This Old #%&@*$ House

I found that putting all my likes/dislikes in different categories of importance helped me review each house I was considering.

MUST haves
Would really like to have
Nice perks
Really don't want
MUST NOT haves

The first and last categories weed out the most and then the other 3 help prioritize what's left.

That backsplash is awesome DSG. 980sq-ft is my perfect size house. You guys have a good thing going.

Edwin wrote:

That backsplash is awesome DSG. 980sq-ft is my perfect size house. You guys have a good thing going.

Thank you. I just wish I could transport the house closer in. Having a commute again isn't ideal, but we'll see. I've done that commute most of my career, so hopefully I can get used to it again, lose some weight, save some money, etc. There's a lot of good that can happen with this movie. And the house couldn't be cozier for the two of us.

Awesome warnings and advice, folks. I'm favoriting this thread.

LeapingGnome wrote:
Quintin_Stone wrote:

Also consider getting a home warranty for the first year. You may even be able to get the seller to pay for it.

On the flip side... http://www.clarkhoward.com/news/clar...

Having used mine on multiple occasions, with them paying out far more than I have, I'd have to disagree. For ~$800 in premium fees, they've paid out ~$3000 or more in repairs. I'll freely admit that I'm almost certainly in the minority with this though.

As for Mike Holmes, he knows his stuff. However, he's also a pretentious dick. He gets a lot of latitude with digging for the root of issues where home inspectors can't(how many times have you heard him wonder how something got missed at inspection?), as well as being far less restricted budget-wise when it comes to doing things to his spec.

Also marking the thread because my wife and I are starting to look for our first house/money pit.

We've been lucky (well, me maybe less so) that we've spent the last two years living with my wife's parents rent-free while we save up a down payment. As a result, we have our 20% socked away, and are working on a fund for move-in costs, furniture, and other stuff, so woo.

We're also lucky that my wife is an architect, used to work for a guy who does home inspection, and her brother is in engineering. I'm pretty sure that whenever we find a house, we'll have a good idea of what we're getting into. The down side of being married to an architect is that it's pretty much a given that she's going to want to tear down some walls at least, and is probably already thinking about additions at worst.

For the mortgage, our financial planner is recommending keeping the monthly principle and interest payments at 15% of gross pay or less, which is workable. We're also planning for being able to make those payments on just my salary, because kids are in the near future and my wife is planning on stopping work for at least a while. Good thing I just started a new job that pays quite a bit better!

I just wish people would put their houses on the market. Available inventory in winter is not awesome.

Great thread! We owned a house for 5 years before my job relocated my wife and I. The house was built in 1959 and was the first house we both had owned. I entirely agree that having money for repairs and unknown things is an absolute must. When I look at the money we spent on the house over that 5 years it is somewhat mind-blowing! We are in the process of building a house now (the South is so much more affordable than the NorthEast!) which should be done by the end of January. We get a 1yr warranty on everything, 2yr on plumbing, 10yr limited which I believe is like the home warranty. I'm hoping if anything goes terribly wrong it will happen in the first year. Ideally, nothing will go wrong ever! That can happen, right?

I would also suggest avoiding propane heat if you can, it's very expensive. We bought our first house year and a half ago and this fall we converted over to natural gas. It paid itself within the first two months this winter. We also got new windows this summer and that helped to bring the bills down from 650 bucks a month to around a 100.

Chaz wrote:

For the mortgage, our financial planner is recommending keeping the monthly principle and interest payments at 15% of gross pay or less, which is workable.

Your monthly mortgage payment also includes two noticeable chunks of change: property taxes (city, county, municipality) and home insurance, and both will almost certainly increase at regular intervals. (Your principle and interest costs are fixed for the life of the loan.) Don't forget to factor those into your calculations. (A third potential cost is PMI, or the dreaded private mortgage insurance that you have to carry if you don't put enough down on your house -- roughly 20 percent. Don't get me started on that ripoff.)

Chaz wrote:

We're also planning for being able to make those payments on just my salary ... .

+1 million to this. My wife quit working full-time shortly after we bought our house. That was a real financial shock, as she was getting paid more than I was. That made for some pretty lean years. But we have this great old falling-apart house, amirite?

Enix wrote:
Chaz wrote:

We're also planning for being able to make those payments on just my salary ... .

+1 million to this. My wife quit working full-time shortly after we bought our house. That was a real financial shock, as she was getting paid more than I was. That made for some pretty lean years. But we have this great old falling-apart house, amirite?

What's more than +1 million without getting into insane numbers?

Gather 'round. I have a story to tell that emphasizes how important this is. In 2008 my wife and I bought our house. We signed the paperwork in late August. We were so excited. We made sure during this process to keep the payment to what we could *easily* afford on one income. 2008 was a bad economy so it might not have been wise to buy any house, but we had the wherewithal to at least keep in mind that we should hedge our bets in case one of us loses our jobs.

We got home (to our apartment) from signing the paperwork, I hopped on my bicycle and headed to the gym. On the way to the gym I was hit by a car (my accident, the big one, that I refer to). I went on to struggle with missed time at work due to tons of physical therapy and eventually I was out of work for almost a year. I can't think of many more instructive cases for keeping your house purchase at a sane level. You can literally lose half your income in a snap. It happened to us and we weathered it because we kept the house purchase to something we could afford on one income.

To this day I have trouble processing the high highs of this day and the low lows. The fact that I was hit on the same day as we signed the paperwork to finalize the purchase of the house seems like the craziest thing.

Enix wrote:
Chaz wrote:

For the mortgage, our financial planner is recommending keeping the monthly principle and interest payments at 15% of gross pay or less, which is workable.

Your monthly mortgage payment also includes two noticeable chunks of change: property taxes (city, county, municipality) and home insurance, and both will almost certainly increase at regular intervals. (Your principle and interest costs are fixed for the life of the loan.) Don't forget to factor those into your calculations. (A third potential cost is PMI, or the dreaded private mortgage insurance that you have to carry if you don't put enough down on your house -- roughly 20 percent. Don't get me started on that ripoff.)

Yeah, we're definitely factoring taxes and stuff into our calculations. By boxing the principal+interest to 15%, it still leaves us room to add the taxes and insurance on and be comfortable. We're planning to avoid PMI if at all possible.

Chaz wrote:
Enix wrote:
Chaz wrote:

For the mortgage, our financial planner is recommending keeping the monthly principle and interest payments at 15% of gross pay or less, which is workable.

Your monthly mortgage payment also includes two noticeable chunks of change: property taxes (city, county, municipality) and home insurance, and both will almost certainly increase at regular intervals. (Your principle and interest costs are fixed for the life of the loan.) Don't forget to factor those into your calculations. (A third potential cost is PMI, or the dreaded private mortgage insurance that you have to carry if you don't put enough down on your house -- roughly 20 percent. Don't get me started on that ripoff.)

Yeah, we're definitely factoring taxes and stuff into our calculations. By boxing the principal+interest to 15%, it still leaves us room to add the taxes and insurance on and be comfortable. We're planning to avoid PMI if at all possible.

I read this and your previous post and it just makes me realize I will probably never be able to own a home. f*cking student loans and medical bills have probably ruined me for the next few decades if not ever.

Yeah, I was lucky enough to go to a state school before tuition costs got wacky, so I have less than $8k in loans, and I'm paying them off stupidly slowly at stupid low interest. My wife went to grad school, so she's got way more loans, but the payments are manageable, if annoying.

I'm honestly not sure how anyone's expected to save up a down payment outside of having some kind of low-rent or rent-free living arrangement though. That part is seriously wacky.

Chaz wrote:

Yeah, I was lucky enough to go to a state school before tuition costs got wacky, so I have less than $8k in loans, and I'm paying them off stupidly slowly at stupid low interest. My wife went to grad school, so she's got way more loans, but the payments are manageable, if annoying.

I'm honestly not sure how anyone's expected to save up a down payment outside of having some kind of low-rent or rent-free living arrangement though. That part is seriously wacky.

This is the part where a P&C thread would be interesting, probably. The insurance makes some sense, in so far as someone without 20% is theoretically a risk. But then they give out mortgages like tic-tacs, thus raising prices, thus ensuring that everyone who attempts to save 20% is priced out unless they're really wealthy or thrifty. But, once again, this is probably another thread of its own.

I think at this point for most people you either don't buy your first house with a large down payment, or you buy your first house at a much, much later time than "ideal". I suspect that that's not actually as much of a new development as we think it is, and that looking at the numbers would show that most US couples buying a house to live in together within their 20s, and maybe even right as they got married in their early 20s, is just another myth about how awesome the US is.

Maybe I can afford to get a trailer/pre-fab or one of those tiny homes like this one.

edit: Sorry, no more derailing.

This is an interesting discussion, but we are veering rather off-topic...

EDIT: here we go. Have at it!

AnimeJ wrote:

As for Mike Holmes, he knows his stuff. However, he's also a pretentious dick. He gets a lot of latitude with digging for the root of issues where home inspectors can't(how many times have you heard him wonder how something got missed at inspection?), as well as being far less restricted budget-wise when it comes to doing things to his spec.

Pretentious dick? Nope. When he wonders why things got missed, it's usually because they should not have been missed. And he often points out that a lot of the stuff he finds is because he can tear open walls and inspectors obviously can't.

Quintin_Stone wrote:
AnimeJ wrote:

As for Mike Holmes, he knows his stuff. However, he's also a pretentious dick. He gets a lot of latitude with digging for the root of issues where home inspectors can't(how many times have you heard him wonder how something got missed at inspection?), as well as being far less restricted budget-wise when it comes to doing things to his spec.

Pretentious dick? Nope. When he wonders why things got missed, it's usually because they should not have been missed. And he often points out that a lot of the stuff he finds is because he can tear open walls and inspectors obviously can't.

When Mike Holmes starts talking about things that a home inspector should not have missed after it took him cutting holes in drywall to find an issue, he's a pretentions dick. Home inspectors don't get nearly the leeway that he does. I've never heard him acknowledge that if something got missed, it was only caught because he's able to pull out drywall.

I have good hearing.

Fair enough. All the times I've heard him go on about how "There is no way the home inspector should have missed this" after he's cut 3 sheets worth of drywall out of a room stick with me.

So we had a new years eve adventure that I forgot to post. As is our tradition, we brought a bunch of seafood to bake in the oven for new year's eve and I made rolls. I went to preheat the oven and noticed it wasn't warming. Did some checking and determined the oven ignitor was busted. Simple fix, but of course nothing was open. Had to wait till Friday to get the part and replace it. Ended up turning the grill into a makeshift oven. Haha it worked out pretty well.

So here is a question for the group. Is there an online, or chain store, that people really like to use for appliance parts? I tend to just find out what is nearby but maybe there is a better place.

Asterith wrote:

So we had a new years eve adventure that I forgot to post. As is our tradition, we brought a bunch of seafood to bake in the oven for new year's eve and I made rolls. I went to preheat the oven and noticed it wasn't warming. Did some checking and determined the oven ignitor was busted. Simple fix, but of course nothing was open. Had to wait till Friday to get the part and replace it. Ended up turning the grill into a makeshift oven. Haha it worked out pretty well.

So here is a question for the group. Is there an online, or chain store, that people really like to use for appliance parts? I tend to just find out what is nearby but maybe there is a better place.

I always try to find something local, preferebly non chain store. They usually have better customer service and I found the prices to be reasonable to online, plus they answer your questions.

Asterith wrote:

So we had a new years eve adventure that I forgot to post. As is our tradition, we brought a bunch of seafood to bake in the oven for new year's eve and I made rolls. I went to preheat the oven and noticed it wasn't warming. Did some checking and determined the oven ignitor was busted. Simple fix, but of course nothing was open. Had to wait till Friday to get the part and replace it. Ended up turning the grill into a makeshift oven. Haha it worked out pretty well.

So here is a question for the group. Is there an online, or chain store, that people really like to use for appliance parts? I tend to just find out what is nearby but maybe there is a better place.

Depends. If I can get it at Ace, I'll go there. If not, I'll hit up Lowe's or Home Depot.

Anyone do a basement finish lately? My wife and I are to the point where we need to either a) finish the basement so the kids have somewhere to go, or b) immolate the TV and XBox in a fiery conflagration of purification, because I'm not sure how much longer we can take the ruckus. Putting your entertainment center right in the middle of the main living area of the house does not work with three boys.

Anyway, I've got a pretty basic plan for our basement that should provide another few hundred square feet of space, enough for a bathroom, a decent home theater/video game area, and a smaller play/game area. We're keeping it as basic as possible to keep costs down and make it as short a project as possible. There are a few niggling details I'm not sure about, like how to close off the main water valve, what to do about the cable/phone equipment that's installed in the basement, etc. Always on the lookout for those inevitable "boy if I knew that before I started..." type experiences.

I'm also ticked by our local permit office. Building permits are easy to get, but our city building codes require that all electrical and plumbing be done by a licensed contractor. Considering that I'm not running anything more complex than wiring lights and outlets, come on. There is an option for homeowner/DIYers to do the work, but only if you pass a test. Which cost $50 each. I can't figure out if this is a way to fleece people out of $50 because they'll never pass the test if they're not at contractor-levels of knowledge, or if the test involves questions like "It is okay to put live electrical wiring into your mouth as long as it's 14ga or less. Yes/No?"

Make sure your finished floor is elevated above the foundation with airflow underneath. Also definitely get a radon test done before you make too many plans, so that you can account for the mitigation unit if necessary.

Boudreaux wrote:

Anyone do a basement finish lately?

I've been working with some guys finishing some basements on the weekend for extra money. As far as the water valve goes, you'll still want access to it, so you won't want to totally close it off. Depending on how it is you can make a bench or something that covers it up with a removable panel for access or just build a closet around it. If possible you can put it in a unfinished storage area too.

For the cable/phone equipment you can again put it in a unfinished area of the basement. Another option would be to build a soffit on the ceiling that this stuff could live in.

We haven't pulled permits for any of the work we've done yet. Basements are easy to hide. Heck, I know a guy that put a new fireplace and chimney in and was able to do the work quick enough and make it look good enough that he never pulled a permit...it just blends right in with the house. You just need to know what you're doing.

Signus-X wrote:

We haven't pulled permits for any of the work we've done yet. Basements are easy to hide. Heck, I know a guy that put a new fireplace and chimney in and was able to do the work quick enough and make it look good enough that he never pulled a permit...it just blends right in with the house. You just need to know what you're doing.

I've wondered about this. I've already done some wiring work in my house to improve lighting and add new appliances, and I didn't get any sort of permit for it purely out of ignorance. Considering 95% of what I'm going to be doing in the basement is framing lumber, wiring/electrical outlets, and drywall, I could probably do the whole thing in a month. I understand contractors getting permits/inspections to protect themselves from liability, but homeowners? How are they going to know if a homeowner just does the work?

Boudreaux wrote:
Signus-X wrote:

We haven't pulled permits for any of the work we've done yet. Basements are easy to hide. Heck, I know a guy that put a new fireplace and chimney in and was able to do the work quick enough and make it look good enough that he never pulled a permit...it just blends right in with the house. You just need to know what you're doing.

I've wondered about this. I've already done some wiring work in my house to improve lighting and add new appliances, and I didn't get any sort of permit for it purely out of ignorance. Considering 95% of what I'm going to be doing in the basement is framing lumber, wiring/electrical outlets, and drywall, I could probably do the whole thing in a month. I understand contractors getting permits/inspections to protect themselves from liability, but homeowners? How are they going to know if a homeowner just does the work?

If it came up, it'd be at sale. I'd have to ask my mother about precisely when though, she's a licensed realtor and would know all that stuff.

Boudreaux wrote:
Signus-X wrote:

We haven't pulled permits for any of the work we've done yet. Basements are easy to hide. Heck, I know a guy that put a new fireplace and chimney in and was able to do the work quick enough and make it look good enough that he never pulled a permit...it just blends right in with the house. You just need to know what you're doing.

I've wondered about this. I've already done some wiring work in my house to improve lighting and add new appliances, and I didn't get any sort of permit for it purely out of ignorance. Considering 95% of what I'm going to be doing in the basement is framing lumber, wiring/electrical outlets, and drywall, I could probably do the whole thing in a month. I understand contractors getting permits/inspections to protect themselves from liability, but homeowners? How are they going to know if a homeowner just does the work?

I've found that it's okay to skate without pulling permits for replacement and upgrade work, like just updating the bathroom or kitchen or whatnot — though if you're using hired trades it's still good to tell them you're pulling permits so that they don't slack of on codes

However, anything that is an addition, specifically anything that adds finished square footage to the house? You gotta permit that stuff if you ever hope to sell the house. Because otherwise, any potential buyers' agent is going to look at your listed square footage and compare it to what the county has on file and see the discrepancy, and that's a MAJOR red flag to any buyers. They're gonna want to start poking around in the walls of the basement, checking the electrical, all sorts of fun stuff that they wouldn't worry about otherwise. Also, if they bring it up with the county, the county may come reassess and hit you with some back property taxes since you increased the assessed value of your home without letting them get their slice of the pie. (Yes, it's a racket. What can you do?)

Also, re-dividing any existing space to do stuff like add to the total bedroom count can get you in trouble come sale time, when the inspector sees that the house is only listed as 3 bedrooms and you're selling at 4. This is more of an issue in septic system areas.