LETTER ABOUT OUR FIXER

The Reasons We Shouldn’t Have Bought Our House

I’ve been meaning to write this post for a while now. There are SO MANY reasons we should have NOT bought our fixer upper. I am so thankful that we took the risk and took the chance, but it really hasn’t come easily. Even as I’m writing this, we are currently not living there.

REASON 1 — OUR SMALL BUDGET

Going into this home purchase, we knew exactly how much we could spend on the home itself to leave the amount of cash we needed for the exact repairs that we KNEW needed to be done. I want to highlight the part where I say the repairs that we knew about. That is key because going into ANY home purchase, there are going to be those repairs that you DON’T know about. The hidden repairs… you don’t see them, the inspectors don’t see them, but I PROMISE THEY ARE THERE!

Our rationale was that in this market, any home that we can afford is going to need extensive repairs and my husband is VERY handy, so we can do a lot of it ourselves. We will do what we can when we can. Basically we went into this with the mentality of a 5-10 year fixer upper. My husband being super realistic with his 10 years…because I’m like — NO MORE THAN FIVE haha!

REASON 2 — NEEDS FOUNDATION WORK

This is a HUGE RISK! For some this is a huge deal breaker. Honestly, I thought this was a deal breaker for me. It just sounds scary and you never really know the full extent of the work needed until they start digging to fix it. Growing up my parents purchased a house that needed foundation work and had mold damage, so I knew the drill and how extensive the repairs are. My childhood was filled with remodeling (probably a big reason I’m so drawn to it). Anyways, this home had several inspection reports by the time we saw it. This is both good and bad. Good because we don’t have to pay the extra cost for more detailed inspections as they had to be disclosed by the seller. Bad because there were SO MANY NEEDED specialty inspections… Like our realtor sent us pages and pages of problems. Okay, back to the foundation report - the one they disclosed to us said that it needed approximately 12K of foundation work and our house was off by about 5 inches (that’s a lot, by the way). The cracks were readily apparent in the drywall and brick. I’m talking huge cracks here.

This didn’t scare Reed off. First of all, it really is a very common problem in Texas. They typically say it’s not IF you're house is going to need foundation work it’s WHEN. This is due to the soil in Texas. Knowing this, we also knew that any house built 30+ years ago is likely to need foundation work.

REASON 3 — NEEDS PLUMBING WORK

All we really knew from the reports was that it was in need of plumbing work. They didn’t know the exact issue but the testing showed there was likely a leak somewhere. The estimate that was provided was around 12K, as well.

I honestly, don’t remember how we rationalized this one. That was a big chunk of change with not a whole lot of information. We knew the toilets flushed and the water turned on and I guess that was enough for us for the time being.

REASON 4 — EVERY SINGLE THING WAS OUTDATED/NOT WORKING PROPERLY

The only reason this is a reason is because the cost associated with this fact. From the oven to the toilets to the shower hardware, nothing really functioned well or correctly anymore. This is 100% due to it ALL being original to the house and I have to give it all major props for surviving this long. But that was also a significant chink in the budget.

We concluded that we would go room by room in updating the house and do what we could as budget allows. This again is why Reed factored in the 10 years.

REASON 5 — THE COSMETIC DAMAGE

Because of the foundation issues, the damage to the interior and exterior cosmetic was very very EXTENSIVE. Like scare people away scary. There were cracks in any room you walked into and the outside literally had bricks falling from the windows. Above the front door you could tell the bricks had separated from the house all together and at any moment might fall on top of you. Now that I’m talking about it, it was more than just a cosmetic issue - it was also a safety issue.

As with everything else, we will just put that in the 10 year plan HAHA!

REASON 6 — THE LEAD/ASBESTOS PAPERS YOU SIGN THAT YOU REALLY DON’T THINK THROUGH ENOUGH

Okay, this was the surprise of it all and the real kicker to the whole thing because I actually wouldn’t have even written this as a reason before we bought the house because we never even thought about it really. This also goes into the category of those UKNOWN REPAIRS I talked about earlier. This has been our biggest unknown. As far as the lead paint goes, I knew that you could get a primer to block it and when we actually tested it, we got lucky as there was no lead paint in the house. HOWEVER, the asbestos. I knew very little about asbestos at the time besides that it was bad and it’s usually obvious what asbestos is. I didn’t think it would be a worry here. It was banned in the early 80’s and came to light in the 70’s so we likely were okay with a 1975 house. NOPE! HARD NOPE! Also, it is NOT a readily apparent thing!

As we started the laundry room renovation - the first room we were going to do in the house, it was suppose to be quick and easy and give us all the confidence to keep going. We decided to have an environmental company come out and test a few spots just for my peace of mind. Holy smokes, the results of that really changed our entire reno plan. We found out that the walls, ceiling, flooring all contained asbestos. It was the popcorn ceiling that tested positive, the backing of the linoleum flooring, and the mud/joint compound/texture of the walls. So yea, this was not a factor in our small budget and was the biggest unplanned expense OF ALL TIME. In the end, I’m thankful that we are where we are…this has pushed our deadline to a lot sooner for a lot of things and it has very much been a “figure it out as we go” thing. My five year plan is winning out hahaha!

SO WHY THE HECK DID WE BUY THIS THING?

I’m sure you’re asking yourself this question…WHY did you ultimately do this? And to be honest, it just felt right. From the moment we saw the house, it just felt like home. It felt like a place we were going to live. I can’t really explain it past that. We knew how crazy of a risk it was. Multiple people asked us if we just had loads of money to burn…We didn’t and we still don’t. We knew there was a ton of stuff that we could do ourselves. We knew this thing could go horribly wrong. We questioned ourselves throughout the entire purchasing process. When we finally signed the papers and went to the house, we sat on the split level steps, looked at each other and Reed said — “this could be a really bad idea!” We both laughed, as Wilder ran around on the 70’s mustard shag carpet. At this point, it was too late and whatever happens, happens!