Do you watch Househunters? For those of you who don’t, here’s the premise: a potential buyer or buyers views 3 homes and selects one of them.
Here's what I learned: I'd be a lousy potential "guest", but it'd be fun, at least in my head, which led to the cartoon this morning.
I'm interested in seeing homes from all over the continent, but the reasons why someone accepts or rejects a home truly fascinates me.
Sure, there are some good reasons – the rooms are too small, or the location isn’t convenient – but the main reasons for selecting or rejecting a home seem to be:
Dear people in the show: These things can be fixed. They should never be part of the reason for buying your home.
Choose a home with good "bones", not good "clothes"
Ironic that a designer would say that, isn't it? But it was drilled into me at an early age to always select a well-built home, a home with good "bones" -- a strong foundation, good framing, sound structure and ignore the clothes -- the carpets, fixtures, cabinets, painting, and plumbing fixtures.
"Sure", you say, "but I have good taste. I need it to look good too." Me too, and I didn't say it'd be cheap, especially fixing a poorly designed kitchen. What I'm saying is you've never seen money drain so fast as you will in a poorly built home, where the guts and structure have been compromised. (I refer you to the movie, The Money Pit, which is clearly mislabeled as comedy. It's horror and clearly NSFW - not safe for work. That would be MY work; I can't watch it. You think I'm kidding. *winces*)
Damaged bones are rarely fixed with a quick repair; they require exploratory surgery, and a fairly intrusive fix. Plus, there's not as much joy to it. As my designer mother is fond of saying, "No one ever says, 'Oh, what a stunning glu-lam you have!' "
So when the buyer walks through the home, saying, “Oh, I really don’t like those chandeliers; they’re a dealbreaker", it surprises me.
How to spot the trouble signs
Of course it’s my day job, and I'm not a contractor, but the following checklist is ingrained into my system when I visit a client's home.
Here’s what I look for:
In one of the homes, the clients warned us the entire subdivision had been poorly built. Their house was on piers -- well, part of it was on piers – some of the posts hung in mid-air in the crawlspace. Fun. When we went outside to look at the kitchen area, we noticed a huge swayback in the roof which turned out to be poor framing in the attic. It was work that needed to be done and it unfortunately wa$n't cheap.
Something to at least consider if you’re planning to purchase a new home.
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