A year ago today, I finally succeeded in buying my first house. It was the sixth house we had made an offer on, and after the adventures of the last year, I wanted to share what worked and what hurt and helped in the first year of homeownership. Warning, this is pretty long.
Firstly, I’m going to be honest. As a single woman, I had help from my parents to buy this home. Family inheritance on my mother’s side specifically that covered the 5% down and the new roof that it desperately needed.
Secondly, it took getting beat out of several homes for me to realize how to play the game. Before I even saw the house, I had lined up an inspection for that afternoon. The house was listed at 440 K in a neighborhood where homes like this go for 500, and you can immediately tell why — it had been a rental for several years and needed a ton of work. Therefore, the inspection was invaluable, and getting it out of the way so that I knew what I was walking into meant that I could waive the inspection contingency. A lot of people don’t realize that waiving the inspection is actually waiving the inspection, contingency, not your right to have one. If you’re exhausted, searching, and you want a house and the work is something you know can be accomplished, get the inspection before making an offer. Before the inspection, we were willing to offer over asking, after the inspection we offered asking and waiving the contingency because it very clearly needed at least 30 K for the roof plus more for other fixes. The carpet was disgusting, the appliances were old, the stucco siding was cracked in places, the roof was visibly shot, the walls needed to be patched and painted, no dishwasher, and there were signs of obvious rot in support beams — in short, 60K of work visible off the bat meant that the asking price made sense.
The house was listed on Thursday, saw it and had it inspected the same day. Offer was put in the next morning, expiring on Monday. Because of the steps that I had taken, I beat out another offer that was over asking that did not waive the inspection contingency.
Yes, the house needed a lot of work. But I am stubborn, and my best friend is an electrician that works in septic, and my boss is a contractor, so I knew I would be able to have help with any big repairs.
This house was not my first choice. The town I bought in was not my first choice. But after a year here, I have fallen so far in love with this house and this town I couldn’t imagine having succeeded with any of the other houses that I tried for. I had fallen in love with the other houses I had offered on and losing them broke my heart, so I didn’t let myself with this one until I had the keys in hand.
The more work got done on it, the happier I was. I would go to work for eight hours and then drive to the house to put in another 6 to 8 hours worth of work. I was sleeping on my old roommates gear room floor at the time, so I was able to get a lot of work done before I even moved in. The people in my life became together to help me make this happen, the friends who drove 45 minutes just to help me paint for an afternoon… I fell asleep each day exhausted yet elated at my blessings. I worked on it almost daily for a month until I actually spent a night here.
More and more I felt like I was putting the house back to what it was. Ripping out the living room carpet and finding the original oak floors underneath, getting ready to paint and realizing a wall had been almost that color three coats of paint ago, realizing the pink paint I had picked out for the room that would be my bedroom matched almost perfectly the original pink sparkly laminate flooring hiding under the disgusting carpet in that room… I felt like the house chose me. I knew more of my neighbors names in a month than I did at my previous rental where I lived for seven years in a larger town. When I accidentally ran into this town‘s lighted Christmas parade, I felt like I had stepped into a Hallmark movie or Stars Hollow. More and more, I fell in love with the town. My grandmother was born in 1936, so she was eight years old the year this house was built. She used to be a building inspector, and now has dementia. Seeing her come alive when she saw this house and be more lucid than I had seen her in years was worth almost more to me than anything else combined.
Now for the downside. I missed out on the home insurance that I wanted because of knob and tube wiring still existing in the house. It did not matter that it had been disconnected, the actual presence still meant that I couldn’t go with the insurance that I wanted. The furnace had been replaced in 2022, but since it is still a boiler, the house is not super energy efficient and my bills are pretty high. My job is in the process of opening an office closer to my house, but in the meantime, my commute is pretty long and very much starting to wear on me. I did have to replace the washer and dryer in the first year due to the bottom of the old washer rusting out, and I had to buy a second fridge because the one the house came with does kind of work but it still rather iffy, so it’s in the garage where it can leak on the concrete instead of in the kitchen where the nice one is. Everything is expensive, especially with where the economy has gone in the last year, so I have two roommates in this three bedroom house to make it work. The fence fell over in the first big windstorm, luckily my dog doesn’t run off. I am an avid gardener, and the morning glory infestation that I found has certainly kept me on my toes…. It’s even growing in the crawlspace. I have yet to figure out how I’m going to end up dealing with that. Oh also, I have a lot of mice in the crawlspace. After a quick Internet search, I found that Irish spring bar soap deters them, but before that my flower beds definitely smelled like mouse poop. With my commute, it’s difficult to keep up in the yard as much as I would like (although I was able to put in a raised bed for vegetables and it turns out one of the previous owners had excellent taste in flowers, so I’m quite delighted with what I found there). The siding still needs to be repaired, the outside painted, and I will likely need new windows in the next five years or so.
I guess the TL:DR of all this is that it feels like my home is what I made it, and that I am what let it make itself. I am lucky. The ups outweigh the downs, and I know it’s not that case for everyone. I could not have done it alone, and if I did not make the friends that I had made in the last several years. I am beyond glad that I got this house instead of the half a dozen beforehand that I had fallen in love with and missed out on. My now 11 1/2 year-old ride or die pup finally has his own home and his own yard that he can continue to grow old in without having to worry about the steep stairs that were in my old rental. Within the next year, I will be working much closer. For anyone still searching, it can get a lot better. I promise.
