Buying A House: C or D?

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.

yr spouse was correct

and you know this man

Yikes, the lifecycle of ilx. I posted in 2005 after we bought a house in Brooklyn (sad all the pic links are expired) and had fixed it up (fixing up is a dud). Sold that house at the end of 2014 and bought an apt in Queens (move in ready). Never ever renovating again unless I am super rich or live in the wilderness.

Grats on the house Marcos! Missed that somehow

update, now we saw one we both liked and i have cold feet

Without scrolling upthread for background on your unique situation, are you already set up with a lender and agent and stuff? That's like 90s percent of the buying-a-house process. Finding one you feel reasonably good about is sort of the easy part.

depends on the area and financial range but still very important

(I had a very helpful veteran realtor but really figured out which houses to check out, and was at or below my range so any lender would have said “ok sure” at the time so I had the right people but...)

Finding one you feel reasonably good about is sort of the easy part.

fuck, we found that incredibly hard, sucks that it's the easy part

but yes we have a veteran agent and i know who our lender will be.

I imagine that part's become harder in 2018. It was definitely beginning to become a seller's market in 2014 when I was shopping, and I know just from looking at listings now that it's much worse for buyers.

I will say this, though. Unless there are things you absolutely HATE about a house you'd otherwise be ok living in, you'll settle in and forget about minor dislikes. You shouldn't just throw up your arms and buy a piece of crap, but minor faults disappear with time.

I guess it just seems so hard to know what's minor. Like, in the house where we live now, the back door is in the kitchen, and it really is kind of annoying that people come in and out of the house through the kitchen, which isn't big, while I'm cooking in there, and are just kind of .... standing there while they take off their shoes and etc. I can't say it's a major thing but I also can't say it's something that stopped annoying me

man, here's me moving into my current rental, good times

Just to give a countervailing opinion, we just moved into a rental house and are delighted. We're paying rent and not building equity, but on the other hand we're not paying property taxes. And what we get for our money is that when anything needs fixing in the house it is SOMEBODY ELSE'S PROBLEM. (It helps that our landlord actually gets things done effectively and promptly and is very into keeping up the house, landscaping, etc.)

And that feeling of "getting home from work and closing the door of your own house?" It turns out you have it even if you don't own the house!

― Guayaquil (eephus!), Monday, August 2, 2010 3:29 PM (seven years ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

and here's my infallible crystal ball on US house prices from 2010 (*cries*)

I believe they'll keep going down, down, down but the truth is no one knows. Cognitive bias validates decisions you've already made, so people who've bought think prices will now go up, while people who haven't (like me) think the trough is still to come.

― Guayaquil (eephus!), Tuesday, August 3, 2010 10:05 AM (seven years ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

man, I describe a lot of houses in 2016 and 2017 that I was super-stressed about whether to buy and now I don't even remember what houses I was talking about

But look what it will probably come down to is that we will buy this place because my wife likes it and she doesn't like anything and that seems kinda fine to me since in my heart I don't think our happiness or anything about our life meaningfully depends on what building we live in

That's a good outlook. Fortunately I'm a bachelor, so the only person I had to agree with is me.

since my first post in this thread things have shifted from "I could totally afford a mortgage but it would be difficult to get one the way things are right now" to "lol with this market I'm never going to be able to buy a house, of well."

Just realized today that it's been eleven years since we bought this house, which I sincerely hope to die in. At the time it was a financial stretch - top of our price range - and I wasn't sure I "deserved" it, whatever that means.

Maybe 14% of the time it is a pain in the ass. It's old and tiny by modern standards; some rooms are just cruelly small; the vibrant location means constant traffic; everything's falling apart and there's always another urgent repair just on the horizon. In that sense, I guess I do deserve it. I deserve the fact that the children have smeared unidentifiable types of goo over every surface.

But the other 86% of the time, it's coffee on the porch watching the birdfeeders, sunlight through the trees, a warm hearth in the evening, bookshelves that are there to stay.

But seriously, kids, what the fuck? There is no reason a crayon needs to even be near the electric heater.

Grats on the house Marcos! Missed that somehow

― IF (Terrorist) Yes, Explain (man alive), Sunday, January 21, 2018 9:53 AM (yesterday) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

thanks man!

I will say this, though. Unless there are things you absolutely HATE about a house you'd otherwise be ok living in, you'll settle in and forget about minor dislikes. You shouldn't just throw up your arms and buy a piece of crap, but minor faults disappear with time.

― Johnny Fever, Monday, January 22, 2018 12:42 AM (ten hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

this is otm

we saw a lot of houses. we did pick the one that we liked the best, and apart from some buyers' regret when we first moved in, we're really happy with it. but i realize now that most of the 20- or 30-something houses we saw would've been just fine, and that many details that led me to feel positively or negatively about a house are things that can be easily changed. we bought the house we liked the most and we still spent a lot of time and money making it our own, and we would've done that with any house

I was talking to a friend-of-a-friend at a birthday party last year about the house they were building, and their frustrations about the builders not respecting the changes from the default plan that they'd written into the contract, and came to a realization:
If you build a house you have the stress of making sure things are built how you want and making choices up front, but if you buy a house that has existed for decades, you can always dream about how things could be and complain about decisions others made but the burden of choice is forever lifted from you, because every problem was someone else's decision.

in my heart I don't think our happiness or anything about our life meaningfully depends on what building we live in

yea good outlook. i spent a year looking at houses thinking it was going to finally bring me happiness and relief when i got the perfect one and obviously that did not happen when we finally moved in.

that said i am really loving our house right now. i got my art studio set up in the attic in the fall and have been up there a few nights a week working on stuff, it is so nice to have all that extra space and be able to personalize it. we put fucking golden yellow paint on the walls with a purple accent wall up there. it looks rad. i couldn't do that in a rental.

minor faults disappear with time

This is so true, there were things in all three houses I've bought that seemed like huge problems in need of immediate attention that we adapted around within a couple of weeks and never bothered to fix or change.

do you guys think having only one shower for two adults and two kids approaching adolescence is a minor problem we'll forget about or something we should strive to fix

it depends on routines and whether you'll be lining up in the morning, imo

I grew up in a house with that setup and my parents added a second bathroom in the basement with a shower around that time, but it was mostly due to three people wanting to shower in the same timeframe

seems fine xp. we only have one shower. but two bathrooms. two bathrooms seemed essential

(our kids are little tho)

only one shower for two adults and two kids approaching adolescence

terrifying imho

Agreed, and I'm only imagining it.

In between. You can learn to live with almost anything. Modern expectations are historically aberrant, especially modern USian expectations. But you still may feel it's an unnecessary compromise.

The house I grew up in had one bathtub (no shower) for 5-7 people. That seemed crowded-but-manageable to us in 1976. It would have been normal in 1900, when the house was built, and luxurious in 1850.

That said, we don't live in 1850 so make the decision that feels right for your family.

Oh hey, I bought a house in November! It was a full year earlier and 25% more expensive than I'd originally planned, but I don't regret going for it one bit.

Of course, I haven't yet paid for the new roof that it needs soon, or the top-to-bottom rewiring that it really should have (it's still rocking 100-year-old knob-and-tube in some places), or the radon mitigation system that it needs, or etc etc etc....

we have a bidet, which is one more bidet than we'd like

A big part of it was the realization that if house prices around here (Minneapolis area) keep going up at the rate that they have been, the houses we'd have been interested could soon be forever out of our price range. Backing off from the ultra-responsible "not one cent less than 20% down" line was hard for me

xpost!

pmi brethren

I want a house, a particular house, in a particular area, really bad. So I guess I'm on the road to saving $20,000 somehow and hoping that no one else wants to buy it a year from now? It's already been on the market like 450 days.

As soon as I sign the papers I'll issue an ILXOR wimmens bat signal for anyone who wants to join the collective.

we're looking to buy a new house. sadly despite it being a supposed seller's market we are sellers and buyers so that doesn't help us much. we saw this one house that was practically perfect except the kitchen was too small. :/ still looking!

you guys want to see a sweet-ass duplex for a cool 1.6 mil? anyone want to go in on it?

https://www.redfin.com/CA/Los-Angeles/4349-Prospect-Ave-90027/home/7135597

I saw Los Angeles even before clicking the link, so braced for lols

we've a giant mirror in our small kitchen that offers one the illusion of a big kitchen. but hard to keep it up when the roomba finds a resonance between a cabinet and your ankle.