Lessons learned from buying my first house

Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share
1

Recently, I purchased my first house. Somehow, I managed to find my dream house on the first shot. I love it. Now, I’m pretty experienced with moving – I’ve probably moved 20 times since I first shuttled myself off to college, lo these many years ago. But this time it’s different. First, I’m moving to MY house. I don’t have to ask anyone’s permission if I want to paint my bedroom bright purple. I can plant whatever I want in the yard and I don’t have to pay anyone else for the privilege of having my four pets live with me. So even though I’ve done the moving thing a few times… here’s what I’ve learned so far about home ownership.

•_Realtors are a ripoff. Now that I’ve been through this once, I will never use one again. Mine did nothing that I couldn’t have done for myself. I paid him a bunch of money, even though I found the house, I showed it to him, I negotiated the deal with the owners, and I got the financing and insurance. All he really did was collect everyone’s signatures, set up an appointment for the inspection… and get himself paid.

•_A good credit rating is key. I got a great financing deal because my credit is pristine. I’m really glad I waited until I got rid of all my debt, paid off my car and saved up a chunk of moolah for the downpayment. :: pats self on back ::

•_It ain’t love, nor money that makes the world go 'round… it’s interest. It’s all about interest.

•_Everyone else who has ever done something that you are about to do… has way more advice for you than is wanted, warranted or needed. I learned to simply smile and thank them. And then I go do what I intended to in the first place. The minute someone starts a sentence with, “What you need to do is…” I just tune out. 80% of the advice is useless anyway.

•_Contractors suck. Not as much as realtors, though. At least the contractors I hired have served a useful purpose and have generally been professional and nice to work with. I had hardwood floors put in two bedrooms, and another guy is currently working on tiling the kitchen floor. Every single thing that has been delivered, or required a contractor to be in my house resulted in me having to clean up or fix something behind them. Examples:

  • The hardwood floor guys: tracked sawdust throughout the entire house and made a big mess in general. This is not a rant – I expected as much. Just wasn’t happy about it. They are also taking longer than they estimated, which is really pushing me against the wall in terms of my moving timeline.
    - The cement backerboard delivery guy – saw that the hardwood floor guys had opened the back gate and backed their pick ups right up to my back porch. This was okay with me, since pick ups are not that heavy. Then the backerboard delivery guy decided he must do the same thing, because gods forbid they have to lug cement backerboard, oh 30 feet, to my porch. So they backed up a huge, heavy flatbed truck into my backyard and left me two beautiful 3" deep ruts running through the yard. Nice. Maybe I’ll just dig 'em a little deeper and run the ruts to the koi pond so a little river runs through it. Make lemonade, I always say!
    - The tile guys - have cleaned up after themselves and in general, been the most pleasant to have around. However, they did wander through my house while I was at work (I haven’t moved yet, so there’s not much in there), and found my boombox to listen to while they worked. While this is okay with me, I had to laugh because the dummies unhooked the XM satellite radio so they could listen to the crappy local stations. Egads.

•_I hate painting. And wallpaper with flower patterns should be illegal. It never looks good people! Please don’t leave it for others to fix your design mistakes. And no matter how you paint, what you do or how long it takes, some “friend” will declare you are doing it wrong. Actually that rule follows for any chore you have to do in front of someone else – like yardwork. See the advice rule above…

•_Furniture salespeople now rank right up there, for me, with used car salesmen, realtors, insurance agents and collections people. Furniture salespeople do not know anything about furniture, much like used car salesman… I walked into one of those huge furniture factory warehouses, (Furnish your entire house for less!!!) and asked, “I really like Art Deco and Arts & Crafts. Do you have anything new and modern that resembles either of those two styles?” The question was met with blank stares, then I was shown some laminated pressboard garbage that looked more Victorian (sort of) than anything else. If you need to buy furniture, you better know what you want and find it yourself. I ended up turning to my friend who owns an antique shop. She is filling the house with beautiful Art Deco and Art Nouveau pieces – much better prices than brand spanking new and far better quality. New furniture is crap. (Unless you live in western North Carolina or some place where they actually make the stuff.)

•_There is no furniture that is dog and cat proof. I had to get a futon for my couch and put a waterproof mattress pad on it. Nobody sells chain mail slipcovers, that I am aware of.

I’m sure I’ll come back here to share new tidbits, as I will be moving over the next two weeks. The plan is to be moved in by the 19th, so I wake up on the 20th, on the morning of my birthday, in my house. Happy birthday to Dogzilla!

So, in the interest of interactivity… what did you learn when you bought your first house, or when you moved out on your own for the first time? Do share.

2

Well, considering that I’m just starting on the journey to purchasing my first home, I’ll be bookmarking this thread. Thank you Dogzilla.

Zev Steinhardt

3

Oh yeah, I’ve thought of two more lessons learned already…

•_Never, but NEVER, attempt to secure a homeowners’ insurance policy in Florida during hurricane season. (June 1 - Nov. 30 for all the non-Floridians) If there’s a storm brewing out there somewhere, there’s a possibility it could strike Florida. So the insurance companies will not write new policies while that could happen. IF you’re even lucky enough to find a company that even writes policies in Florida period. The reason I got one: I already had a renters’ policy from eight years ago. Florida first-time homebuyers beware: better line up insurance before you even find a house. Here’s a tip for State Farm customers in Florida: they have so many slots each month for writing new policies. Once you’ve found a house and got a contract, get on the insurance hunt right away. You’ll do better if you start near the beginning of the month. If you close on the 31st and wait until the 26th to start looking for insurance you’re either going to have to take an expensive high-risk policy, or else you’ll be SOL and have to move the closing back to the next month.

•_Nobody makes rubber sheets anymore. I got a club chair from my antique shop friend. She’s recovering it. I wanted her to put a rubber sheet – like my mom used in my crib when I was a baby – between the fabric and the padding. That way when my not-yet-housebroken-rescue pup decides to mark the chair, I can clean up the pee without having the smell soak into the chair stuffing and ruin the whole stinky thing. I can’t find rubber sheets anywhere. They don’t even use 'em in nursing homes any more. I had to get vinyl so whenever anyone sits in the club chair, they’ll hear the crinkle of the plastic and will suspect they are wearing diapers. Any doper moms have old rubber sheets stashed away in the attic somewhere? If so, please e-mail me, or post 'em on ebay and let me know. I’ll buy 'em…

4

What size do you want the chainmail slipcovers in? I know how and have a supplier for the materials. If you want small links (about the size used for shark suits) it will take longer for me to get the supplies then it will to make it. If you want larger rings it will take considerably longer.

When I get home I’ll look around and find you some rubber sheeting. You just have to know where to look for it. :wink:

5

I don’t think that is necessarily so. I had an excellent realtor that spent a lot of time with me showed me a lot of houses and helped me negotiate a deal. I hadn’t even lived in the country for ten years, was in the middle of a divorce, had janked up credit thanks to my ex, scads of stuff, he was awesome. Sorry you had a lemon.

6

OK, here’s the most important thing that Dogzilla did right – hired the contractors to do the work before moving in.

Doing it after you move in really sucks.
Everyone does have advice. Tuning it out may or may not be good. Cautionary tales have their place.

I’m not sure if a realtor is a rip-off or not. I’d be reluctant to sell my house myself, and I think that a realtor can stop you from making some bad buying decisions. But they do charge too much. I think the going rate is 6%, divided evenly between the buyer and the seller’s agents. Which is odd when you think about it, because I doubt it takes three times the effort to sell a $300K house than a $100K house.

I do think my realtor, having more experience than I did, should have caught some of the more questionable actions that the previous owners of my house made – overstating the square footage of the house and getting a fairly incompetent contractor to do the Title V septic installation.

7

Sorry! Only read 20% of the OP! :smiley:

The King of the Castle can usually be found on the throne.

8

I’ve had good realtors and realtors who wanted nothing more than their check. But some places, it’s almost impossible to do a housing sale or purchase without one. In Georgia, it’s a snap, about three forms. In Maryland, we had to fill out about 25 forms just to make an offer on a house. I really would not have wanted to negotiate that minefield without an experienced realtor. (And we had a wonderful one that time, too.)

The realtor we had when we bought our current house was great. A then-cow-orker of Papa Tiger who sold real estate on the side, and since he had to face Papa Tiger at work every day, it was well worth his while to be good to us. He did that unbelievably rare realtor thing – showed us houses IN the price range we wanted and ONLY houses that had the features we had as our bottom line. We had to talk him into going higher in price range so we could get a good idea if we were getting a deal or not on our current house. If we have to sell it, guess who we’ll be calling?

9

Ah, but thanks to the deviants out there, you can get latex sheets. (http://www.betweenthesheets.co.uk/).

I’m guessing that they are fluid-proof (but I don’t really want to know) and you might get some knowing looks if you buy them over the counter…

10

Actually if you really hate the paint, wallpaper, paneling, etc. in a house you otherwise love and want to make an offer on, you can negotiate it with the seller. Tell 'em you either want them to fix it, or knock off a reasonable amount from the total cost of the house so you can hire someone to fix it. I hate painting too, and that’s one way to avoid it. And painters suck much less than other contractors!

And my response to “helpful” friends would be to hand 'em a brush and tell 'em to show me the “right” way to do things ;).

11

I agree with the OP on the real estate agent. As the purchaser, I felt him to be unnecessary.

The biggest lesson I learned: Don’t close until everything is exactly the way you want it, especially if the house is new. When the builder’s agent tells you they’ll create a punch-out list, and that the builder doesn’t get paid until you sign off on it, he’s lying.

12

The sad thing is that the way the commissions are set up, it wouldn’t have saved you any money to go without a realtor. Instead, the sellers’ realtor would have been entitled to the entire commission (probably 4-6% of the selling price).

That said, my buyers’ agent worked his tail off for me when I bought my first house, and deserved his commission. I highly recommend finding someone who primarily or only represents buyers. (Ours represents a few sellers - only those selling houses that they originally bought through him. He won’t take on a new client until he has determined that they’re not interested in anything he might be listing for a seller at that moment).

13

When buying an existing home, as opposed to new construction, get an inspection done by a pro. I wish we’d done that on one of our previous home purchases… it wound up costing us when we sold and those buyers did have an inspector. :frowning:

Also, never assume anything. Get it in writing. Even if you think it’s trivial, get it in writing.

14

Well I am in the middle of trying to find a place to buy and my realtor is proving to be indespensible. The market is moving so fast and she is really dedicated to helping me find a place I like. I think the OPs blanket statement needs to be tempered.

15

Popping in to address some comments.

First, my realtor only charged 2%. So mebbe I shouldn’t whine so much. Second, the sellers did not use a realtor at all. In fact, the house I bought was never listed on the market, nor was there ever a “For Sale” sign in the yard. (Until my realtor put up a “Sold” sign, which is the part that chaps me a bit, I guess.)

See, I bought the house across the street from where I currently rent (literally – 30 steps from my front door, which is convenient enough to be a pain in my butt but not nearly the pain an interstate or across-town move would be. I’m counting my blessings on this part.). I heard that my neighbors were building a new house in another county and were thinking of selling. So I went across the street and asked if that was true, were they serious and could I see it? That’s how the whole thing happened. I called “dibs” and my neighbors promised not to list the house until they spoke to me first.

Had I not heard about this house through the neighborhood grapevine (and my entire block knows about this transaction and everyone offered to lend me their trucks to help me move. :rolleyes: ), my realtor would have had a much bigger job cut out for him (and probably would have asked for a higher percentage. I believe he was generous in only asking for 2%). I was very specific about staying in my neighborhood, I wanted an old house restored and updated (which I got) and I was very very picky about the whole thing. My realtor was trying very hard to accommodate my wants and needs. I just happened to like a neighborhood that is very tight. Everything we looked at that was listed had four or five offers on the table before I even got in to see the places. Had I not gotten the neighbor’s house, I would have been in a very competitive bidding situation and my realtor would have been worth his weight in gold.

One other point I should make about the realtor: I have Legal Insurance. That covers an attorney preparing an offer and being present at closing. Had I known I was going to buy a FSBO, I would have skipped the realtor, and used the (damn near) free lawyer and done all the legwork myself.

Does that temper my original blanket statement sufficiently?

gatopescado: LOL. Good one!

Finagle Great tip! I hadn’t thought about web sites like that one! Unfortunately that is way more than I want to spend to protect a chair from dog pee.

romansperson True, I could have negotiated painting. I gave these people a huge to do list in the contract which involved much more than just paint. The sellers went above and beyond that list as well as the inspector’s list and did a lot of little detail cosmetic improvements, left me a wall of built in bookshelves and a number of other little perks such as a greenhouse. At the time, I was thinking, “eh, I’ve painted before, I can do it… no big deal.” Now that I’m walking around at work with paint in my hair… I’m kinda wishing I hadn’t spent all my leftover cash on the floors. But the floors were a necessity because of the animals. Let’s just say I agreed to do the painting myself as part of the compromise. . . with myself.

One other thing I want to point out: props to the sellers (my former neighbors) who took such great care of the house. The inspectors found exactly zero wood destroying organisms and very minimal wood rot (very common here in Humidity Land), which the sellers fixed prior to closing. In fact, my neighbor fixed spots of wood rot that he knew about but was not documented in the WDO inspection. The guy restores old houses for a living, did a fabulous job on my house and really… he’s just a class act all the way around.

16

I did paint my bedroom bright purple!
Only thing I can add is never buy a house on a concrete slab if you can avoid it. It’s like living on a giant rock with bugs underneath. They keep inviting themselves in.

Oh, and one more. Contractors always take longer than estimated. If they even show up at all. At least in my experience. :mad:

17

Realtors (Always a big ‘R’) aren’t the same as real estate agents. I found out that an agent can say anything they want to, but a Realtor (Realtor.com) can’t. This is because Realtors have to report to a local Realtor board. Agents don’t have to, but there is a national agent licensing board, yes, although they take forever to deal with things.

Anyway, Dogzilla, is that an agent or a Realtor? Look at their card, should say so on the bottom.

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handy, he’s a Realtor. In fact, he’s the current president of the Tallahassee Board of Realtors.

Really, I’ve given the wrong impression here. He’s no slouch. He was helpful. And he did facilitate the transaction and helped me keep everyone else on track with the timeline. I didn’t know I could have gotten through it all by myself until the process was over. See… the whole point of this thread was these are the lessons I’ve learned this summer, mundane and pointless as they may be.

I can’t believe many Dopers here have focused in on the Realtor part, but nobody seems to care about the furniture salesmen. Where’s the love for the furniture guys… or the contractors?

19

Given what you said about advice, you may want to ignore this, but i’d check where my sewer lines left the house. Many of them, especially in older houses, are ceramic–like clay pots. If Mr. Cement board drove over them and they weren’t sufficiently buried, they may have been cracked by the heavy truck. If he drove over the line between the house and the main sewer line, you may want to have a plumber check them out. It would be a bitch to find out months down the line you have a problem and not be able to prove who did it.

20

I’ve had good and bad furniture guy experiences, so I can’t add a lot to that. And I don’t think we’ve ever hired a contractor - we’re pretty hard-core do-it-ourselfers.

One lesson I wish I’d learned early on involves bidding on a house. We were always too timid in what we offered. I know in at least one case, we paid way too much. It’s a business transaction - if the sellers take your bid as a personal insult, that’s not your problem.