UPDATED IN OP: S/o s/o Did you/do you love your house ?

[cricketwife]

Brought to you by the castle and house threads, and our real estate woes.....Did you love your house (condo/apartment) when you bought it? 

I have REALLY wanted to move for the last 5 years.  We are finally in the position to be able to move now and it’s the worst possible time.  There is NOTHING on the market.  I’m struggling with knowing if I should “just settle” for something that meets our needs and nothing more, or if I should wait-  months, years???  Until we find something that we can afford that we LOVE.

I bought our current home 17 years ago and I loved it then.  It didn’t have everything on my “wants” list but it had everthing I needed and a lot of charm.  I still love the house but at 1100 sq ft and one bath, we have looooong since outgrown it.  DH believes that most people by a house that’s “fine” or “ok” but that very few people buy a house they *love*. So that got me wondering.  

What has been your experience? 

UPDATE: We moved to a house we love!!!  It looks like I originally posted on Nov 9 and was despairing that there was nothing on the market.  Well, Nov 18, late in the day, a house became available, I viewed it the next morning, without H, and we made an offer (without him seeing it). We were under contract The next day and closed this past Friday! It was a stroke of luck combined with an awesome realtor.  I still can’t really believe we got it.  I’m now two miles from work, which is also my children’s school, we have exactly double the square footage, two bathrooms, and lots of other things on our list.  This house was built the year I was born and has that 70’s “contemporary” style.  I loved it when I looked online and when I saw it in person, I loved it even more.  And the longer I was there, the more I loved it. As someone said, it isn’t perfect, but it’s perfect for us.  When H and the boys saw it, they all loved it too. H had the same experience as I did, loving it more in person, and loving it more, the more he saw.  We did stretch our budget beyond what we originally planned, but neither of us regret it.  We can afford it, just hadn’t planned to spend this much.  Four months of “looking” and we only viewed two houses, but since we found this once, it’s been a whirlwind.  I never would have thought we’d be in a new home for Christmas.  Thank you all for sharing your experiences. 

[af1212]

I answered “it was fine”.

But really there are some things that we absolutely love about our house and that are hard to find in our area. So we put up with the stuff we don’t love because those other things are more important to us.

[Captain Catnip]

I picked something else. Of the ones we looked at I loved it, but it wasn't exactly what I wanted. I love aspects of it and dislike aspects.

[TR]

I love our house. We bought it before we’d seen it (buying long-distance in a desirable neighborhood, realtor did a FaceTime walkthrough with me) and I first saw it the day we moved in. But it immediately felt like home. Are there some things I’d change? Sure. But I want to leave TX a lot, but our house is one thing I’d miss.

[dove]

I did not love this house when we bought it in 2018, but it had good bones and in an excellent location. Bonus - it was at a great price because it had been sitting forever and they wanted to close out the estate.
We have done so much work to this house. Gutted the kitchen, main bed/bath. There is not one room that hasn’t been touched, we finally finished the last big project last month.
…and we just found out we’re moving again 😭
On the bright side, with the upgrades and the market, we should make a killing!

[sonrisa]

I didn't love it, but we could afford it and I was very pregnant. "It was fine" overstates it. "We were able to buy it and when we did most of it worked." Since then, we have had significant issues.

We always planned to make major changes. We thought a major remodel would be enough but it's looking like we'll need to do a tear down for all the problems. Which puts it out of our price range. So I'm looking at every listing under 2.5 million hoping to find a magical unicorn that is in decent condition. No luck.

Don't be us. Be excited when you move in. 

[arehopsveggies]

My first house I didn’t love but I knew the minute I saw it that DH would love it. It was a really really trashed foreclosure though and I don’t have vision

I HATED our current house and cried when we put an offer in. But after some renovations it is just what we need, and it was really cheap so I’m glad our mortgage payment is so small

[cricketwife]

Nov 9, 2021 20:17:19 GMT -5 dove said:

I did not love this house when we bought it in 2018, but it had good bones and in an excellent location. Bonus - it was at a great price because it had been sitting forever and they wanted to close out the estate.
We have done so much work to this house. Gutted the kitchen, main bed/bath. There is not one room that hasn’t been touched, we finally finished the last big project last month.
…and we just found out we’re moving again 😭
On the bright side, with the upgrades and the market, we should make a killing!

😭😭😭

I hope you do make a killing!! 

[dove]

Nov 9, 2021 20:20:05 GMT -5 cricketwife said:

Nov 9, 2021 20:17:19 GMT -5 dove said:

I did not love this house when we bought it in 2018, but it had good bones and in an excellent location. Bonus - it was at a great price because it had been sitting forever and they wanted to close out the estate.
We have done so much work to this house. Gutted the kitchen, main bed/bath. There is not one room that hasn’t been touched, we finally finished the last big project last month.
…and we just found out we’re moving again 😭
On the bright side, with the upgrades and the market, we should make a killing!

😭😭😭

I hope you do make a killing!! 

According to the preliminary #s my realtor gave, I should make about a profit 55%. That’s after I take my expenses for remodel out. And I will need every penny because where we are headed the market is bananas

[wildrice]

Our house is fine, but no I don't love it. There are a lot of things I like about it - the layout fits our needs well, the rooms are a good size for 2 people, it's in a convenient location, it has the right amount of outdoor space, and it was in our price range. But it's a very basic house. If I was able to live anywhere I wanted to, without regard for cost, this would not even end up on my list of places I'm sure. But it's fine.

I honestly don't feel like I need to love my house, but I do love where we live, which is far more important to me. We are in a great location, I love the state and the community, and I feel like it has everything we want in a place to live. Unfortunately, along with being a great location, it is expensive here. Realistically I will not be able to afford something I LOVE here, probably ever and certainly not without sacrificing a lot of other things I care about (travel, entertainment, flexibility, saving for the future, etc). So I am fine that I don't love my house.



Eta: actually if I'm being accurate, the city would be my top choice of location, but for a suburb I can't think of anywhere better and we are very close to the city anyway. I love the general metro area and our suburb is well positioned to be able to take advantage of it.

[TR]

I actually went back and read the rest of your post and have to say, I would absolutely buy a house I didn’t LOVE. If there were some things I liked, it fit our budget, and the location was right? I’m good. We just got lucky with this house.

[nicolewi]

We have a really good house, but we actually bought it at a sheriff's sale without ever seeing the inside in person! We were starting to look and there wasn't much on the market, and this was a great deal. We bought and then did a lot of renovations. If I had been looking at all different houses, this wouldn't have checked all my boxes, but it's turned out really well overall. We have tons of space and a great yard. We've grown into it, in a way.

[dancingirl21]

Our first house, no. We were there for 7 years and it was home but never felt like our long-term home.

This one, yes, I love. We almost didn’t look at it based on the pictures but we were already in the neighborhood seeing another one so decided to see it. The layout is perfect for us and has pretty much everything we wanted. Granted it was pretty outdated, but we loved the neighborhood and the layout. We’ve been here for almost 5 years and have put a lot of money into it - finished the previously unfinished basement and added a bathroom, gutted and redid the majority of the first floor (all floors, entire kitchen, rebuilding bookshelves, painting our fireplace, etc). We still have projects we want to do but this house feels like home and we won’t leave it anytime soon, unless we have to.

[goldengirlz]

I LOVED our first house. I really don’t like this one. I know why we bought it (size, layout, commute, price) but it was what we could afford, not what we really wanted.

We’re currently in the market again and I only want to buy something I love. But we’ll see if it works out. The one thing I can say is that this house has appreciated quite a bit. And it’s a good house; it’s pretty uncommon to have three full bathrooms at this price point, and the extra space has been clutch during covid. What I hate though is being right on top of our neighbors and not having a lot of outdoor space (though it makes lawn care much easier.)

So I guess I hate the lot more than the house itself, which would be fine with some improvements (if we were willing to sink money into it instead of moving.)

[VillainV]

There are a lot of things we like about it, but a few things we’d probably change if we were going to live here longer. We typically only spend 3ish years in each house, which means we’re careful to only make improvements that either greatly impact our quality of life (like adding extra lights/ceiling fans) or increases our resale value (installing a pool).

But now we have a lot of things we would like our next house to have (like a mud room or at least a bigger entry way off the garage). Honestly, it’s more important to us that our space be functional than anything else. In the end, I don’t really see us “falling in love” with a house.

[bee20]

I had to buy my current house very quickly, and I was looking at a very competitive (lower) price range in a hot market. So, I bought a plot of land, the builder wouldn't promise a particular layout, just square footage, and it was a bit of a gamble. It's fine, the floor plan makes no sense but the house is bigger than I need so the wasted space only bothers me when I think about it. I still don't LOVE this house, but I really appreciate the financial security of owning, and the market has appreciated since then and priced me out, so I overall like this house and don't have regrets. It'll be 10 years in this house next summer.

My first house I absolutely loved. I saw it on the listings but it was about 15% above my price range, so I looked at other houses first. Not finding what I liked I decided to make a low offer (in a slowish market) and it was accepted. It had been empty for a couple of years and I put a lot of work into it, vs. the sterile new build I am in now. I cried when I sold that house (even though I was moving for happy reasons) and still think fondly of it. Honestly, I enjoyed living there but I'm fine being in a "good enough" house instead of a "true love", and it makes it much less painful to think of moving.

[abs]

I really loved our first house. It was more about the location than the actual house though. It was an old 1960's house with tiny closets, a very outdated kitchen that hadn't been updated since 1980, and the world's smallest master bath. Still it was charming, in the middle of everything yet somehow quiet, and we were very happy there. Sometimes I wish we hadn't have moved but our reasons for leaving were solid. The things I loved about the house--being close to downtown and better restaurants are not something we need right now anyways.

Our current house is fine. It checked all of the must have's--bigger kitchen, bigger bathrooms, more storage space, sidewalks. It's a more family oriented neighborhood. I would never say we loved it at first sight but it's been great for us. It's not our forever home but it's our perfect for this stage of life house.

[jinkies]

I didn't love it, but the market sucked at the time and we basically only had 2 houses to choose from that met our minimum requirements.

I'm very glad we chose this house over the other option and it meets all of our needs.

But it is a 1970 development house so it's never going to have any great character or anything. It's fine.

[namasteak]

My first priority has always been location.

Then exterior.,

Then interior minus major renos.

[brooke77]

I loved my house when I bought it in 2011. I love it still. It’s a great location and a wonderful layout. It’s 1200 sqft but feels much larger. It has so much natural light and just feels happy. We do need to move because we need dedicated office space for permanent WFH (and I would love a second bathroom!), but when we move I will really, really miss this house.

I wouldn’t move into a house I hated, but I don’t think it has to be perfect.

[jamie.1022]

I love our house and our property. I don’t LOVE the location; meaning the street it’s on. It’s a somewhat busy road but I like our neighbors and not being on top of others. I love the area (it’s where I grew up) and I love the school and the friends I’ve made from my son being at this school.

[ny96]

I love parts of it. It’s too small for us and has been since day one, but like what a lot of people have already posted, it was what we could afford and it’s in a great location. We are starting a major remodel soon and it has the potential to be a dream house, but still won’t have a nice yard (almost all hill).

[penguingrrl]

I absolutely love my house. It’s from the 1920s and has a lot of charm. It sat on the market for months in an area where houses don’t sit because it lacks some amenities (no garage, no owner’s suite, no central air) but they were all amenities neither H nor I had ever had anywhere we lived, so that didn’t bother us at all. Nearly 5 years later and we’re still in love and in awe that this house is ours. We weren’t planning to start looking to buy a house yet when we noticed it on the market and expedited our plans to hopefully get it and lucked out.

We’re beginning to plan a potential small addition to allow H access to both floors if his autoimmune disease gets worse (he was diagnosed out of nowhere shortly after we bought) that will also give us an owner’s suite, upping the resale value and making it an easier sell. But if that ends up cost prohibitive we will happily live here for the next 50 years and have a solution if he can’t use stairs.

[1confused1]

The second house my now XH and I bought was 100% my dream house. It had everything, size, location, layout, yard. I was absolutely devastated when I had to sell it when we divorced, I couldn’t afford the mortgage on my own at the time.

Ironically, the rent I pay now is more than my mortgage was then 😩

[icedcoffee]

I said I loved it. It’s not perfect but it has a really good layout and we could afford it. I still love it but it’s not perfect.

[cricketwife]

Nov 9, 2021 20:45:35 GMT -5 1confused1 said:

The second house my now XH and I bought was 100% my dream house. It had everything, size, location, layout, yard. I was absolutely devastated when I had to sell it when we divorced, I couldn’t afford the mortgage on my own at the time.

Ironically, the rent I pay now is more than my mortgage was then 😩

I’m sorry. 😢

[yellow23]

Our house is fine, it works for us. There’s nothing special about it. It was built in the 80s and we live in the first neighborhood in our town, it was a rural area before then. This means all the other houses in our area are newer and more updated than ours, but our house isn’t old enough to have much charm.
However, our neighborhood was built with good lot sizes. We bought our house because we love the yard and we back to woods and a stream. We see a lot of wildlife in our backyard, which we love. Most of the houses in our area have lots less than half the size of ours. We don’t have a huge yard, but it’s very large for the area where we live.

[starburst604]

Yes I loved our townhouse when we bought it almost 8 years ago. It needed updates which we have done and was never intended to be our forever home, but we’ve been here a bit longer than we planned. I love our indoor space for the most part but we’re ready for better space for entertaining inside and a real backyard. We have plans to buy a new home in the spring and we’d like a pool and 2 car garage instead of one. DD is at an age where we want a house she can have friends over to play with plenty of space. This next house should be the one we’ll live in until we’re empty nesters and decided to downsize.

I’ll miss this house in some ways though, we’ve made great memories and I love the proximity we have to a lot of conveniences. We moved here knowing really nothing about our town but we’ve put down roots and made friends and really love it here. I’m glad we took the chance. I will also mourn the small mortgage we have currently lol. 

[cricketwife]

Thank you, all. This is really helpful. I guess I’m struggling because my current house is not “perfect” at all but it’s a 1940’s home that has some soul/character/charm, whatever you want to call it. It only has one bath, a tiny, outdated kitchen, 2 beds and a third walk-through bed. Virtually no storage. So definetly not perfect, lol. It’s not anywhere close to ideal for our current life (2 kids, H is WFH permanently.). But it has beautiful, original hardwood floors, fantastic light, charming front porch, a great lot.

I bought this house in my 20’s, as a single woman. I’m really struggling with the idea of paying 5x more for a house now, and it just being “fine” when nearly 20 years ago, I was able to have “love.” I want a little “zip,” little personality, lol! But I guess comparing then and now is apples and oranges. It sounds like I should just look for something that suits our needs better. I appreciate the perspectives.

[rupertpenny]

We bought our place last spring, but I did and do like it a lot. I never had any illusion that I would get everything I wanted and I really think we got a decent deal on the apartment that was best for us. The building is 120 years old and has pretty stuff like tin ceilings and exposed brick, but we also have a modern, functional kitchen and modern(ish), functional(ish) bathrooms. We will not stay here more than 6-8ish years, but it is great for us now.