Thu 7 Aug 2008
At BBQ, Inc., we’re house-hunting. And while we’ve been reading the likely resources, I can’t help be feel curious about some of the more personal weirdities folks have encountered in their own housing adventures.
What most surprised/dismayed/thrilled about a new place (house, condo, apartment, hollowed-out tree in the woods, whatever)? What things caught you off-guard during or after you made the decision?
(And a quick shout out to It’s Lovely, I’ll Take It, a very fun terrible-real-estate-listing-photos blog run by a Seattlite Mefite.)
Posted by Josh Millard8 answers so far!
Okay, let's hear it.
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The thing that caught me completely off-guard about the house I’m sitting in right now is how truly/madly/deeply we fell for it. They did a really good job presenting the house during their Open House (no clutter, cleaned up, etc), but we completely overlooked some obvious stuff. The previous owners were, it turns out, complete incompetents: projects were started but never finished (notably attempts at molding that ended as soon as they came to a non-straightforward cut). This house had maybe a dozen eye sores when we moved in; we noticed 0 of them during the Open House and only a few during the home inspection (not the inspector’s fault, it was mainly cosmetic. This is only a working theory, but if I had to do it again, any house I fell hard for, I’d step outside and then enter it again as though I completely hated it and was trying to find fault. It wouldn’t have stopped us from buying this house, but we would have walked in with a better idea of what was happening.
The other thing is that a house is a job, but it’s a weird one. Because it’s endless. It’s Cuchullain versus the waves. And yet, our previous house was a fairly new attached townhouse and it was boring to not need to do much. It never felt exactly ours (though that may have been the neighbors). Our new dream is an old farmhouse far away from everyone. And if we never invite anyone over, we’ll never need to fix any of the rot.
(Figured this was you.)
The previous owners were, it turns out, complete incompetents
That’s an awesome photo set. I have all kinds of complicated feelings about that whiteboard.
This is only a working theory, but if I had to do it again, any house I fell hard for, I’d step outside and then enter it again as though I completely hated it and was trying to find fault.
That’s actually a pretty good idea, yeah.
(Figured this was you.)
Yup! And, y’know, I’m gonna go retcon a proper shoutout to that blog into the post, because it’s darned great.
complicated feelings about that whiteboard
Me too. Two-and-a-half years later, it still hangs where I found it.
I’m gonna go retcon a proper shoutout to that blog into the post
Better tag it with “happenedonearth606″ so everyone knows.
We bought our house in Austin in the middle of a crazy seller’s market–anything decent was getting offers the day it listed. I couldn’t even go see the house before we made an offer because I had a class that evening. But I’m famously unpicky, and my wife checked it out, so we put in an offer.
Mostly, we got a pretty good deal, but we were dismayed to discover later that there were seven very loud and largely unsupervised children living next door, staggered in age about nine months and ten minutes apart. They seemed to spend most of their time playing the “who can scream the loudest” game and inexplicably flinging their toys over the fence into our back yard.
We didn’t realize until after moving into our current house that several of the rooms did not have overhead lights. The old owners had lots and lots of lamps, apparently. We came in, flipped the switch, and got…no light.
Ah, JD, that’s a good one. Wish I’d through to flip the switches and see if any of the outlets were wired to a switch in our house. In my defense, I did notice the finished third floor of a house we looked at did not actually have any power. Not even outlets. So keep an eye out for that if you’re looking at hovels.
The only entrance to our 5-foot crawlspace, where the water heater is, is in my bedroom closet floor.
The previous owners of this house turned the then-garage into a family room and added a new garage onto the front of the house. They put an entrance to the attic in the new family room. Prior to that, the only entrance to the attic was in my parents’ bedroom closet, requiring you to take out the shelf and closet rod to get into it.
Boo to bad design.
Do rentals count?
If so, first week in the new apartment building I open up the big steel hallway door only to find a full SWAT team on the other side, right in front of my apartment. As it turns out, they were visiting the neighbours. The same neighbours who broke into my apartment, and apparently gave my original Nintendo to their kids for that Christmas (and when I called the cops, they did nothing).
If rentals don’t count, we bought 5 acres of undeveloped land, only to find that the neighbour built his fence 3 meters on my property.