JonInMiddleGA
08-27-2005, 07:54 PM
Today was day one of house hunting for us.
Yuck. OMG yuck.
It was a really simple plan, honest it was.
3 houses to see
House 1 - really a farm, not a house. Asking price out of our target price range by nearly 50%, this was more like browsing than seriously looking.
House 2 - Expected to be nice but eliminated quickly due to being located immediately next to a Georgia Power sub-station.
House 3 - A big-time potential winner, we're talking about the kind where you really think there's a pretty good chance that you'll take the tour & make an offer before you leave (based on the location, what you've seen in the printed & online info, etc).
So, House #1 is about what was expected. Aside from the price, it was really a lot more grounds & a lot less house than we would have wanted. But if anybody is looking for a nice place to have about 8 horses, let me know.
Well, the only gripe really at this point is that we ran a little long & in order to match up all the agents schedules & such, we needed to flip-flop the order that we visited #2 & #3. No biggie though, off we go.
So House 3 is next, very high expectations. We know the asking price is about 15%-20% over our target, but after 4 years on the market, there's a good chance that an offer would be taken. Walk in the back door, no problem. We know the kitchen is a complete tear out & remodel going in, so it's lack of appeal is no problem, plenty of space to do what we want in there anyway. Next up is the addition that would become my new "cave" - combo office & play room for me. Plenty of space, good lighting, even direct access to the back porch which I found surprisingly appealing ... and then it started.
Something catches my eye & I realize there's major league water damage to the ceiling, an obvious major leak problem. We revisit the kitchen area (also added on) ... same tell-tale signs of water damage & leaks. Start back across the foyer between the two & discover the first bad floorboards. We're not talking loose, not talking soft, we're talking about there's fucking holes rotted completely through, please-don't-step-on-me-unless-you-want-the-express-
elevator-to-the-crawlspace sort of rotted. From there, it was like a train wreck as we went from room to room.
Basically, this wonderful exterior & attractive at a distance interior had been neglected for the entire 22 years this family had owned the house. We're talking about a 1860 vintage house that's been neglected in even the simplest ways for at least the past two decades. The source of the leaks became obvious quick enough too, these fuckers were too lazy to clean the magnolia leaves out of the gutter (a 200+ year old magnolia towers over the house, certified as the oldest tree standing in the town). I hate gutters as much as the next person, but for crying out loud, there was literally open-the-window-
and-reach-outside access to the problem area. We leave shaking our heads, even our agent couldn't get out of there fast enough.
Incredibly deflated, we head for House #2. It's a raised cottage (think Charleston or New Orleans style) which I've always liked, but here's this damned electrical sub-station thing literally so close that if you reach over the back fence you're liable to get electrocuted. A constant & persistent hum is your nearest neighbor. Still, we go inside figuring we ought to at least look around. To our surprise, we found ourselves (me especially) liking a lot of what we saw.
Total opposite of the previous house, everything you can think of appeared to have been done in terms of regular maintenance & everything added/changed/altered had been done with as much workmanship & quality materials as you could dream about (for example, there's not just a fence, there's a $55,000 wrought-iron fence, those aren't just concrete "cannonballs" atop the fenceposts, those are hand-made-in-England $500 each single-piece construction (lead around a copper core, then covered with some sort of cement) cannonballs, about 200 lbs each, so they aren't going anywhere).
And for me, the piece de resistance -- a two-room structure out back, built for oversized office + "play area", basically like a dream come true.
But here comes the rub(s). The house is actually about 25% smaller than our current house. One of the big goals of the move was to gain space, not lose it. And yet we find ourselves looking for workarounds, ways to maximize the space. IF we could get the usual amount of negotiation savings, we could probably do the work needed to make it workable for us without busting our budget. The sub-station thing isn't optimal, but it actually produces significantly less noise than the traffic passing by House #3 (the uber-disappointing one) that we had been so high on.
But beyond the space & beyond the amount of interior remodeling we'd have to do, beyond the dollars is some pretty obvious truth: I really liked the house, and loved a lot of things about it (I could go on & on about stuff I liked, from the yard being the perfect size to me to the landscaping, etc, on & on I could go) ... but I'm 100% convinced that my wife would never really like the house. She was awfully game to try to find ways to make herself like it today, but it's virtually none of the things she was looking for. It's too small, not one of her preferred styles, etc. Once I said that straight out, she was still very "I don't know, with some work, I could ... etc" but I'm pretty sure she knows it's true.
And that all brings me to the really frustrating, downright damned depressing part of the scenario. We're very limited in the geography of where we can relocate, as we try to match the location of our major client AND the location of our preferred school(s) for our son. The town we looked at today is one of the very few places that works on both counts, and not working on either count really isn't an option. Unfortunately, all the houses currently on the market (and really, this could be said about 99% of the houses in the town regardless of their status) are either too expensive or too small or just totally out of synch with anything we want in a house. In short, we're looking very very fucked right now, and it's one hell of a bummer :(
Yuck. OMG yuck.
It was a really simple plan, honest it was.
3 houses to see
House 1 - really a farm, not a house. Asking price out of our target price range by nearly 50%, this was more like browsing than seriously looking.
House 2 - Expected to be nice but eliminated quickly due to being located immediately next to a Georgia Power sub-station.
House 3 - A big-time potential winner, we're talking about the kind where you really think there's a pretty good chance that you'll take the tour & make an offer before you leave (based on the location, what you've seen in the printed & online info, etc).
So, House #1 is about what was expected. Aside from the price, it was really a lot more grounds & a lot less house than we would have wanted. But if anybody is looking for a nice place to have about 8 horses, let me know.
Well, the only gripe really at this point is that we ran a little long & in order to match up all the agents schedules & such, we needed to flip-flop the order that we visited #2 & #3. No biggie though, off we go.
So House 3 is next, very high expectations. We know the asking price is about 15%-20% over our target, but after 4 years on the market, there's a good chance that an offer would be taken. Walk in the back door, no problem. We know the kitchen is a complete tear out & remodel going in, so it's lack of appeal is no problem, plenty of space to do what we want in there anyway. Next up is the addition that would become my new "cave" - combo office & play room for me. Plenty of space, good lighting, even direct access to the back porch which I found surprisingly appealing ... and then it started.
Something catches my eye & I realize there's major league water damage to the ceiling, an obvious major leak problem. We revisit the kitchen area (also added on) ... same tell-tale signs of water damage & leaks. Start back across the foyer between the two & discover the first bad floorboards. We're not talking loose, not talking soft, we're talking about there's fucking holes rotted completely through, please-don't-step-on-me-unless-you-want-the-express-
elevator-to-the-crawlspace sort of rotted. From there, it was like a train wreck as we went from room to room.
Basically, this wonderful exterior & attractive at a distance interior had been neglected for the entire 22 years this family had owned the house. We're talking about a 1860 vintage house that's been neglected in even the simplest ways for at least the past two decades. The source of the leaks became obvious quick enough too, these fuckers were too lazy to clean the magnolia leaves out of the gutter (a 200+ year old magnolia towers over the house, certified as the oldest tree standing in the town). I hate gutters as much as the next person, but for crying out loud, there was literally open-the-window-
and-reach-outside access to the problem area. We leave shaking our heads, even our agent couldn't get out of there fast enough.
Incredibly deflated, we head for House #2. It's a raised cottage (think Charleston or New Orleans style) which I've always liked, but here's this damned electrical sub-station thing literally so close that if you reach over the back fence you're liable to get electrocuted. A constant & persistent hum is your nearest neighbor. Still, we go inside figuring we ought to at least look around. To our surprise, we found ourselves (me especially) liking a lot of what we saw.
Total opposite of the previous house, everything you can think of appeared to have been done in terms of regular maintenance & everything added/changed/altered had been done with as much workmanship & quality materials as you could dream about (for example, there's not just a fence, there's a $55,000 wrought-iron fence, those aren't just concrete "cannonballs" atop the fenceposts, those are hand-made-in-England $500 each single-piece construction (lead around a copper core, then covered with some sort of cement) cannonballs, about 200 lbs each, so they aren't going anywhere).
And for me, the piece de resistance -- a two-room structure out back, built for oversized office + "play area", basically like a dream come true.
But here comes the rub(s). The house is actually about 25% smaller than our current house. One of the big goals of the move was to gain space, not lose it. And yet we find ourselves looking for workarounds, ways to maximize the space. IF we could get the usual amount of negotiation savings, we could probably do the work needed to make it workable for us without busting our budget. The sub-station thing isn't optimal, but it actually produces significantly less noise than the traffic passing by House #3 (the uber-disappointing one) that we had been so high on.
But beyond the space & beyond the amount of interior remodeling we'd have to do, beyond the dollars is some pretty obvious truth: I really liked the house, and loved a lot of things about it (I could go on & on about stuff I liked, from the yard being the perfect size to me to the landscaping, etc, on & on I could go) ... but I'm 100% convinced that my wife would never really like the house. She was awfully game to try to find ways to make herself like it today, but it's virtually none of the things she was looking for. It's too small, not one of her preferred styles, etc. Once I said that straight out, she was still very "I don't know, with some work, I could ... etc" but I'm pretty sure she knows it's true.
And that all brings me to the really frustrating, downright damned depressing part of the scenario. We're very limited in the geography of where we can relocate, as we try to match the location of our major client AND the location of our preferred school(s) for our son. The town we looked at today is one of the very few places that works on both counts, and not working on either count really isn't an option. Unfortunately, all the houses currently on the market (and really, this could be said about 99% of the houses in the town regardless of their status) are either too expensive or too small or just totally out of synch with anything we want in a house. In short, we're looking very very fucked right now, and it's one hell of a bummer :(