So we might be buying a place...

Righto. Or if you're a POC looking for your first home.

 

Make note of the neighbors. You don’t want to live next to anyone who looks like they’re a bad mechanic for three cars in the yard.

 

Go to the neighborhood at 9 or 10 at night, and see how loud it is, or if there is a lot of traffic, etc. You don't want to live next to a party house or someplace where there are a lot of barking dogs.

 

We are fortunate. It's 100 percent owner-occupied and the folks next to us have been there for about 30 years per property records. The two townhouses on the other end of the strip were last sold in 2013. We're in an end unit, which is good.

 

I'm usually not a fan of "home warranty" deals, but it's not a bad idea your first year in a new place, just in case something goes awry that you or the inspector overlooked. Gives a little peace of mind for about $400.

 

No kidding. I had to peel a lot of wallpaper from a couple of rooms once, and decided then and there that I would never again have wallpaper in any home I owned.

 

Wallpaper is the work of the devil. First house I bought we had wallpaper to remove and the largest piece I managed to get off was the size of a dime. Miserable work.

House two also had a ton of hideous wallpaper. Eventually I figured out the secret: absolutely drench it in wallpaper remover fluid. It needs to be soaked all the way through.

Good luck with the inspection.

A slight dissenting view on home warranties: if you can get the seller to pay for it, go for it. Otherwise I wouldn't bother. One of the nice things about home ownership is you no longer have to beg someone to drop by at their convenience and do a half-assed job of repairing something.... unless you have a home warranty. My experience was not good.

 

We closed last month on the house that we had rented for a year. After my divorce, I thought I’d never be a homeowner again, but I gotta admit it feels nice. The only downside so far is that our interest rate is so low that I might still not need to itemize deductions.

Good advice above. I’ll add my piece: Read EVERYTHING, even the shit that looks like boilerplate. And I know it’s hard to scrape up a few extra Franklins at a time like this for anything that’s not gonna hang on the walls, but it’s never a bad idea to have a lawyer put a second set of eyes on the papers if you can afford it.

 

I never knew redoing a floor could be so expensive. Has anyone used a steamer for removing wallpaper? I've seen that trick on the googels.

 

When we bought our home, the seller paid for the home warranty for the first year. We used it for a couple of things, then renewed it for a couple of years before letting it run out. Fortunately our nephew is a plumber and he has helped us out a few times. Most of the time, we have to force money on him because his company does most of his work on new home construction and makes a shit ton of $$$$ there. He put a new water heater in for us and wanted to charge us only the price of the heater. We made him take some profit.

 

That happened to us. When we decided to renovate our deck in 2017, we discovered the original builder — who owned four adjoining lots — had built the corner of the deck over the property line. No biggie to him, since he owned all the property. In the years after, he sold off all four lots and it caused us major headaches in the renovation, even though the adjoining lot had been donated as a deeded conservation trust and is unbuild able.

Eventually, we paid the neighbor $5k for 1,200 sq. ft. of the lot and had the property line redrawn.