Home Buying Tips
Lessons From a First-Time Home Buyer: The Shifting Priorities Between Home Shopping and Home Owning
I have a love-hate relationship with the show House Hunters. Although I do find it entertaining and have been known to consume multiple episodes in a row (including a relapse of sorts during a recent trip to Kansas City), the people on the show bug me. More specifically, the choices the participants make often leave me scratching my head. In fact, I’m often able to guess which property they’ve purchased by assessing which would be the worst possible choice for them.
One recurring theme of House Hunters boils down to homebuyers just not being realistic. John Mulaney has a great bit about this — but it seems that these home seekers really have no idea what is possible in terms of location, budget, and features. But perhaps my biggest pet peeve is when people on the show step into a home and gasp at how much they’d immediately need to change. Mind you, these aren’t safety concerns or functional changes. Instead, they’re often cosmetic adjustments that they feel oddly passionate about. Personally, it hurts my head watching people turn down a home that better fits their needs than another just because they aren’t huge fans of the fixtures.
Since buying our house two years ago, this recurring trope has only stuck out more to me. That’s because, despite making a list of potential future projects while first touring the home and when we moved in, we haven’t bothered to tackle many of them.
The truth is that, since we’ve settled in our home, we’ve discovered that some of the things that bothered or we thought we’d want to change right away stopped being concerns. For example, I wasn’t a fan of the bedroom doors upstairs. In theory, swapping these out wouldn’t be too much work, nor would it cost a fortune. Yet, now that we’re here, I don’t really see the point of changing them.
Had we gone the House Hunters route and made everything “perfect” before we moved in, I fear we would have wasted a lot of money. Then, when more pressing issues arose — like our water heater going out — we might be SOL.
This isn’t to say that we’re completely content with the current state of our home. In particular, I’m itching to change out our windows. To that point, though, letting these smaller updates go allows us to focus more on the larger tasks (and expenses).
It’s actually amazing to me how much our priorities have evolved since buying our house. As I mentioned, some of the things we weren’t crazy about no longer bother us. And, on the flipside, there are of course some things that we may not have initially noticed (or have arisen since) that we now want to move up the list.
That’s exactly why I’d advise homebuyers — or at least those for whom budget is important — to consider living in their home for a bit before trying to make changes. After all, you may just end up liking more than you think, saving yourself time and cash in the process.
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