Don’t look at pretty. Look at the bones. My first house was an absolute craphole, but it was that way because it had been neglected for 30+ years. I didn’t have attractive but shoddy workmanship to tear out left and right. If you see things, worry about what you can’t see. Screw the tray ceiling and the fancy stuff-look at an electrical panelboard with space to expand when you want more outlets, an HVAC system which is properly sized (with mebbe a skoshe extra for finishing that basement) with a decent SEER and AFUE rating.
Ever wonder why builders always paint walls with flat paint? Because when you refinish them with a nice eggshell or satin, they will look like shit, because the drywallers ran through the project like squirrels on crack and all of the flaws hidden by flat now stand out like the big pimple you got the day your graduation pictures were taken. Are the walls actually straight and true, do the baseboard mouldings fit tightly, or are they kinda sorta close with a 1/4" of painter’s caulk disguising the sin?
Home inspection can be good or bad. I saw a post commenting about a ‘certified inspector’. Certified by whom? Perhaps some states require demonstration of professional qualifications, but mine doesn’t. Pay a couple of hundred bucks, and Fast Eddie’s Inspector Training School and Massage Parlor will convey a diploma on you. I’m not certified, because ASHI prohibits me from working on any property which I inspect, and 90% of my inspections are done for the existing customers who trust my knowledge and want me to fix what I’ve found to be wrong.
Case in point: I was called by a former student to investigate a water leak at her home. I went there this morning, and found a boatload of siding detail issues, along with noting that the deck has more code violations than you can shake a 2 x 4 at. She had a home inspector, and I asked if he or the guide dog wrote the report. Thankfully she has a good sense of humor, yet this is another instance which will go in my “Reports from Hell” file of supposed inspectors who couldn’t count their testicles twice and arrive at the same sum.
If I recall correctly tremorviolet, you’re a single gal like me.
The most important thing I would keep in mind is to not buy more home than you can handle. When you’re taking care of EVERYTHING yourself, it’s amazing how quickly stuff can pile up.
When I purchased I bought a home much smaller than I could afford so that I knew I would be able to get everything done. I wanted to miss things like shoveling snow, cleaning out gutters, climbing up on roofs to inspect chimneys, repairing water heaters, etc. I have enough with tinkering with wiring, doing minor plumbing repairs, etc. Hence the appeal of a condo for me.
When you’re renting and something goes wrong, you phone the land lord. When you own and something goes wrong you either fix it or pay someone to. If your budget is tight, calling a plumber is a real drag.
Also, check your paperwork VERY carefully - my name was spelled 3 different ways in my paperwork, and NONE of them were correct!
Finally, figure out your budget, and then reduce it by about 10 or 15% - then you’ll be totally comfortable afording everything.
I second this, but if you only have time to do it once do so at night. This will let you know if your neighbors have a #*( ‘security’ light that will shine into a bedroom, a dog that’s let out at night to bark and bark and bark (and etc.), noise from a nearby busy road that drifts over (but is unnoticeable amongst the usual daytime noise), etc.
Also, there are some neighborhoods that are a Jekyll-and-Hyde. They seem perfectly nice during the daytime, but come nightfall it turns into something you may not be comfortable with even if you can’t put your finger on why. (And why live in an area that you don’t feel comfortable with?)
For the house itself, don’t forget to look inside the closets and up! Sloppy renovators will often make the room itself look great, but step inside a closet and look up and you’ll see settling cracks that they didn’t patch, water damage, etc. And sometimes in older homes they adapted the house for modern conveniences (like central air/heat) by sticking stuff in the closets.
But don’t freak out at every single crack in the wall/floor that you see. Houses settle, and they don’t settle evenly: so you’ll typically see smallish cracks in corners. (Corners of the room, corners of the door or window frame, etc. Anywhere where two items meet.) Cracks that have no reasonable explanation for being where they are, and/or are large (width and/or length), and/or are in brand new or just renovated houses are definitely something that need to be checked into further. For example, in one 25-30 year old house that I looked that there were large cracks (long and wide: I could stick my fingernail in and move it around in some) that essentially bisected the house and evidence that they had been patched perhaps multiple times in the past. (If you stood directly in front of one crack, it was almost a given directly behind you there would be a crack as well.) A bit more research found out that there was a clay deposit running under that area, and it was likely the house was built partially on it. Since the house was on a slab foundation, given the circumstances there was a good chance the foundation was cracked or if it wasn’t it was going to crack eventually.
<< I have NOT lost my mind. It’s backed up on the server. (and the network is down again…) >>
Like others have said, don’t go overboard on the space. A single person won’t really need a four bedroom. My wife and I have a three bedroom and while the space is nice, we don’t use at least one of the bedrooms and the formal dining room is a total waste of space.
During fall, the leaves always need to be picked up and the during the summer, the grass needs to be cut. During the winter, if it snows, you need to shovel the walkway.
Something that you should look at is how noisy is the neighborhood. Is there a lot of traffic? Do trucks drive by? What is the crime rate?
Something that you should think about as well is how much will I spend on utilities? Is the house well insulated? What is the gas bill like in the winter? What is the electric bill in the summer?
My dad just got certified as a building inspector in the state of Kentucky. Up until a few months ago, state certification was either nonexistent or nominal (I can’t remember which). Now it requires a three-week course, a written test that’s apparently an utter bitch (most people in Dad’s class failed it), and a practical exam where they inspect a model house in Louisville. He also has to be bonded for a certain amount.
So it’s probably worth asking what “licensed” really means in your state. I’ve had an inspection done both times I bought a house, and both times it turned up enough problems that it more than paid for itself when I got the seller to fix them.
The most annoying thing about the general inspection, though, is the tendency for the inspector to cover his ass by requesting special inspections if anything is even remotely awry. It’s then hard to get any specific recommendations, or any idea of how big a problem might be, without getting those inspections, and by the time you’ve had an electrician, a plumber, an HVAC tech, a structural engineer, etc. out to look at everything, you’re talking about a lot of chicken. I really don’t know what to do about that, except to make friends with someone who knows houses and talk it over with him.
When we had our home inspected, they gave me a Tyvek suit & I went into the crawlspace with him! It was really interesting and I learned a lot. Our home inspection took 4 hours. The husband/wife team didn’t catch everything, but I’m glad for the things the did require. Plus they recommended that a roofer examine one problem, which probably saved us money.
danceswithcats, I wish you’d explain those acronyms and give a little more detail on verifying that a house has the correct furnace (and hot water heater).
The thing I found really difficult about homebuying was the amazing amount of information you have to deal with. We had some time constraints, which made it even worse. Faxes and documents, mortgage and offers and counter-offers – it’s enough to make your head swim. A good checklist would’ve made a world of difference. It’s so frustrating, trying to ask questions but not knowing exactly WHICH ones are really helpful. We started out with a lot of energy and persistence, but eventually the whole thing wore us down & we were just like “whatever, where do we sign, let’s get this over with.”
Our friend Liberal had a thread on this a while back, too; you might want to search for it, I think some of those recommendations were helpful to us.
I’d echo what’s been said-the older a house, the more repairs will cost. In my case, we have an 63 year old house, and I’m constantly fixing stuff-last job was a new furnace ($4700)! Across the sstreet from us are 4 new houses-these are all vinyl windows, siding, and 30-year roofs= NO maintainence (for about 25-30 years). I wish I owned one!
And forget those pretty Victorians-those houses are elegant and cost a fortune to maintain!
Hokay, SEER stands for “seasonal energy efficiency ratio” and the short explanation is that a higher SEER air conditioning system costs more to purchase, but is less costly to operate over the cooling season. If you wish to calculate it, take the BTU of cooling (12K per ton) divided by the watt/hours of electricity needed to operate said system.
AFUE, or “annual fuel utilization efficiency” refers to how much of the energy derived from burning a fuel becomes heat for the structure vs how much goes up the chimney. If you have an 85% AFUE heater rated at 200K BTU gross or input, 170K will be your net heat, because the other 30K went up the stack. Once again, the high efficiency units cost more initially, but are kinder to your wallet over time.
No home inspector is going to perform a complete heat loss calculation, however builders are notorious for putting in the barest of minimums, such that a seat of the pants calculation leaves you wanting. Finish the basement for a game room? When you cut in two more discharges on the main trunk, the rest of the house suffers. Finish part of the walk-in attic for an extra room? Ditto. I also fault residential installations which don’t have turning vanes or means of regulation at the main and branch ducts, because without them, it isn’t possible to properly balance a system, leading to rooms which are starved for heating and cooling and/or rooms which get too much.
The Uniform Plumbing Code (and other model codes) have tables which refer to the number of bathrooms and the number of bedrooms to determine a minimum 1st hour rating in gallons for water heaters.
I wish I had known that the street was a main route for both an ambulance station and a fire station. It’s a rare day that doesn’t have sirens shrieking by in one direction or another.
This is a good idea even if you don’t have kids (or plan to have them). If this isn’t the house you plan to die in, the people you sell to are very likely to care about the schools; if you do plan to stay indefinitely, you’re still likely to end up with better neighbors if you’re in a good school district.
Like Lilarien said, a good buyer’s agent is an important thing, I found.
Don’t let the seller’s realtor be the only agent doing the work, and don’t get an agent from the seller’s realty company.
As far as I know (at least in Ohio, anyway) having your own agent won’t cost you anything more in closing costs than just going with the seller’s agent. In my case, I believe, it was like 7% closing costs to pay the agents and they split it. Had there just been one agent she would have gotten the entire 7% (someone correct me if I’m wrong).
I happened to know someone that I knew was an excellent realtor and as soon as I was ready to buy a house I called her up and she took it from there. She showed me the home (after looking at it herself), gave me her opinions, told me about money and then kicked some major ass in the negotiations. There is absolutely no way in hell I would have done this without her. I never once had to speak with the seller’s agent or the sellers themselves.
When looking for an agent to represent you, choose someone who’s not only been in the business a long time (there’s way too many realtors out there who just got into it last year!) but has been in the business in the area where you want to buy.
Also, my mindset when I bought was that I could care less if the place looked like shit. As long as the roof, furnace, foundation, windows and water heater were new(er) and in good shape, I was good to go. Carpet, paint, yardwork, etc - that can all be done in due time and at the cost you decide - not the cost that the seller decided a bunch of crown molding was worth because it looked fancy.
I wish I had known that the house I was buying WASN’T too small to have my grown kids move back in.
That won’t be applying to you. This might. Back when I was married, we bought a house. We didn’t think to check the elevation of the yard with an eye to drainage. We were away during a big rain and when we went home all of the yards on the street were flooded. The standing water got deeper and deeper as we approached our house. And then we got to our house and saw that they’d raised the yard about a foot higher than all the surrounding property. We were the onle ones completely hight and dry.
Now I work for a city public works department and I can tell you that if the drainage isn’t in place before the house gets built, there is very little that you can do to improve things. There are several ways to check out the drainage, but the easiest is asking the neighbors. Flooding generally shows.
I’m with the “buy lower than the mortgage they are prepared to give you” crowd. Also, some advice: don’t buy a fixer upper unless you are prepared to do all the work yourself, hiring is expensive. Spend a day through the week and a weekend day hanging out in the neighbourhood to see if you like it. Talk to the neighbours if you find a house you like…you’ll be surprised how helpful they will be. If you’re going to be on a septic, get it inspected or at least put it in the contract that you want it approved before you buy.
Go to see the house in the rain, you’ll spot leaks. Also, it will be easier to spot water problems on the outside. Check the attic and the basement, if there is one for leaks. Don’t let anyone rush you…look behind the furniture too, you’ll be surprised what it can hide! In our case, it was a leaky window…the couch was in front of the window and we didn’t look behind it. Good thing hubby does windows!
Decide what you are prepared to negotiate on and what you are not. i.e. new roof = $3,000 you can live with. Tearing the walls out and insulating because there is none = much more than you’ll ever want to do.
For the house inspector and the lawyer, don’t take a recommendation from your real estate agent. Those folks have a vested interest in seeing the deal go through. You want both the lawyer and inspector to feel free to say “This is not a good deal. Let it go.”
Lots of good advice here, especially: Do not underestimate your repair budget.
I would add, don’t just think about “the cost of repairing/replacing X” for each X in the house. Think about Y, Z, and W that may be affected if you do have to replace X.
Case in point. Shortly after my wife and I bought our home, the oven stopped working. No big deal right? Well, it turned out that the oven was a nonstandard size, so to replace it, we would have to basically destroy the section of cabinets and countertop that it was built into. Replacing the oven snowballed into remodeling the entire kitchen. We could afford it, but it meant that some other things that had been higher priorities, like replacing the ancient, incredibly small and crappy washing machine and drier that came with the house, fell by the wayside. Eighteen months later, we’re still using that same washer and same drier.
