Ain’t got a home (yet)
The past two weeks have been pretty momentous in my family’s life, so I feel like I need to depart a little from my usual topics of discussion and write a little about what has been happening.
Lynn had surgery on Monday and has been recuperating at home since Wednesday; she has two more weeks of recovery before her doctor will release her to go back to work. On March 1, she will return to have her sutures removed, and to have a follow-up checkup. Only after that point will we be able to say that our lives are returning to some sense of normalcy. Lynn and I have written about the details of her surgery at her blog, Patati~Patata, so I won’t go into detail about that here.
Our other preoccupation of the past two weeks has been home buying, so we’ve had two rather stressfull items of concern on our plate all at once. It has been nerve wracking.
Only a couple days prior to her surgery, Lynn and I placed a bid on a home, with the qualification that the deal would of necessity be terminated if she died in surgery. She did not die, of course, but the deal did die anyway. We bid $115,000 on a 1000 square foot home; the seller wanted $134,000.00, nothing less, so we declined and let that house go.
Friday, about a week after turning down our first choice for a home, I went on my own to look at three houses. Unlike Goldilocks, I found the first one to be on too steep of a hill, and the third one too old and decorated in seventies-era yellow; but the middle house was just right. Sorta.
I am going tomorrow to sign the paperwork to make an offer on it. I am going to offer $125,000.00, which is only 2500 less than the asking price, so I feel like our offer will be accepted. And that is suddenly very scary. Lynn and I are both wringing our hands about whether it is the house. Lynn asks me if I can imagine us living in this house, and the truth is I can, but in the same way I could imagine us living in Washington itself, or Munich, for that matter. I can imagine it, but is it real and right?
Here is the realtor’s picture of the house; it’s a low quality jpeg, so you won’t be able to tell much about it.
It’s specs are 1350 square feet of living space; three bedrooms, two full baths; kitchen, dining, and living room. All appliances included, including washer and drier. Here’s a pic of the kitchen, which is ordinary, but clean and modern-looking.
The house was built in 2005, which is a big selling point for us. It hasn’t been inhabited long, and is essentially brand new. I can’t imagine that there are any structural or roofing issues that we will have to face in the immediate future.
Adding to the attraction of the place is that it is on a relatively new street. Three years ago, there was only woods on this side of the street; now there are new homes and some still-wooded lots all the way up the street. I feel like we’re buying into a location that will see further development–and increased home values–over the next few years. Potentially, we could stand to actually make some money on this investment. But ultimately, I am not thinking of buying this home chiefly to make money. I want a home for us, our own home, a place where we will be happy for at least the next couple years.
The downside to this house is the lot. It’s on a slight grade, and as you can see from the picture the front porch is quite high. The front porch is in fact at least six foot high, because on the far left side, I can stand underneath it without bumping my head. There is no outside storage, except underneath the porch. There is a door in the lattice on the left side, allowing access to the underside of the porch, where one would presumably store a lawnmower and other lawn equipment.
There is a rear entrance and rear deck that makes the house more attractive, but front access will be more common until we can lay a paved walkway around the house connecting front and back. The slope of the yard, however slight, makes walking around the side of the house slippery on wet days, so as I imagine it, we will have to pour a stepped walk around the right of the house. At the same time, I suppose we will pour a concrete driveway as well; currently it is only a gravel drive.
As I see it, this unfinished, sloped lot is the biggest drawback. The house is as perfect as a brand new house can be. It’s small, but we’ve been looking at small homes anyway. The current owner left some utility bills lying on the table for us to view, a nice gesture, and the utility bills are lower than what we are paying now in our townhouse.
So, do we buy a perfect house, with an imperfect yard? How much of a drawback is it that I would probably have to spend the summer trying to perfect an unfinished lot? I am open to advice, believe me.
4 Comments »
RSS feed for comments on this post. TrackBack URI
Leave a comment
Line and paragraph breaks automatic, e-mail address never displayed, HTML allowed: <a href="" title=""> <abbr title=""> <acronym title=""> <b> <blockquote cite=""> <cite> <code> <del datetime=""> <em> <i> <q cite=""> <strike> <strong>
If you are underpaying, it is probably not by much and if the neighborhood is growing, you can expect your house to mature at an even greater rate than as usual. I do think that you may end up want more storage eventually. Is there room to add an extra storage building on your property? We’ve about the same amount of footage with a garage and we still have lots of odds and ends in our rather large storage building. But, somehow, I doubt you two are the pack rats that we are.
Comment by Todd — Sunday, 19 February 2006 @ 9:53 pm
I’m really not going to miss having a garage. We really only need a place to store a lawn mower, which this house has (under the front porch). Even so, at some point I do see us adding a storage shed; there is room for it around back, if we clear off some of the trees. I don’t know how much a tree removal service would charge, but it shouldn’t be more than a few hundred dollars. 300 or 400? I’ll pay whatever it costs; I am not the person to be allowed to operate a chain saw, trust me. Keyboards are the most dangerous equipment I operate.
However, clearing trees is exactly the kind of work my Dad and Grandpa would have done themselves when I was a teenager, and they would have enlisted me in the task as well. I know how it’s done, I just don’t want to do it. I’d rather pay someone else. I remember when my Dad built our house on Pine Avenue, Grandpa, dad, and I dug the ditch for the sewer line ourseleves with shovels and picks. The soil was flinty and made for tough digging. In some places, we actually used these long, chisel-ended pry bars to chip away at the rock before we could shovel out the dirt/rock. That was possibly the single worst weekend of my life. It was like working on a chain gang! After that experience, I vowed that when I was an adult, I would pay someone else to do such manual labor. Call me lazy, I don’t care. I’ve done that kind of work, and there is nothing particularly envigoratng about it.
I think we’re feeling better about this house; our stomach butterflies from yesterday have flown away. I am still waiting for our agent to call me to come over and sign the paperwork for our offer. Luckily, today is a federal holiday. If the agent doesn’t call today, she will have to bring the paperwork over to the house for Lynn to sign tomorrow. I really think this offer is going to be accepted. It’s a good offer.
Comment by Matt — Monday, 20 February 2006 @ 11:32 am
I’m excited for you two!
I understand the manual labor bit: there’s a lot of stuff I am capable of doing, but prefer not to. As an uncle of mine said, that’s why I got a PhD, so I wouldn’t have to dig holes. And then proceeded to let his non-doctorate brothers and brother-in-laws dig holes. I don’t have a PhD, but a growing aversion to manual labor. It ashames me just a little when I think the people who work harder than me for much less, but not enough to do it myself.
That might be a conservative tendency sneaking in. I dunno.
Comment by Mel B. — Tuesday, 21 February 2006 @ 2:17 am
If I had friends who lived close by, I would help them with manual labor, if they asked. As for myself, no thank you. If it were a matter of not having the money to pay for others to labor on my behalf, I would do the labor myself; but I have money now. I can contribute to the economy and keep blue collar workers employed by paying them to do the work I don’t have to do. The way I look at life is that we all are going to die sooner, rather than later, and our money does us no good in the grave. Spend, spend, for tomorrow you die, that’s my motto.
My Grandpa and Dad did not necessarily take on all these physically demanding tasks because they wanted to save money, however. I think it had more to do with simply the pleasure they took in doing something physically difficult. I remember one summer afternoon, my Grandpa called me to come over to his house and help him cut down a maple tree. I go over, and he hands me a double-bit axe. “I think we’ll use axes,” he says, “Just to see how long it takes.”
The maple tree wasn’t especially huge, but it was at least 20 or 25 years old. After anchoring the tree so it would fall away from the house, Grandpa stood on one side of the tree, I stood on the other, and we went to work chopping at the tree. Today, I forget how long it took to chop that tree down, but I remember standing there chopping that tree and thinking, “This is an absolutely ridiculous way to spend a summer afternoon!”
The work proved very difficult, and at the end, when the tree finally fell, Grandpa turned to me and said, “Gee, now can you imagine what our forefathers went through clearing whole forests with nothing but axes?” Thanks for the lesson, Grandpa.
I also think Grandpa and Dad realized how lazy I was, and that if left to myself I’d sit around reading all day. Maybe they viewed this kind of labor as edifying for me. In the end, it reinforced in my mind that laziness is a supreme virtue, and I will never do that kind of work again, so long as I can pay someone else to do it for me.
Comment by Matthew — Tuesday, 21 February 2006 @ 7:29 am