Buying A House: C or D?

When you buy a house it will always need a new roof, boiler, water heater. It's just the rule.

I have a gut feeling it will need to be rewired as well. Fingers crossed no plumbing issues. It’s block construction so at least no termites or mold.

General observation for anyone on the fence. I've made some bad decisions in my life; the two houses I bought--in 2003, and again last year--were easily the best.

General observation for anyone on the fence. I've made some bad decisions in my life; the two houses I sold--in 2012, and again five years ago--were easily the best.

You’d be amazed at how many of those “I need to fix this right after we move in” things you end up just living with for years because they don’t seem like that big a deal after a while.

(xpost) I think selling and buying are inextricably bound. Buying the one house in 2003 was a great decision; selling it when I did in 2019 made the 2003 decision retroactively even greater.

Put in an offer today, supposed to hear back tomorrow. I did a walkthrough with a contractor (who happened to know the late former owner and had worked on the house and is also well versed in the local market). He said it didn't need anywhere near as much work as I initially thought and that we could do pretty minimal stuff, move in, and then decide what else we want to do over time, what we can live with and not, etc. He said it was a "good house," that the price we wanted to offer was reasonable, and it turned out the former owner was the town building inspector, which made me think it was less likely to have horrible hidden problems. I got a lot more comfortable with the situation and upped my price from lowball to normal offer. The house has some fugly aspects inside for sure, but a lot of potential, and it's a town we love with great schools that has a very tight real estate market. So wish me luck. I'm supposed to hear back tomorrow.

good luck dude. it's quite an emotional rollercoaster.

the location is important, but also so is your inherent love for the house

Good luck.

You’d be amazed at how many of those “I need to fix this right after we move in” things you end up just living with for years because they don’t seem like that big a deal after a while.

True. There was a wiring issue with my first house that initially made me think I'd have to spend a lot right away to get it fixed. I instead did nothing and never had a problem--all I had to do with some of the outlets was be extra mindful of shutting something off first before removing the plug (which you're supposed to do anyway).

conversely, you will discover things that desperately need work years after you move in that no one told you about. like this year i suddenly realized my house was missing a gutter on the back of the attached garage and it was wrecking the foundation.

I ended up buying a modest but beautiful historic home in an amazing neighborhood, a house that was architecurally significant but which which was a complete and utter wreck, that needed years worth of work. My father when he saw it described it as a toolshed

I put a ton of work into it and am happy with the results, and am grateful to be able to shelter place here, but those years reconstructing it were pretty grueling and I feel in retrospect like I lost those years.

so not sure what the calculus is for anyone else

you'll laugh at this given the amount of work you did, but when we got our house i had about a week where i would work normal office hours, drive to the new house and paint interiors until like 10 or so, come home, drink a beer, sleep and repeat. it was not a sustainable routine for me.

innocent question: do you not think that property values in the NY area are likely to go down post-Pandemic?

i don't think normal apts will go down that drastically (in nyc).

I absolutely expect my apartment value to go down post-pandemic. I also think it rose an exaggerated and unsustainable amount since I bought it. I think I will still be able to sell it for a modest profit on what I bought it in 2013.

xpost we had to live in our house while doing construction mostly ourselves, living with constant dust from sanding, drywall, floors for a year. It seems like I posted now expired pics from it above, 14 yrs ago. I remember sleeping on mattresses with plastic still on them and spending xmas sanding the walls where we took off molding because my mom was coming to visit and i was trying to make it look somewhat presentable. I don't ever want to buy a fixer upper ever again, esp in ny. Once was enough.

nyc places always seem unsustainable price wise. I don't know, I am supposed to sell my place that I bought in 2014, like right now. It looks like it will be more near the end of summer now. I don't really think there will be a post-pandemic anytime soon and I don't really want to wait. It may stay on the market longer but I am figuring it may go for like 5-8% less than it would've last year. shrug emoji.

good luck on the offer!

not in nyc but when this first started i thought property values would tank and now i'm much less sure about that. for people that can afford it this situation seems to underscore the value of having your own place.

it might loosen up a bit too if airbnb places are sold off in the same timespan. But i stopped following how much that still affects ny as opposed to some other areas.

My bigger concern than prices is time -- my apt is in a coop, and (1) it could take a while for them to even start allowing showings again and (2) coops just take longer to sell (20% down required, approval process, etc.). It's in a great school district but school is up in the air so that's a weird factor. Hence we were willing to buy something that needed some work, because it meant it was plausible to buy without selling.

yeah, my current place is a coop. I hate coops.

oh, and some work won't be bad! our 1st place in blyn was in pretty bad shape when we got it. basically everything was changed/fixed.

What I learned today that gave me some peace is that the roof has at least a few years left, the gas boiler doesn't need replacing, and the wiring is good and not that old, and nothing else dramatic jumped out at the contractor except for some floor rot in a half bath that will be the seller's responsibility.

What we need/want to do in the short term: replace the electrical box, replace the water heater, paint the exterior, landscaping to make the backyard usable, some interior paint, maybe random cosmetic odds and ends, rip out or paint the weird wood walls in one room, maybe put in a door on that room (there's a doorway), add a small patio

What we'd like to do longer term: install HVAC or ductless AC (right now it has steam radiators which I'm ok with, but wall and window AC which I'd prefer not), add another full bathroom, re-do the fugly existing full and half bathroom (institutional pink and blue like a doctor's office bathroom), move the laundry to the basement (hookup is already there), replace the interior doors, finish the basement, maybe extend the upper level over the garage to create larger bedrooms, maybe break the wall between the house and half of the garage to create a larger art studio space, or else move the art studio into half the garage and convert the other room into a guest room/office.

The plan is to do the immediate stuff with current funds and then do the longer term stuff based in part on how much money we get for our apt.

Work is almost always cheaper than the markup on the work when you buy a fresh flip. The most important things to have right on move-in are the floors, ducts, and plumbing.

I’ll never understand people who pay asking price because of shit like backsplashes and appliances.

it is such a waste when people choose terrible kitchen and bathroom fixtures soley for resale purposes.

Yeah that was very much part of my thinking in targeting this house, getting to choose non shitty stuff

install HVAC or ductless AC (right now it has steam radiators which I'm ok with, but wall and window AC which I'd prefer not)

If you are going to add traditional HVAC ductwork, I would highly recommend (if you can swing it) also converting from the steam radiators to a hot water heat system. You do this by converting the gas-fired steam boiler to gas-fired water boiler and then adding a hot water coil to your HVAC system, so that your heat comes out of the HVAC ducts. We did this and it has some great benefits: (1) you get to eliminate all the bulky steam radiators, which surprisingly gives you more room; and (2) hot water heat is much more efficient (and thus cheaper) than steam because you are only heating the boiler to 160-190 rather than 220. The only real disadvantage other than initial cost is that the forced hot air is drier than steam radiator heat.

Oh shit, that is actually a brilliant idea. The house is not big and the radiators cause a lot of layout problems.

steam radiators are so terrible. i have never lived anywhere where they were mostly quiet. we just completely stopped leaving them on at night because you wouldn't be able to sleep otherwise. and now i am so used to sleeping in the cold. ugh, get them out if you can.

Oh my god I love love love radiators, u guys are crazy

Mine make 0 noise tbf

Our steam radiators mostly just stopped working, so we had like 2 or 3 radiators heating an old 1100sf house (with no insulation, lol). Our gas bills would swing from less than $50/mo over the summer to like $1500/mo in the dead of winter. I should have just shoveled $1 bills into the boiler.

maybe we just couldn't find the right people, but no one ever seemed to know how to service/fix our steam radiators.

after a night with steam radiators, as a friend memorably put it once, you're pulling statues out of your nose

You Yankees.

Get you a gas floor furnace and install these bad boys.

https://i.imgur.com/23UBELP.jpg

At least once every two years, my grandfather would remove the grate for cleaning and my grandmother would come through the hallway and fall right in.

ohhh, i lived in a house in virginia that had that. it worked well.

we have radiant floor heating in our current place. i think it sucks. we never turn it on. i have a hot water bottle and a lot of quilts.

We went with mini split AC in our (small) bungalow. Love it, and I wouldn't want to switch heat from radiators to forced air. Forced air can be noisy, dry air, just much prefer the quality of heat from radiators (I know steam radiators can have noise issues of their own vs. hot water). And the mini split can provide heat if it's a cold day and you don't want to fire up the furnace/boiler.

if you're doing a full hvac project yes, get rid of the radiators, but steam can be made quieter and more efficient. the problem is that almost nobody knows how to work on steam systems these days.

i finally found a company that specialized in them and it made a big difference

Our 100+ year old radiators are also beautiful. At least after spouse stripped ugly industrial gray paint from them, down to the original cool bronzeish finish.

otm, and nice to sit on on a cold day.

Also, modern furnaces seem to have a lifespan of 10 years, +/-. Our 1926 boiler, original to the house, is still going strong.

My apt has nightmarishly loud steam radiators and also we don’t control the heat. I grew up with forced air so I know the dryness it causes, but you put in a humidifier and deal. On balance Id take forced air, especially given the room size and layout in this house. Radiators create a lot of furniture placement issues.

I’m also not crazy about the way those mini split A/Cs look, although still nicer than window/wall units.

i have water radiators and they’re great. they run off a combi-boiler that fits in a cabinet above the kitchen counter.

xp Yeah, the head units are v. ugly, though I'm overlooking it because they are worlds better than the old window unit we had, and super quiet.

i like those mini acs. i didn't know what they were called. I always wondered why they weren't used in the US more.

To combat dry air you can get a whole-house humidifier put in - it was a relatively inexpensive addition last time I bought a furnace.