Buying A House: C or D?

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.

Yeah I've been into woodworking, working on bikes and motorcycles, building guitar amps and pedals, playing drums and guitar at deafening volumes - all things that are easy to do when you have a garage or basement or workshop and no neighbors on the other side of the wall.

If I lived in Seattle/San Francisco/New York this would be harder to do outside of some communal space, but I imagine I'd spend more time seeing shows or events or going out to eat.

TVs in general are ugly and suck even if a necessity (for me), no good place to put one really

we do basement and that works really well

yeah. my ideal house would have a tv-less living room and a basement with tv, stereo and ping pong table.

ugh fuck. we are having our house painted this summer, it needs it badly, and we're working with a contractor to repair some rotting clapboard siding here and there as well as some rotting tongue-and-groove boards on the porch floor. the contractor took a look at the porch flooring and foundation and said that he won't be able to replace anything without the city requiring a new porch, it's that bad. he said that patchwork (and (and poorly done) repairs indicated pretty clearly that the previous owners knew about the problem. how the inspector missed this i don't really know.

that is a drag marcos. is there ever any recourse for an inspector missing something?

our inspector left a bad taste in my mouth cause he made some crack about plumbers earning so much money for just showing up, and i was thinking yeah but plumbers actually make stuff work, you're charging me $$$ to look around and tell me what you see.

the inspector noticed the rotting wood but thought overall that the porch foundation was fine. he said that down the road we'd need to do some repairs but it wasn't anything urgent.

imo get a 2nd and 3rd opinion if you dont want to pay for new footings now. your contractor probably wants the extra $$ when its just a porch

option of vinyl siding instead of paint?

Hello and welcome to the thread, Satan.

@marcos, call the inspector and tell him what this contractor is claiming. Also, do you have a home warranty? Sometimes mortgages include them automatically - ours did and we were able to claim a repair on our HVAC that was needed in the 1st year.

option of vinyl siding instead of paint?

― Dean of the University (Latham Green), Friday, June 23, 2017 11:43 AM (five hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Hello and welcome to the thread, Satan.

― Dan I., Friday, June 23, 2017 4:28 PM (twenty-four minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

loooooool

spencer that is good advice

thanks

we got some extra opinions on the front porch, one from the GC who finished our attic and one from the housing coordinator from our local community development org, both said sure there a couple patchwork repairs you can do on the porch and but certainly nothing urgent, so that's a relief (and is in line w/ what the inspector originally said). the earlier guy got me thinking our porch was gonna collapse by the end of the summer

we move in next week. i'm excited but also kind of terrified about this responsibility. owning a 110-year-old beast scares the shit out of me. i smoked too much weed last night while working on a couple things in the empty house and i started freaking about shit, like wondering if there is asbestos in the plaster walls, moisture penetration in one of the bedrooms.

the guy who did our attic did a pretty good job and accomplished it on time (we really wanted it done before we move in). he kind of skimped on the floors though. we kept the rough plank flooring already present in the attic, he and his guys sanded it a little and did one polyurethane coat and that's all. i didn't notice until after we settled up (things have been hectic and crazy as we try to wrap up everything for the move) but the floors are still pretty rough and splintery and could use another sanding and a few more coats of polyurethane. the guy, who was great to work with until now, basically said they've done all they can do and anything else would require significantly more time and money and that i was welcome to sand and put more coats of poly on myself. ok thanks dude?

i get what he's saying to an extent, they are very rough planks almost similar to barnwood, and the floors were not a big part of the quote but im kind of pissed they didn't quite finish the job. being new to all this too i have a lot to learn about specifying everything clearly w/ folks im hiring

You can also hold back like 5% of the total for a specified amt of time, like 3 months, after work is finished, to allow you time to notice things like that in the process of living in your place, which gives you a bit of leverage for fixing problems. One for next time maybe!

that's a pain in the ass, yeah

going to get some quotes on external stuff soon -- I know I've been posting that for probably years now, but I pulled the trigger on a cash-out refinance last week, as opposed to just dumping a bunch of my discretionary cash into improvements over the last five years on small projects, so I should have the $$ for bigger things. also lowered my interest rate and dumped a few years off my mortgage term, so I feel like I'm doing things proactively regardless of how much gets done immediately

marcos, your attic sounds a lot like my upstairs half-story. I redid the floor on 1/3 of it (there's a natural break where the chimney goes through, so I consider 2/3 of it one "room" and the other third my office "room") and it was a little uneven and I did some similar work. I think the roughness is fine, because that kind of wood doesn't lend well to being sanded smooth. if it's surface splinters, then it sucks because it might need some sanding. if it's the edges and there's a gap between the boards, you might be able to alleviate it by using some filler in the cracks and sanding that until it's level. then you don't have edges splintering into the gap.

fwiw I still fall into these nightmares about how my house is over a hundred years old, and something is going to go wrong, and omg my life is tied up in home ownership

but on the other hand, look at it this way: if no one's managed to fuck this thing up and have it fall over for a hundred years, it's really unlikely you'll be the one to do it!

You can also hold back like 5% of the total for a specified amt of time, like 3 months, after work is finished, to allow you time to notice things like that in the process of living in your place, which gives you a bit of leverage for fixing problems. One for next time maybe!

― illegal economic migration (Tracer Hand), Monday, July 24, 2017 2:53 PM (seven minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

yes this is a very good idea

i settled up w/ this guy after a brief walk-through and even though i noticed the roughness the next day he's not interested in hearing it

if it's surface splinters, then it sucks because it might need some sanding.

yea that is what it is

rude, that guy sucks imo

i'm excited but also kind of terrified about this responsibility. owning a 110-year-old beast scares the shit out of me.

Oh man I totally get this. We moved into our 80 year old place two weeks ago and I had serious, intense buyer's remorse for a couple days about how old the place is, how everything was going to break down and catch on fire and leak etc. It's gotten a lot better as we settle in and meet neighbors and establish routines.

Moving stress is intense and unrelenting - leaving a place we lived in for over a decade, packing 80% of our shit (movers did the rest), selling and getting rid of tons of stuff, a fucked up trip that had us on one flight, 7 and 9 hour drives, and sleeping in 6 different places in 3 time zones in 10 days.

us sleeping in six different places

welcome home, joygoat!

btw if anyone wants to come visit in a few weeks I'll be way flush with that refinance cash and all the contractors are overbooked anyway, so... beer money, man

(you can tear off some shingles while you're here

haha count me in

right now I am taking a break after prepping to put a polyurethane layer on the attic floors :/

i took a break from the weed tonight to avoid crushing paranoia about how I'm probably ruining the house

All the houses I could theoretically still afford with the market going nuts were built in the window when aluminum wiring was acceptable. I'd seriously have to consider budgeting for a complete rewire at that point, I don't trust aluminum at all.