I’m not looking for “gee, I wish I had know the water heater was gonna crap out in three months”, more like “I wish I had known to ask about _____” or “I didn’t know I should check _____”.
I’ve just started the whole looking for a house and possible buying process and it’s pretty intimidating. So I’d love to hear about the non obvious stuff that you think is important to know about.
We’re nearing the end of our first year as homeowners, and it’s been quite an experience.
Our main complaint is that the home warranty that our sellers purchased has been almost completely worthless to us, because it didn’t cover the well pump system. We had to replace the whole thing, which cost us over $2,000. It doesn’t cover the septic, either; we’re hoping that warning light in the garage doesn’t actually mean anything, since there aren’t any suds in the lawn & we can still flush.
We felt a really misplaced sense of security based on that warranty.
We also didn’t realize until afterward just exactly how close we are to the airport’s flight path. Beeyyyyyurrrn…buggada buggada buggada.
Also, our closing was a real PITA. Every single document we signed had some kind of error on it – and I’d tried to correct those with the loan officer, really I did. The whole thing got delayed by a few days b/c of paperwork snafus. But actually that turned out fine, because it gave us a chance to paint a couple of rooms BEFORE we moved in. Really, that closing date is just an estimate.
However, we did find a 4.9% mortgage, since we were first-time homebuyers of modest means. Check out your state’s website – our lender said they’d look into it, but they never did. We went with one of the big, national banks…next time, I’m going local.
The amount of time and energy it takes to maintain a house is pretty substantial - mowing the lawn is obvious, but there’s also cleaning the gutters, fixing appliances and dealing with malfunctions. Our furnace went out completely a couple of weeks ago - the warranty DID cover half of that $200 repair.
Those people who say you can put XX dollars into housing, based on your income? I’d shoot well under their figure. We had several thousand dollars in the bank after the closing — gone, every bit of it. Little things, big things, plenty of things I don’t regret at all (hey, that purple toilet seat makes me happy every single morning). But it’s been much more expensive than we expected. We’re crossing our fingers that next year won’t be as bad.
OTOH, even knowing its flaws now, I wouldn’t trade this house for any other. We fell in love with the place immediately & didn’t even bother touring any of the other homes we’d driven past. Every house has flaws; go with your gut & find one you love, b/c it’s going to take a lot of your time and energy either way.
We built our house, and there are a couple of things we would have done differently. For one, the garage. We wish we’d made the garage both wider and longer. The fact is, “stuff” accumulates, you need a place to put it, and the garage is where a lot of it tends to wind up. Also, a wider garage would make it so much easier to get in and out of the car, for both of us.
So, my advice is, take a good hard look at the garage. It’s all too often overlooked and ignored, but it’s pretty darn important once you’re living there.
I’d really recommend finding a good buyer’s agent. The house we bought recently (by ‘recently’ I mean ‘a month ago’ here) was found in part through the skills of an excellent buyer’s agent.
What he did for us: first of all, he had access to a website with an extensive list of houses on the market that we could sort through in order to select potential houses. He did some of the dealing with sellers’ agents for us, prepared our paperwork for offers, and all that good stuff.
And he had a wealth of knowledge about houses, where they tend to develop problems, where people hide things they don’t want the sellers to know.
A good agent will know the area you’re looking in, will be able to point out merits and flaws of things you’re looking at, and will be able to teach you some of the ‘what should I be looking at here’ questions yourself.
Living in deep and constant snow country. I’m very glad I bought a house on the up-hill side of the road. All snow is plowed down hill, off to the side. I’m also glad that my driveway is downhill from my house. I can always get to work and don’t have to plow at 5am.
I think what I found most difficult was how badly I’d underestimated cost. When I was looking at houses each time (I’m in my second now), I had plotted out how much my mortgage, taxes and insurance would be. I underestimated the other little costs – gas, electric, water, trash, etc. – and I also underestimated the cost of fixing the little things that need fixing when you move in, or doing the things that you want to do to make the house your own.
I am a complete moron when it comes to doing home improvement projects. Fortunately, I have a couple friends that seem to enjoy the projects, and I’ve shamelessly imposed on them to do things around my house, like install lighting fixtures, do some repairs, etc. If it weren’t for them, I would be thousands more in the hole hiring someone to get things done. (No, I likely wouldn’t do them myself, if for no other reason than (a) I lack patience, (b) I lack skill, and/or © I work way too many weird hours). I’m unspeakably grateful that they’ve done the things that they have, and I also hope they don’t think I’m imposing.
So my advice is to take your monthly budget and increase it by at least 10%; also plan to have $5-10K set aside for “fixes” when you buy. That may not get you there (particularly if you need to redo flooring or have extensive painting to do), but the money was the big shocker.
You’d think I’d learn, but I didn’t. I had the same shock when I bought my second place as when I bought my first. But I do love it, and with each day, as more and more things get done around here to make the house mine, I love it more and more.
Get it inspected. By a certified inspector.
Find ‘buying a new home’ guides and pore through them.
Try everything; check the water pressure. See how the toilet flushes. Look and smell for dampness, especially in the basement. Look at ceilings for suspicious spots. Think about your driveway - buy a house on a real busy street and it can be hell on wheels to leave in the morning or get back in at night.
Check out storage - have you room for everything you own? Are the kitchen and bathroom designed well? Do you know the neighbourhood - is it ok?
Think of problems you and your friends had while renting and check to see if the house has them.
The pitfall for me twice was the condition of the roof. It was actually fine, but the bank insists on roof inspections, which roof inspectors treat as a licence to steal. They simply declare the roof to need redoing even though only a couple of shingle are loose and no water has entered yet. While the seller is mostly on the hook for this, if it’s enough and he balks then the deal is stalled and may die in escrow. So there is pressure on you to help fund the unneeded new roof.
The only solution I can suggest, but doubt your bank will buy in on, is to insist that all inspectors not be allowed to bid on making the repairs themselves, and that a second opinion will be required before anything major is done. But, since everyone involved doesn’t care how much money is wasted on unnecessary repairs, you may have to eat it, like I did twice.
I agree that you should factor a repair fund into your budget of at least 10% of the mortgage.
We had a home warranty included with our first house that ended up costing us quite a bit of money. When you get warranty work done you have to go with the warranty company’s repairmen, and their chosen HVAC people (who did almost nothing but work for that warranty company, as evidenced by their surprise and confusion when I asked them to come do a small job for (gasp) cash) had their heads so far up their asses it’s a wonder they could see to walk around. (We didn’t really know this until the furnace quit again and we called a more reputable outfit.)
Pay attention to where the electric outlets are in the rooms, and if the house is older, whether the outlets work. It sucks when you have the perfect place for your computer desk or media center and then you realize there isn’t a working outlet anywhere near it.
Also remember that if it’s an older house, especially one that has been renovated multiple times, repairs may be harder than you think. We tried to get the light in our guest bedroom fixed, only to find that a previous renovation left no access to the wiring, so that fixing it would require taking out a large section of drywall.
If you’re planning to sell the house within a few years, remember that problems that don’t bother you may very well bother other people. You may accept some occasional water leakage into an unfinished basement as something that just happens in an older house, but your buyers may insist on the $8000 waterproofing job. If the market happens to go from seller’s to buyer’s in the meantime, this is even more true.
Expect at least one major repair that any home warranty will not cover in the first year. (For me, it was the sewer pipe. Entirely devoured by trees. Maybe my pecan crop sucks this year because they’re no longer getting fertilized?) Cost a fortune, was an enormous pain in the ass, etc. My plumber may no longer speak to me about it.
Expect to spend time. There’s always something. My yard looks like crap right now because I got all into gardening (my downfall!) and then let it take over. I need to get out there and attack it, but the rest of the house is a shithole too and I have no time.
Oh, and little things like curtains and rods and shower curtains and toilet seats and fire extinguishers and whatever will cost you a freaking fortune your first three months in the house.
Look at as many houses as you can before deciding to buy. Figure out what’s most important to you as much as you can before you buy. My biggest regret with this house is the lack of a finished basement. That regret is big enough to make me want to move within the next few years.
Set aside a serious repair budget. In the five years I’ve owned this house we’ve had to replace the boiler (6K!), the back stairs to the deck and the hot water heater. We’ve also had $1,700 in plumbing repairs and $800 in pipe work and had to unclog the sewer twice at $300 a pop. Oh and $1700 went to termites infestation that the idiot home inspector didn’t catch.
That was a lot more money than I ever expected to put up for home repairs.
A house needs something all the time. It represents the end of your free time. Lawns ,sidewalk shoveling, painting repairs and fixups. endless. You will never finish. But it beats the hell out of an apartment. You can have a dog and cat and not care what anyone says. You can have wild nights of debauchery and get away with it.
However the day of escalating home values may be over,. For us ,you keep it a few years sell it for much more and upgrade. That may not be in the equation any more.
For the closing I took a lawyer. Not sure it hasn’t a waste of money, but I felt better.
The maintenance. It costs a bit to maintain a home, so make sure you have the funds should something break. We just had to replace a dishwasher and this summer we repainted the outside of the house.
The first house we had we couldn’t afford to fix the AC, so when it died, we suffered and had to get a window unit just so the living room was tolerable. This house, when the AC had a hiccup, we had the funds to get someone out to fix it. We can also afford a bit extra, like pest control and a riding lawn mower for the grass.
So make sure you are not buying more house than you can maintain.
Oh, and be sanguine about the house hunting process. Don’t fall in love with a house and go nuts trying to get it. If you don’t get it, it wasn’t your home, and your home is still out there, waiting for you to find it.
Be wary of the “Oh, we love it, but we hate the living room color. I guess we can repaint that…” because chances are you’ll never get around to it. We built this house, and I can tell you I will never buy an existing home again. You can get the cabinets and the faucets and the paint exactly the way you want for about the same price you will pay on an existing home.
If you do purchase and older home, be sure to complete a walk-through just before you sign the papers. I learned this the hard way when we purchased our first home.
Make sure to ask what seem to be the obvious questions. Are the curtain rods staying? If not, are you going to repair the walls that you tore them out of? Make sure to make note of every single mundane item; condition of doors, condition of appliances, water heater, etc.
When we purchased our first home in the early 1991, we did not do a walk through just before closing. Closing was delayed many times. When we finally got to move in, we discovered they had removed all the curtain rods and didn’t patch the walls; they had a big hole in one of the bedroom doors, the oven was completely filthy, and that’s just the stuff I can remember. Things turned very ugly.
When we purchased our second home, even though it was brand new construction, we did a walk through with the builder. We pointed out all the stuff we wanted fixed and it was taken care of.
All the advice about having a cushion for fixing things that could go wrong is very true. Things go wrong all the time. We’ve been fairly lucky with this home, so far. But there have been a couple of things that required repairs.
Watch out for HOAs. Some are very nasty, to the point of measuring the height of your lawn. I am not kidding. My HOA is fairly decent, but, again, I’ve been lucky in this regard.
As others have said. Whatever your total monthly payment is, budget that much again extra per year for repairs. For the first year, budget for 2 of those extras.
Plan to spend 1 weekend per month on mainenance work, or on finding (and paying for) somebody else to do the work.
In addition to ivylass’s wise words about not buying more house than you can maintain, remember that when it comes to mortgages, banks will give you a lot of rope to hang yourself with. We deliberately bought a house that cost about $30,000 less than the mortgages we qualified for. The lower mortgage payment means that we are not pouring all of our income into our house. So, for example, my husband could afford to go back to school without taking out huge student loans. If, heaven forbid, one of us loses our job, we’d be able to get by for awhile without losing the house.
Look at the neighborhood, not just the house. You couldn’t pay me enough to live in a neighborhood with an HOA, but most people in my neighborhood keep their house and yard looking trim. Almost every house has a garden or flowerbed. It’s not a wealthy area, but you can tell that folks take pride in their homes.
If young’uns are in the picture, research what school district you’re in and if it’s a decent one.
Thanks for all the replies, everyone, I defintely need to keep learning about home ownership. Money’s definitely a big worry; I’ve tracked my daily expenses for over a year so I know exactly where everything goes and I think my budget is realistic but I know stuff always come up. I’ve got good credit so the brokers want to mortgage me to the hilt but I told them I didn’t want to go over a payment I was comfortable with.
When house-hunting, drive by the house at different days and time. It might be dead on Tuesday morning, but come Wednesday afternoon the kid across the street has all his friends over playing basketball in the driveway. Sunday afternoon might be peaceful, but Saturday night there could be screaming brawls from the neighbor that spill out into the street.
Of course, that won’t help once you’re moved in and people come in after you, but you can at least get a sense of what you’re getting into.
Good thinking! Another consideration is the number steps from the garage (or the street) to the house. You really notice this the first time you’re bringing groceries home in the rain.
My next house (if there is one) is going to have an attached garage, and no steps. And a laundry room on the same floor as the bedrooms.
I’d also leave myself some lead time before I had to take possession. Like Ivylass said, it’s harder to paint, work on floors, etc. when all your stuff’s in the way.