Home buying thread

No offense but why did you sell your house before moving into the new one? Closing on a home can take awhile and is not at all uncommon.

TheCutlery said:

Still man, it"s paint. There"s simple stuff to do around the house, and there"s shit that should probably be done by a professional. Paint ain"t shit in the grand scheme of things. Just like you can handle plumbing too. Plumbing is easy...you fuck up, you get wet, big deal. Electrical...well, might wanna get some help on that

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You fuck up plumbing, you can kill the occupants of the building with sewer gas. Or potentially burn down or blow up the building. It"s not as simple as people seem to think it is. But provided that the work will be inspected by the local authority, the average handyman can do basic renos to his own home.

Wolfen said:

So now this paint job is going to cost almost twice what I had budgeted. Yay

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As a contractor, I don"t know how Joe Public gets anything done properly at a reasonable price. Honestly, it"s ridiculous how many bad tradespeople and companies there are. Painters are the absolute worst, though. They"re all fucking scum. A job site will have zero thefts for the first 3, 6 even 9 months that it"s being worked on. The second painters show up, and to a lesser extent drywallers, shit starts going missing instantly.

I"m with you on hiring people though; I would much rather pay someone else who knows what the fuck they are doing to get it done properly, than to spend my precious weekends or evenings doing my own hack job.

The "professional" painters they hire around here were college students who needed a job for the summer and were getting paid minnium wage for long hours. They could give a fuck less about doing it right. I hope your area has it better.

The paint job we did we never told anyone until after we urged a comment or two about it from them. Usually they thought it was very professional and must have cost us 3 or 4 grand for all those rooms and to have it done in a week. It"s so much fun to break it to people that it cost us about $400 to do ourselves.

The painting company I hired this time is doing a great job. They started today and the difference in quality and speed is amazing. My wallet is much lighter, but the job is getting done right this time.

I really don"t think that"s a huge issue for the VAST majority of projects that a homeowner would have to deal with. I"m talking like garbage disposal/bathroom vanity/shower kinda shit here, not main sewer line. Of course there"s crap you can get in over your head with, but the vast majority of plumbing is pretty damned simple.

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You"d be shocked how easy it is, actually. Look under your sink, see that P-trap? That 1.25" of water seal is all that"s between your home, and the sewers (some places have building traps where the sanitary enters, as well). Depending on the jurisdiction, some sewers aren"t all that bad, but some are positively horrific.

If the drains and venting aren"t plumbed properly, you can have situations where the trap is "pulled" by momentum, siphonage, wind on the vent terminal, or any other number of things.

Once you"ve lost that small water seal, you are essentially venting the sewers directly in to your house, with all the hydrogen sulfide, carbon dioxide, and carbon monoxide that entails.

So like I said, in most cases the risks are minimal and provided that an inspector is making sure shit is up to code before the walls are sealed up, it"s not a big concern. But don"t think for a second that fucking up the plumbing in your home can"t be an extremely serious health concern.

And in actuality, plumbing gets much simpler the larger it gets. It"s all the smaller stuff for draining and venting fixtures that"s complicated. Once you"ve got a 3" or 4" line coming from a bathroom group, bank of fixtures, house or whatever it"s much simpler: shit flows down hill and you add the fixture units up to get a line size and to determine how much grade you need to keep the poop rolling.

My point isn"t that it"s particularly hard. I just get my hackles up when I see someone saying "oh, any idiot can do plumbing, that shit"s easy, not like electrical!" Both if done improperly can be a serious hazard to your health and your family"s. Neither are all that difficult for what the typical homeowner is doing, however I think we can all agree the typical homeowner shouldn"t be allowed to hold a screwdriver most days.

Eomer said:

My point isn"t that it"s particularly hard. I just get my hackles up when I see someone saying "oh, any idiot can do plumbing, that shit"s easy, not like electrical!" Both if done improperly can be a serious hazard to your health and your family"s. Neither are all that difficult for what the typical homeowner is doing, however I think we can all agree the typical homeowner shouldn"t be allowed to hold a screwdriver most days.

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A Bad plumber is almost the worst sub you can get. One word - pipes in concrete.

Story:

I was VERY anal about building my house, I was down on the jobsite at least twice a day. I caught some pretty massive errors just in time... like the footings for my garage being 5 feet short!

So, the plumber lays all the pipe inside the footings, and they come pour the pad. They stamp and cut the concrete, and start framing, right?

Well, they get the basic framing up, and I walk into the master bath. The "toilet drain pipe" is off by about a foot. This is in just a toilet-only room, maybe 4"x2" total. No chance it would work, toilet wouldn"t even fit in the room now.

Well, had to cut the fucking concrete out of the room, with the framing all up, redo the pipe, pour the concrete, and restamp it.

They stamped it with the wrong pattern as the rest of the house. So we had to do a thin pour on top if it and stamp it AGAIN. Looks totally retarded and will probably have to just tile over everything when we sell the house.

Other things the plumber did:
- Ordered a bisque garden tub (jacuzzi size, no jets). Gets us a white jacuzzi tub. Tell him to send it back. Argues. Finally gets a new tub... a white garden tub. Argues. Tells us he"d have to drive 2 hours to vegas to get a bisque one! Argues. Finally goes and gets it, looking at me like I fucking shot his grandma.

- Ordered a bisque 2 basin sink. We get a 1 basin stainless sink. Granite guys install sink and counters before I can see it. Plumbers response? "Oh, that was for a commercial job, you got the wrong sink."

- Order a oil-rubbed bronze kitchen faucet. Get a copper one. He says they "look the same to him." Finally get it replaced after much argument.


Sadly, so much work was done it wasn"t going to work to just find a new sub, but since then, my father-in-laws company has moved to a different plumbing sub.

But yeah, next house I build, I am going to oversee and measure everything myself.

^often times the plumber"s given wrong measurements to go off of, as well. Not saying that"s what"s happened there, but most of the time when we have a problem with misplaced sleeves in concrete buildings, they"re all out exactly the same amount. Gee, could it be that the carpenter or drywaller/steel stud guy shit the bed and gave us the wrong grid line?

That said, we pretty much expect to core 10-20% of our holes because of us fucking up, or someone else fucking up.

opiate82 said:

Stuff

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Do you have an agent (for yourself)? I"ve dealt with several REO"s and SS"s prior to writing them off and buying a normal sale, and never, ever, was I told we"d be locked in by simply making an offer. We were allowed to back out up until AFTER the home inspection (losing the cost of inspection, of course).

Is this shit really down on paper you signed?

There"s no way I"d agree to terms like that. When we bought our house (as stated, normal sale) we withdrew 2 offers on SS"s, one of them had been sitting with Countrywide for 4 months. Our agent mailed both banks (BofA and Countrywide) letters withdrawing our offers, this is how well they are at paperwork, 2 months after we lived here (making it 6mos on one offer we withdrew), both of the previous offers were accepted.

I"m lucky in that our landlord at the house we rented felt sorry for us. I had called her (crying), saying I knew our lease was up but we"d had 3 offers out, seen upwards of 80 homes, and had nowhere to go. So she let us rent month to month with the agreement she could show people our home, and we"d pay a full months rent even if we left on the 6th of the month or whatever day.

If I were an investor, I"d go after distressed sales. Otherwise, there"s absolutely no way I"d ever put myself through that kind of stress again. I will always be asshurt about the house that got away, and I hope that mother fucker who lives in it now gets termites, the really strong ones from Texas!

Grats man, always good to see people someone get the home the always wanted.

Zeste said:

You gotta build for cheap, then sell after 2 years of living there and take the profit. Roll that profit into your next house you build, and do it again. Do this 4-5 times over a 10 year period, and eventually you can build your house for cash.

My cousin has done this, and right now as it stands, his next house should be nearly mortgage free.

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Your cousin did this during an intense, overinflated housing boom. Can we figure out why this might not work now?

My short sale took around 3 months. It would have taken a little less time but the owners had a second mortgage that had to be dealt with.

Here"s proof that banks will take just about anything: The owner"s owed the second bank $46k. The bank wanted 10% of that before they would sign off. We talked them down to $3k.

We did 14 day escrow. Moved in as soon as recorders finished (usually 24 hours after close). It depends on how fast your lender works and if the seller will agree to a fast close. I don"t know if it"s true, but I heard a lot of lenders don"t like 14 day rushes, could probably try for 21. Mind you, 14 worked for us because I had every detail updated every week we looked for a house and had every single thing prepared in advance.

I used UAM (United American Mortgage / Brokered to Chase) and worked with them to keep all records current.

Ravvenn said:

Do you have an agent (for yourself)? I"ve dealt with several REO"s and SS"s prior to writing them off and buying a normal sale, and never, ever, was I told we"d be locked in by simply making an offer. We were allowed to back out up until AFTER the home inspection (losing the cost of inspection, of course).

Is this shit really down on paper you signed?

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Yes we have our own agent. Not sure what made you think we were locked in, but, we can back out of the offer if we find something else and/or get sick of waiting for their bank. We just haven"t found anything else in our price range that compares to the house we have the offer in on.