My wife and I are about 3 weeks from closing on our first house and I am losing my god damn mind. All of our finances/budget work out while still having savings for emergency repairs, our inspection went well after having to back out on the first we offered on (tree fell on the house after offer was accepted, thought we could fix but it was a wash) and we really like the area and first impressions of our neighbors.
I know buying a house is a top “most stressful thing” an average person can go through, but this is a lot harder than I thought and I didn’t downplay it in my head. I am guessing I will feel like this for the first year or two and progressively it will become normal right? We have a lot of support from our families (financially, emotionally and labor/handypeople) so I am still optimistic about the whole thing, but my appetite is non existent and insomnia seems to be working in overdrive.
Our house has a partial park view. It’s nice. And, in about 3 years we’ll have a full park view because the pipeline running through the city is undermining the foundation of every house in the neighborhood and we’re all slowly sliding into the park.
But you’re going to be fine…
The intense, intense, like your feeling pretty much dies down after closing and you can get a bit of a high having your own place. Assuming its a fixer upper (I have no basis for anything else given affordability in my lifetime) you will unfortunately get headaches with repairs and refurbishing and taxes and all that good stuff. Assuming you bought something you could afford with a 15 year fixed (now you see why my experiences are with fixer uppers) but got a 30 year fixed but overpaying on a 15 year timeline you will have a nice feeling knowing you can drop down to pay the minimum if things are tough and then if you can keep the overpayments going for 5 years or so you will get to the point where its almost impossible to be underwater which is a great feeling. If you have assesments (I have never had something with its own private lot) you can find that the taxes and assesments alone can be pretty close to what rent would be depending on how crazy or reasonable the rental market it but at least it stays stable at or below what rent would be so that is nice, but it never just goes away as an expense and even if you have your own plot if you are not spending what typical assesments are for upkeep then you are likely letting your place go.
eh you get used to it. for me the anxiety from first house went down within a few weeks/months after moving in.
It’s still a shit process every time. so ya never get used to the shit process of selling and buying a house.
I hear some folk have sweet stories of fantasy where rainbows and birds bring them the keys but I didn’t get those in my filtered reality bubble.
maybe it’s them there rich folk I been hearin’ bout.
Yeah was expecting it to suck ass. Two of my cousins bought houses around 2022 and I helped with some of the work at their places when they first moved in, so I knew nothing would be perfect and got an idea of what we could do ourselves/with a little help.
But yeah I happen to know a couple who had rainbows and birds deliver their keys. My SIL’s SIL (there has to be a word for that) married a trust fund kid who’s dad owns a car dealership. The dad was buying a house in a newly developed area, and decided to buy the house next to his and gift it. They have not been a good source for advice.
Just got past 1 year ownership of a new build and had the 1-year warranty inspection done and worked with the builder to do the repairs. I think it has only started to calm down now, as we’ve finally experienced one year of living in the house and we now know what to expect throughout the year. Except for emergencies and major unexpected issues of course.
Congratulations! May your new life as homeowners bring you happiness!
Make sure you know where the water shutoff valves are, and that the electric breakers are labelled. And do not, I repeat, DO NOT start any DYI project on a Friday afternoon.
It takes a while to get used to the new house after you move in. You are hyper aware of little things that you might have missed during viewings, mainly due to being responsible for maintaining it now. I remember being alarmed by floorboards creeking while I went to the bathroom one night after moving in. It’s almost like learning a new musical instrument or something.
That said, you do settle in after a few weeks. Our settling in was delayed slightly by a leak to the shop downstairs which turned out to be the exit pipe for the whole block (so not so bad) but took a while to get to the bottom of. Now, it’s been more than 2 years and I’m not sure where the time went.
My advice would be to try and avoid the temptation of leaving boxes around unpacked. Getting everything stored away correctly will make you feel at home much faster.
It’s been about ten years in my house, the list of needed repairs is getting longer faster than I can fix them.
The house is probably at least a hundred years old, so you might not have that issue.
More frustrating: for every little thing you do manage to fix, three new jobs pop up!
And if you’re as talented as me, those three new things are a direct result of attempting to fix the first one!
Ouch!
This one is about 90…oh no
About 2 year mark things start to fall in place at year 4 it will truly feel like home. It’s
It is what?
I’m dying here with anticipation.
It’s… is what happens when you are at year 5 in your home and hear the pitter patter of 2 small feet getting into something they shouldn’t.
Everything you’re feeling is normal. Stay optimistic. We were in your shoes not that long ago and went through the same thing. Keep breathing, deep breaths, maybe take up some breath focused meditation for 15-20 mins a day. Or even some yoga can calm your nervous system. There will be unexpected setbacks but you’re going to work through it all and come out the other side just fine. Personally, I’ve had to redirect my attention to just tackling one thing at a time and keep plugging away so I don’t get overwhelmed with the magnitude of all the issues together.
How does one eat an elephant? One bite at a time.
I think after 18 months or so you will have a good feeling for what you bought. There will still be things to do. There will ALWAYS be things to do (some of which will be very expensive). But as far as coming to terms with exactly where everything is, what the quirks are, and whether you can live with them, you need all 4 seasons and a bit.
Didn’t think about seeing how everything holds up during all the seasons. Windows and AC are only a few years old but the furnace is closer to end of life than new. Guess we will see how it goes this winter. I’m sure there will be a lot more to consider that I don’t even know about yet.
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When you’re tired from work but you’ve still got to clean the whole thing to ‘protect your investment’.
Also because it’s nice to live somewhere clean and tidy?
It all becomes normal after a while but I still stress about the things that could take it away. Treefalls during big storms and fire hazards and places where people might trip and gutter overflows and was that a carpenter ant and and and.
A now, ten years later, we’re doing some minor remodeling and a lot of those money stresses and fears of the unknown are coming back.
The first house our offer was accepted on had a large tree (the biggest tree I ever saw IRL besides some state parks) and had a credit to get it removed. 3 days after our offer was accepted a big storm came through and a branch fell, destroying the roof on the back half. We went through with the inspection because they told us insurance was replacing it, but we walked into a house with water going from the roof to the basement. There was even water pooling in the breaker box. We mentioned everything we found to them and they just said “well our neighbor is the contractor and he can do the roof and some of the walls. If you guys want to talk to insurance or find another contractor that’s fine”. We backed out after that.
Edit: There were multiple broken struts in the roof and they “didn’t know about” and said the neighbor could fix them. We looked up the neighbor and he’s just some guy with an LLC doing handy work. Nothing against that but when it comes to structural work, I would want an artitect or engineer to take a look, not some handyman who can “fix it” while missing a lot of the damage our inspector found.
Dodged that bullet, wow.
Dodged an artillery shell!
Honestly for me it was when we moved in that things started getting more calm.
I did not like all the uncertainty of the transaction hanging above my head.
Now it’s been a few years and we’ve added gardens and done a few upgrades and we have our furniture and spaces, and it’s my happy place.
The magic wears off as soon as the first expensive thing breaks.
It has been 5 years. Next door has been doing construction for the past 9 months, they have destabilized two of the property border trees that could potentially land on my house. They have literally lashed them to the frame of the house in the meantime at least. So I’m a little biased here haha
The stress is as bad as you make it usually though. Sometimes you just have to let things be suboptimal for a while to maintain your mental health.
