had a door to door painter guy come and tell me how shit my house looked and I was lame to nto hire him and I just closed teh door - I know it looks shitty but I am cultivating the haunted hsoeu look

https://www.coldwellbankerhomes.com/az/concho/669-county-road-8235-stanford/pid_18337473/

i mean

http://cdn.cbhomes.com/s3/mediasvc-prd/properties/0e649C29481740f-215144.jpg
http://1cdn.cbhomes.com/s3/mediasvc-prd/properties/D3ebC435fA2742e-215144.jpg
http://1cdn.cbhomes.com/s3/mediasvc-prd/properties/F1d6138844Bc4D8-215144.jpg

Contemporary eccentric full log sided custom home on 20+/- acres for the cat fancier! If you love cats this is the home for you! If not bring your sandblaster! Custom build, hardwood kitchen cabinets (Oak, Lacewood, and Bocote) artistically accented with river rock. Cat walkways and in great room Medieval cat castle with different levels (stone). All interior doors custom built (wood). Must see to believe it does exist!!! Once in a lifetime find extremely fun home!

what the

wow

The saddest thing here is that cats actually prefer mid-century modern.

:D

if they wanted to go viral they probably shoulda taken better pictures.

even so apparently...

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this seems fine.
http://1cdn.cbhomes.com/s3/mediasvc-prd/properties/Ea79B20EcA064Cc-215144.jpg%3Fpreset%3Dtrim

http://1cdn.cbhomes.com/s3/mediasvc-prd/properties/Ea79B20EcA064Cc-215144.jpg

that seems like the perfect setting for a horror film

getting deep dream vibes

chef michael symon's house is for sale: https://www.redfin.com/OH/Cleveland-Heights/2080-Kent-Rd-44106/home/66296322

now that's my shit

never mount a tv over the fireplace, though. worst home trend ever

That's where mine is, but it's a) a decommisioned/decorative-only fireplace now and b) there was literally no place else to put it because of where the windows are and a built-in bookcase.

our soon-to-be house has a perfectly-installed bracket above the fireplace that will be mercilessly removed. i can't stand watching stuff at an upward angle.

i wonder if michael symon watches himself cook on that kitchen tv while he cooks.
can't believe that house is less expensive than my 2 bedroom apartment in a not totally desirable neighborhood in brooklyn.

http://www.goodhousekeeping.com/home/renovation/news/a32031/home-improvement-fails/

That house is pretty rad, especially the kitchen. I'm honestly kind of surprised at how small the fridge is, compared to the giant monstrosities I expect to see in fancy kitchen remodels these days. But TV over the fireplace is terrible, always. Even moreso when new houses are built with something specifically for a TV in that space. I'm struggling to think about where to put the TV in our new house and refuse to put it over the fireplace even if that might be the most logical spot.

Finally sold our current house yesterday, two weeks later than we were supposed to, thanks to the lender being a dolt and screwing up a couple of things. So I technically do not own a home nor do I have a lease anywhere for the next two weeks when we close on the new place.

Congratulations and good luck!!

Our dumb American house finally closed yesterday, after two years! we hadn't paid the mortgage for a year, intending never to live in the USA again, so we didn't care about foreclosure, but the bank was happy to take a short sale since it wasn't gonna sell (or rent) any better as their property.

my advice is to avoid buying or for that matter living in the American midwest but ymmv

my advice is to avoid buying or for that matter living in the American midwest but ymmv

Too late. Though honestly there is a lot about moving back to the Midwest that kind of bums me out.

i miss boston a lot sometimes and i just spent last week in colorado thinking "why would anyone want to live anywhere else" but having a tiny mortgage on a 5 bdrm cool old house in a decent city is pretty dope, hard to get that anywhere outside the midwest

btw i love euler always referring to his house as a his "dumb midwestern house" itt

that phrase has loomed in my head since we closed and i worry that someday i might refer to my place as that

btw i am also not a fan of the TV over the fireplace. TVs in general are ugly and suck even if a necessity (for me), no good place to put one really

in a cabinet that can close imo

good point

fuck that, I have no shame in my television watching. that sucker gets a place of honor alongside the wall, with my most comfortable furniture facing right at it

yes agreed but it's nice to be able to cover up the great black void if one wants.

toilet notch resplendent

I have come to feel that location is 99% more important than the actual dwelling

there ought to be a saying or mantra that captures this feeling

About buying in the Midwest - just wait, it'll be coastal soon enough, right?

I won't cast TV judgement, except to say that every television in that Cleveland Heights house is poorly placed.

Two above the fireplace, where there looked to be plenty of room elsewhere.

And there even looked to be glare all over the kitchen one. That's a professionally taken photo, so imagine what that's like in real life.

I have come to feel that location is 99% more important than the actual dwelling
I have come to feel that location is 99% more important than the actual dwelling
I have come to feel that location is 99% more important than the actual dwelling

really the only thing I wanted in an American house was a pool but we chickened out of that bc the summer didn't seem long enough to make it worth it despite their midwestern hellmelt but if we hadn't maybe I'd have wanted to stay? well and maybe we'd need a landscaper bc I hate all things yard work esp mowing the lawn but then it's not that cheap anymore.

pools are really expensive to maintain! and yeah, they're amazing for a few months in the summer but in the midwest they're even more likely to get fucked up by the winters

yeah i've been looking at houses in upstate ny and every time i see a pool it just seems like so much work and expense for so little benefit. i don't really like swimming in pools either.
hot tubs on the other hand are a total bonus.

Pools: we specifically avoided houses with pools, and I was pissed a couple times when looking and a new listing would have a pool. I like the idea but you'd only use it a couple days a year and it feels like it would be a huge liability in terms of upkeep, having a toddler, insurance premiums, etc. One house on the market actually belonged to friends of friends, and our friends told us they were selling specifically to get a house without a pool.

Place: this one is kind of weird thing for me to think about. We're both academics (she's the "real" one, I'm the spousal accommodation) so we're sort of doomed to live in one of maybe 100 cities in the US and a good number of these are small, out of the way, not particularly interesting, etc. I've spent 11 years in an area with a metro size of about 85k people and the place I'm moving to has a metro area size of about 550k - so I'm excited about having more stuff around, if nothing else.

But if I was to get out of university life or had lottery money, I wouldn't even think of living in any of these places - I'd live in Portland or Seattle, possibly Denver or Minneapolis. So on the macro level "place" really isn't something I can think about too hard without totally changing both our careers in our early 40s.

On a micro level though, a lot of these places allow you to live a comfortable life in a nice house - the $225K place we bought would easily be $800,000+ in a lot of the neighborhoods I'd like to live in in Seattle. And it's 3/4 of a mile from my office, half a mile from downtown, a block from a park, less than a mile from where my kid will eventually go to school, etc.

Part of me really wishes I could live in a more desirable city, but it really isn't going to happen based on our fields as none of the schools that want my wife are in any of these places. But we also have have 3 months off every summer to travel which sort of makes up for it - we can go to my sister's place near Lake Michigan 3 hours away, visit my brother in law in Portland, our kid's birth mom in Seattle, etc., without having to blow our two weeks vacation on one trip per year.

So who knows.

Place is a balance for me (or would be if I had options) - I'm learning to weld, I'm painting a guitar, I'd do a fair amount more woodworking if I could, etc..

A garage or exterior shed/building is valuable to me, but if I had the opportunity to move to a Seattle or something I'd probably reevaluate my priorities. Much more likely those would have communal options, too.