Buying A House: C or D?

also pro tip, paint the walls of your bathrooms bright colors. so nice.

nice

at least you didn't have the anxiety of drilling into tile!

we hung a bunch of towel racks and door hooks yesterday, we have some nice old solid wood doors that made it super easy.

Starting to save this month so we can hand over a 50k deposit in ten years to own a one bed apartment forty years after that.

Ill put the money away for a quiet life but I'll eat it in coin format before I become part of this

you can always sell it when the time is right for a quiet life. well not always. maybe have a 10 year window that is right for the quiet life just in case.

I've a good pension. The investment side of it disgusts me regardless. It's a utility.

I sometimes whimsically think of equity in terms of what vertical percentage of the house the bank owns, vs. what we own. When we bought the house, I think we owned up to about waist height in the basement. Now I think we own the ground floor - but just the floor, and maybe the baseboards by now.

Yeah I don't mean to piss on anybody's woodchips itt, sorry.

It's crazy here again and all my friends have just sunk themselves in it and I'm p horrified by the whole thing rly.

But then I don't and won't have kids and we're OK to up and move at a moment's notice so I have the luxury to be horrified and not participate.

I sometimes whimsically think of equity in terms of what vertical percentage of the house the bank owns, vs. what we own. When we bought the house, I think we owned up to about waist height in the basement. Now I think we own the ground floor - but just the floor, and maybe the baseboards by now.

Well, the good news is that we own up to the top of the living room light switch.

The bad news is that it's a two-story house.

I never think in terms of what % I or the bank own but sometimes I think "I own that tree" because it seems weird that just comes as part of the deal.

we own the right to stop neighbours opposite building on a very small piece of their garden, which I sometimes smile about

also this happens so so rarely but the previous owners of our house actually cared about putting decent things in it like lots of sockets and internet ports in sensible places, and also a skylight that you open with a button and it closes itself when it rains!

whoa

that is an a amazing feature

Yeah the sockets and ports thing - I was setting up stereo equipment in the new place and found wires coming out of the floor and it turns out someone had run speaker wire between two rooms, exactly where I'd want to have two sets of speakers set up. Every place I encountered an obstacle, like needing a hole to run cable, or a power source, I was pleased to find someone had already drilled a hole there and made sure there was an outlet inside of a builtin cabinet. It was great.

Of course there are tons of dumb things as well, the "how could you live with this for so long?" stuff like a switch on the left controlling a light on the right and vice versa.

When the guy before us built the house in 1999, he had landline connections installed in every room. Even the kitchen! The bedroom has a line on either side of where a king-sized mattress belongs.

So of course, 17 years later, we stream everything on cordless devices.

Despite admiring the sockets we did end up moving a big bank of them to the opposite side of the room...

hey, look what went on the market around the corner
https://www.fsbohomes.com/homes/des-moines/ia/details/113732/1002-40th-street/

yea that is a nice house. $315k for a new build of that apparent quality seems like a good deal imo

reminds me of this new build near my house that went on the market this summer, also done in a craftsman style with some built-ins, woodwork, etc: https://www.zillow.com/homedetails/1427-Scenic-St-Cleveland-OH-44107/33489147_zpid/

another one by the same builder is going to be built a few houses down from me. if you going to do a new house i think it's cool that they have it blend in with the other housing stock

there are no pictures of the basement in the one I linked, so I'm assuming that's where they lock up their children

hickory floors must be really 'in' right now

they are cool!

i see this where i am. i don't hate the olds but there are a lot of them where i am because everyone quit smoking and can't afford to move to florida and health care here is pretty decent. they aren't going anywhere. but they are kinda done? lots of single/widowed older people living in big old houses. and i do want younger people to move in and make an investment in the town and have energy and ideas and run for office and keep the town breathing, you know? the older people just want everything to stay the same. but other than a job with Big Candle (Yankee & Kringle) or the Opioid Task Force there isn't a whole lot to keep younger people here. You need fresh blood to keep a town going.

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-08-08/baby-boomers-who-won-t-sell-are-dominating-the-housing-market

I think that some people my parents' age (mid 60s) are starting to get it, in that I've heard them discussing how they don't want to be stuck in their homes doing maintenance and hoarding as they get older and aren't able to do as much as they can now. Both my parents have had fathers living alone in homes that were falling apart with the classic "I'll die in this house" mentality. But they didn't, and their health suffered and their homes fell into disrepair and they ended up going straight from messed up house to care facility.

The couple who lived in my parents' current home prior to them downsized to a townhome for a decade or so and are now in a senior community, so *some* people get it

the six houses immediately surrounding mine are all owned by people ages 60+ who have been in the neighborhood for 30-40 years

there are people on nextdoor like that, and they keep wondering why all these immigrants and crime are in their neighborhood when it used to be so nice

it's because your neighborhood has fallen into disrepair and the lack of new people moving in/out has caused it to be less interesting to young people, driving property values down

i would be ALL about a nice senior condo setting when i'm 70 with a pool and someone else to cut the lawn if i could afford it. there is not a lot like that around here though.

people have to work forever now too. they can't afford to move in a lot of cases. 2nd and 3rd mortgages, etc. there need to be better options for the oldies. also now that they live into their 80s and 90s more frequently.

tbh after some stupid political article about Levittown I poked around a little bit to see what that area is like now

all these homes built to a handful of plans, at the same time, taking up massive tracts of real estate. none of them really conforming to what anyone wants in a house in the 2010s (although the majority have been modified), all with aging populations. it's a weird thing

where's the thread for complaining whenever a new home repair needs to be done? i swear these fucking things are never ending. two leaks in two separate parts of the house in a week. one requires that the plumber basically remove the kitchen ceiling to repair.

i've just been using this one.

ahh that sucks btw

it's like obviously not the end of the world and it can be fixed without much upset and the cost isn't going to bankrupt me so thank god for all of that but it's just crazy i never really appreciated until i owned a house that the repairs would basically be never ending. you're in a constant war with nature and entropy to keep things running correctly. there's never a moment where /nothing/ needs to be done.

i swear these fucking things are never ending. two leaks in two separate parts of the house in a week

Is that you, Mooch?

xp so true, even if nothing is broken, just living there and having a building that has weather going around it and people tromping through means things will age and deform and break and you have to maintain

yea even though our mortgage is lower than almost anything we've had to pay in rent over the past 10 years, we have already spent such huge amounts of money on this place that i can't believe i once thought that owning would be cheaper than renting

if you buy a brand new home and everything works exactly as it should and you do minimal landscaping and then move as soon as something breaks, you might get out cheap

of course people that do this every time are jerks imo

My apartment has now appreciated 40-45% in the four years I've lived in it (assuming the redfin estimate is high and knocking a good amount off what they say, which would put it at over 50% appreciation). I'm really tempted to just sell and bank all the equity and rent. Feel like the market can't go on like this.

if you're cool w/moving that's probably a good choice IMO. we can't sell now for a few reasons, but I kinda wish we could.

I mean I'm not 100% cool with it. OOH we would kind of like a house anyway. OTOH renting a house will up our monthly cost, notwithstanding the profit on our apartment. Also, we'd probably no longer be in the immediate vicinity of the school my daughter is going to attend in the fall, and although she'd still be able to attend, she wouldn't be walkable/bikeable/busable there, and she wouldn't be walking distance to friends from the school. OTOOH, the area in which we could probably get a house would improve my wife's commute. So lots of factors.

time to build a cottage in backwoods Michigan

Bad idea, here be militia.

somehow in the time between my last mortgage transaction and today, some false mh (maybe a couple) has done bad things and I must have a friend sign an affidavit affirming they are not me for my new mortgage!

one of the pitfalls of having a common name. I kind of want to know what the one dude did to get a trailer park mad at him, though

my house exterior is painted! it looks fabulous, i am so happy with it. you cannot imagine, however, the anxiety i have felt the past few weeks while the painters worked, thinking i had made a horrible mistake by picking the wrong colors. a house in the middle of painting looks very bad and the new colors clash with primer paint, taped up windows, and various layers of old scraped paint and bare wood. i kept thinking "what the fuck have i done....what made me think i had the expertise to pick out the colors myself???" but now it is done and the magic i was hoping would happen with the three color scheme i chose finally came out.

that's awesome! what colors did u pick? i grew up in a pink + green victorian (painted lady style) and always thought it looked cool + distinct. my house is like beige.

kind of a sage green for the body, dark green for the trim and porch floor, a deep reddish brown for the porch ceiling and some decorative rafter tails (or brackets?) in the front

sherwin williams has an historical colors selection, i chose from there.

very nice

ooh nice!!

ugh, just saw another one which ticks all the boxes but spouse was just not that into it, the longer this process goes on the more incompetent i feel for not having bought a house and the less i feel like buying a house. it's not even like i was all that into it either.