First off, the "budgets" they agonize over. By the time the 30-ish professional couple fusses over their "budget" of half a million, they've already lost my sympathy. I think I could find a way to be reasonably happy with ANY house market priced at $500K, and I don't have a vivid imagination.
These couples always obsess about having enough room for entertaining. Really? Most of the professional people I know put in long hours at work and are too tired and too short on time to plan large, elaborate parties on a regular basis. Make sure the dining room is large enough to host thanksgiving dinners, and let the rest go. Besides, once you have that baby that is somewhere in the nebulous future but you're still hoping to buy a house with a nursery for, there will be no more parties. That is, until Baby is old enough to want birthday parties with allllll of his/her fellow students plus a pony (but no clowns).
The kitchens ALWAYS need updating. It doesn't matter how fabulously beautiful and well-designed it is, every house hunter on this show wants all new appliances and the latest countertop material du jour. The lighting has to be canned, unless it already is, in which case it needs to become dropped lighting. Whether or not the current lighting or the proposed lighting changes provide enough illumination to work properly is beside the point.
I will concede the bathrooms. A shared bathroom with one's spouse NEEDS two sinks, and if the toilet and shower can be shut off from the sink/vanity area, so much the better. I've had both and you better betcha there are days you HAVE to dash in to brush your teeth at the exact moment your spouse lets rip the byproducts on the beans, cabbage and onions consumed the previous evening! So yes, be picky about the bathrooms!
Some shows feature people moving to exotic locations and obsessing about the views from each abode. Here is my advice: if you moved to Costa Rica to live on the beach, then choose the house that is ON THE BEACH and quit worrying about getting stainless steel kitchen appliances and a bigger walk-in closet in the master suite! You can find a big closet somewhere in Kansas, surely!
Here is how my house-hunting experiences have gone, in comparison.Our first time around, our budget was about $40,000. My husband was working a low-paying factory job and I was on disability for being on dialysis. All we wanted was a starter home because we were certain that once I had my transplant I would be going back to work and pulling down as much money as before. After all, this is what everyone in the medical community told us over and over again: the transplant would make me good as new, I'd have so much more energy They lied, but here again it's a subject for another blog entry. Anyway, we thought it was financially prudent to make payments toward ownership, gaining equity, instead of renting until we could afford the house of our dreams.
We looked at a cute little cottage on a large corner lot at White Birch Estates, a gated community out in the woods. White Birch did not have natural gas or cable. The cottage did not have a furnace, a water heater, or even plumbing for hot water. The lot was steeply sloped, had no garage and no room to build a garage except at the bottom of the slope. The house was at the top of the slope. It was near the top of our price range which meant putting in the furnace and hot water would be something Bill would have to do himself, and I had my doubts as to his abilities there. Plus having a garage would be years away. We passed.
We looked at a home west of Farwell just off M-115 in a cul-de-sac. It was all on one level, I don't remember there being a basement, large front lawn, small back yard, attached garage. There was no door from the house to the garage, so you had to go out in the rain and snow to get to the garage. The rooms were numerous and small. It gave me claustrophobia just looking at it empty.I said out loud that the rooms and doorways were too tight to fit my wheelchair, once that day came (and it did, not long ofter). We passed on that one too.
We settled on a 1300 sq ft house on a slab on old US-10. It had an open floorplan, old stained carpeting, crooked wallboard panels, an attached one-car garage, and mis-matched cabinets throughout the kitchen. We lived there fifteen years and managed to entertain on holidays, survive my transplant and two severed Achilles tendons, the loss of two cats and two dogs, the adoption of two more dogs, and the usual ups and downs a couple has when one is crippled and there's never any money. We still own it but it's up for sale, in much better condition now than it was when we moved in.
That was our make-do home.Since we moved in there, we lost Bill's mom, my dad, my aunt, and my mom. My aunt was a single lady and she and I had a close and loving relationship, much more so than I had with my mother. When my aunt decided to move into a retirement home closer to me, the little devil had half a million in assets, plus monthly pension from General Dynamics and her Social Security. Although she lost a chunk of it in 2008, she was still sitting pretty when she passed away. She left most of her money to my mom, her sister, but also left generous sums to my sister and I.
Bill and I decided to take our little inheritance, buy the abandoned property next to ours and build a polebarn on it, and re-do the kitchen an bathrooms to make them more handicap-friendly and attractive. But a neighbor of ours threw a monkey-wrench in our plans and decided to out-bid us (by a ridiculous sum!) on that corner lot, so we decided to move.
We looked at a few small places with bigger yards that were priced at about $80K or less, hoping for a quick sale on the house. But before we contacted any realtors, my mother suddenly died,leaving us half of Aunt Marie's estate plus the modest amount she was living on since Dad passed away. (I don't mean to belittle the deaths of these women, but my grief isn't relevant to this particular posting.) So we stopped looking for a month or so, until we could get a handle on what our budget for a house COULD be, what it should be, and what we should do with the rest of the money.
We decided that due to the volatile stock market, investment was going to be tricky, especially as close as we are to Bill's retirement. We decided instead to find a home we really really liked, pay cash for it, and fix it up in preparation for retirement now, while Bill was still working. And here's where the big snag came in: we couldn't come to any type of agreement on what would be "perfect" for us!
Bill wanted to move somewhere he could tear around on his racing mowers with no one close enough to complain about them. This often meant dirt roads, no cable and no cell-phone service. I wanted something on a paved road that I could drive in the winter and the spring thaw, I wanted high-speed internet and natural gas lines. Bill wanted a pole barn for his racing shop and I wanted an attached garage so I needn't worry about slipping and falling on my way to my car in the winter, nor about scraping the ice and snow off it. Basically I wanted one of the beautiful homes near Shamrock Lake on the north side of Clare, and Bill wanted a farmhouse out in Amishville, but without any Amish neighbors.
The first house we thought would fit all our needs was between Rosebush and Mt Pleasant, right on Mission (Old 27). It sat way back from the road, and was a cute pearly-gray color with rose colored trim. Attached 2-car garage, several outbuildings, and backed up to the freeway. There appeared to be some kind of trucking company on one side, so the only residential neighbor that might object to Bill's noise was to the south and quite a ways away. There was a huge back deck that reminded me of an aircraft carrier, and there was a screened gazebo at the end. But upon closer inspection we discovered that the garage had at one time been a separate building, and the add-on was entirely at main-floor level. The door opened to a short set of amateurishly made steps, which invaded most of the parking area on the near side. The steps to the basement were long, straight and narrow. Except for the kitchen, which was amazing, the rooms were all tiny as were the doorways. Very little closet space existed upstairs. The outside was perfect; the inside not so much.
Then we looked at a manufactured home high on a hill on the west side of Mission. It had an enormous pole barn but no garage. There were cute small flower gardens here and there on the hillside, and it was well within our price range. When we arrived to look at it more closely with a realtor, we discovered that the steps to the side door were unmanageable for me. There was a patio door on another wall but no deck. The only other door led to a basement that had NO INTERIOR ACCESS to the main floor. Inside we noticed that not only were there no appliances, the furnace was gone too, right down to the vents and grates, leaving huge gaping holes in the floor. Some animal had been kept in one of the "bedrooms," and there had been huge turds left on the rug. Bill reported that the basement could only be locked from the outside, not from the inside. That gave me the creeps so bad, I couldn't wait to get out of there!
Bill found a house about a quarter mile north of a paved road just a mile or two south of Herrick Park. It was a one story on top of a walk-out basement. It had about 8 acres of farmland, a big propane tank, no internet available except dial-up, poor cell phone reception, and a huge 4-6 car garage. Bill loved it, but it was unlivable for me. Again,much of the living space was downstairs, and the stairs were such that I couldn't get down to that level without going outside.
Finally while on the internet one day I found a place that had a manufactured home on 27+ acres, mostly wooded. The pictures showed the house looked like a log cabin, it boasted both a pole barn and a garage, there was a picnic shelter and a windmill in the back yard, it had cable tv and internet available, had natural gas heat, and low property taxes. Trouble was, the location was a secret! I scoured the internet, cross-referencing and back-tracking and finally found it just north of Harrison. My husband gasped. "Not Harrison! Harrison sucks!" Nonetheless, the day after Christmas we took the short drive up to check it out. And it was almost everything we ever wanted.
The house was in very good shape, and move-in ready. We closed in less than a month, hired people to change the carpeting to flooring and bought two new appliances (NOT stainless steel!) and some new furniture. We moved in the end of February and threw our first party three weeks later. And all for less than $150K. Great view, I love my eat-in kitchen, my big living room, my deck and front porch, my big windows, the big yard for large dogs to run and play in, the picnic shelter for our summer cookouts (guess what? We DO entertain!), and our trails through the woods winding past the two deer blinds. Now THIS is a story most people could relate to, don't you think?
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