Homes

Lessons From a First-Time Home Buyer: The Things You Don’t Think About

I like to think that my wife and I were quite thoughtful, careful, and diligent when it came to buying our home. Not only did we visit the house a few times before making an offer — and taking the time to inspect various elements on each visit — but we also got a comprehensive inspection completed before closing. For the most part, that’s all worked out well for us, but there are a few things that have come up that we missed or honestly would have never thought about that have given us a few challenges.

A prime example of this involves the stairs down to our basement. One of the things we loved most about this home in the first place was that it had a finished basement. So, we immediately started making plans for the space once we bought the house. Unfortunately, our vision ran into trouble when we moved in and learned that our sleeper sofa would be too tall to get down the stairs and placed where we wanted it.

Then, a similar headache presented itself just a couple of weeks ago when we learned that the 90-degree turn required to go from the staircase into the basement itself made installing our new washer (and removing the old one, for that matter) more difficult than our delivery men were prepared for. Granted, unlike with the couch, they were able to make this work, but I felt terrible for putting them through this.

In my defense, seeing as there was already a washer in the basement, how I was to know that there would be any problem getting a new one in there? Also, for what it’s worth, these delivery men were also the second people to find it off that we don’t have a walkout from the basement. As someone who never had a basement growing up, I didn’t realize this was even a thing — but I guess our house is somehow uniquely annoying for these large items. Who knew?

Something else we didn’t consider (or at least not enough, apparently) relates to gutters. What’s funny is that we’d actually thought about them quite a bit before moving in and since! After all, we did have them partially repaired after our inspection found an issue and have previously considered getting those fancy, covered gutters. We also paid some mind to how we’d clean them in the meantime, purchasing a ladder within our first two weeks of closing. However, what we didn’t realize at the time was how our slanted yard would make it difficult to reach the gutters in order to (safely) clean them ourselves. In turn, we have yet another expense on our plates — and one that’s difficult to time since our massive tree will surely be dumping leaves for weeks to come.

My intention here isn’t to lament these oversights and errors on our part but to point out that there will inevitably be things you find out about your home that you either didn’t catch or never would have even considered in the first place! That’s exactly why it’s important to stay within budget when buying a home and ensure that you still have funds on hand afterward so that you can address some of these issues as they arise.

In our case, the solution to our basement angle problem is that we’ll need to find another piece of furniture to put down there — and, yes, I did make sure to tip the washer delivery guys extra. As for the gutters, it may be a situation where we need to pay a pro a few times before we’re ready to potentially upgrade them. That task gets added to our growing project list that we continue to tackle in order of importance to us (even though some have jumped the line such as the water heater and, now, washer).

Of course, there are surely some other issues that will present themselves in the future that we currently have no awareness of — that’s the joy of homeownership, ain’t it?