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Anyone feel like the housing situation is hopeless?
We live in a smallish (1400 sf) house. We have two official bedrooms, and one bathroom. We made a third bedroom out of a den, but it can not be a permanent situation. We have been here 5 years, and while did not overbuy, we did lose equity in the house over the past years.
We need more space. The room that DH and I use for a bedroom would be great play-space for the kids, but we owe more than the house is worth, and yada yada.
Has anyone here built on to their home? Did you do it yourself, or have someone else do the work? How much of an undertaking is that?
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Re: Anyone feel like the housing situation is hopeless?
We looked into all options before putting our house on the market. The problem we ran into with adding on was that the best (most affordable) way to add on to our house, would not be an easy configuration and would not have added enough value for resale. So if we spent $20,000 to add a room over the garage, it wouldn't increase the value of the house by $20,000... with the housing market so bad, we decided to sell (at a small loss) and buy something bigger where we gain the equity back because of the bad market. The plan would have worked great if we had found a house to buy before ours sold... but now we are moving into my mom's house as our selling closing is May 1 and we don't have a possible closing date on the foreclosure we are trying to buy!
Good luck with your decision.
I have a 1200sq ft home with only about 900sq ft of usable living space right now. Our attic has an additional bedroom, but it is in extreme disrepair, we need to do some major work there and there is no working heat up there either right now. The plan is to add a domer and make it a master bedroom/bath in the future with an office. We would also like to finish half the basement for even more room.
We bought at the height of the market here before it came crashing down. The grand plan was to live here for 5 years (it has been 5 now) and move when our oldest child was in kindergarten...
Yeah my only child is 2 and my house is worth 100k less than what we paid for it right now. So we are stuck here until D is in college.
So we are just making the most of it, since we have no choice. We have no land to build outwards, so we are just going to eventually add to the space we have.
Right now we are fixing the yard since it has major flooding issues, but once that is done we will tackle the basement in 1-2 years... baby steps at this point. Just saving and then doing.
We will hire when the time comes. It just takes less time with someone doing it for you - we renovated the space we live in now when we had no kids and it took several months to complete the work. With a kid, it would take twice, if not 3x as long.
After 7 years trying to concieve, 3 failed IUIs and 2 failed IVFs, my third IVF was a success!
My Christmas baby turned into a turkey bird! Dillon Richard was born at 34 weeks, 5 days on November 28, 2009 after 10 weeks on bedrest for preeclampsia.
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We also purchased our current home in 2007. We are in the process of building a semi custom home with a builder that is building a development. So that process is different than building a custom home. The worst thing about building like this is that you really have very little clarity into what your end cost is going to be. Meaning they give you the price of the base house but then when you get to the point where you have to make actualy decisions (after you've already entered the agreement) they can nickle and dime down to the toilet paper holder and electrical outlet. So that can be annoying. You can have a budget but sticking to it is hard and as our lawyer explained to us in the agreement with the builder - the buyer is naturally disadvantaged so you have to be willing to accept this.
We weighed out the fact that our current home is never going to get to the price we paid before it before our kids go to school and that a bigger home is now more affordable with a 4% mortgage that we can get now. So we're losing equity in our house and picking some up in less interest expense down the line. We are reolcating to a different state where our jobs have moved. We talked about it a lot and thought about it a lot and the loss of equity is painful but we just decided it was time to go forward.
Good luck deciding!
I live in a two-bedroom apartment and will never be able to afford to buy anything, not even a condo or townhouse, for as long as we live in this city. Even moving outwards into the outlying communities is not really an affordable option. But unless we both make major career changes, we are likely stuck here for work. So... yeah. Sucks.
Have you thought of purchasing a new home that better suits your needs and then short selling the one you're in now?
I know it's not an ideal situation because you'll lose equity and take a ding on your credit.... But we have friends who have done that... with the low market and low interest rates they've gotten into a great "forever" home at a reasonable cost and then after that deal was done they short sold the home they were underwater in...
Just a thought...
Yes! We bought at the height of the market in an "up and coming" area (read: not the best town). Well, instead of being up and coming, it turned out to have the highest foreclosure rate in the state. So the house is now worth $100K less than we paid for it (and that isnt even including the $70K that we put into it).
We really wanted to get out before the boys went to school so we saved every penny we had to come up with a 20% down payment on a second house and rented out our first house. Thankfully we made enough money to be approved for a second mortgage, because they won't include rental income as actual income unless it has been coming in for 2 years...so that wasnt a factor in us getting another mortgage.
We are taking a $400 a month loss on the old house, but for now it was worth it to get the boys to a better town (and near family). Hopefully at some point we can sell our old house and not have to bring money to closing. Or else, we will just have to keep renting it (and pray we actually get people in there that pay the rent). We have been very lucky with the renters we have now, they have been amazing. I really hope they stay for a while!!
While we are not actively looking to sell, we are so frustrated. Neighbor sold last summer and lost a bunch (similar home) which certainly effects value. Other neighbor is going on market in next month (smaller house, will sell for less)=another hit to us. Our house took significant dive on Zillow (i know not exact) and it has never been as low as it is now. We have lost almost 70K since we bought even though things are selling in town.
If you are adding on, have someone else do it. My DH is handy but I would NEVER allow him to add on to this house.
We had to sell our house at a loss 2 years ago (bringing about 12k to the table). It was really terrible but we decided that it was worth it for our long term goals (moving closer to DH's office). That said, if we wanted to stay in the same area but just wanted a bigger house, I think we definitely would have built on to our existing house. My parents did it when I was in high school and it made a huge difference, it is like a completely different house.
I would never do something like that ourselves, knowing what you're doing it way too important.
Also, just as an FYI, from what I understand, if you're building onto the first floor, it usually makes sense and doesnt cost that much more to add a second floor since the cost is in the foundation and roofing.
Good luck!
-----Lisa-----
I don't know if your husband would want to commute but my area has pretty reasonable priced houses:)