The Joys of Home Ownership

The NY Times has an article today about, basically, how much home ownership sucks.  I think the key is that owning a home (like everything else in life?)  is much easier if you don't have to worry about money.  It's WICKED expensive, and that's why the current housing situation is all the more precarious - homeowners with little or no money down are massively leveraged.  Some of them are intentionally leveraged to provide maximum return, but I'd guess that most are leveraged because they simply couldn't afford to put more money down.  If you spend your last dollars on a 3% down payment, you're going to be hosed when you need minor repairs.  The Times article mentions a family whose swimming season was ended when "$500 worth of pool pump filters died."  They show a picture of the homeowner sitting beside his algae ridden pool. I have no idea how much this home owner makes, if he has savings, or what his mortgage looks like, but if $500 is going to be an impossible expense for you, then maybe you should reconsider buying a home with a pool.

I am learning on the fly just how expensive owning a home is, because I just bought one.  Never mind the expense of furnishing the home - things add up quickly:  property taxes (mine are nearly 3% of my home's value!), oil (in the winter we'll probably spend $600/month on oil for heat, even though I've adopted my Father's "put a sweater on!" technique and tried to keep the temperature below 68 degrees), minor repairs ($400 to have the angle of the granite block leading into my barn changed so that our Honda Civic could enter without bottoming out on the threshold).  Of course there's also insurance, snow plowing, landscaping, and now this morning: mice!  My wife declared war on mice while we lived in NYC, and spent many hours devising a bait which they couldn't deftly pluck from the traps.  She settled on dog food kibble super glued to the trap, after the mice proved adept at licking peanut butter clean.  We'll see if the NH country mice are as savvy as the NYC urban mice.  Early indications hint that the country mice are a bit sneaky - they actually opened the top of my cereal box rather than gnawing through the bottom - but they were a bit sloppy and left some clusters of cereal and mouse poop behind, betraying their theft.

The article also quotes a homeowner with an interesting philosophical take on do-it-yourself home repairs:

"“Why would I have any interest in fixing the bathroom sink?” he said. “I’m in my 30s. If fixing something made me happy, I would have learned how to do it.”"

I'm the opposite - I have spent my life so far generally bereft of practical real world skills which I would now like to acquire.  Since we've moved in, my wife and I (she's the brains of the operation) have changed 3 electronic thermostats, and yesterday we replaced an outdoor light.  I enjoyed wiring the new light myself, mostly because we didn't get electrocuted, we didn't have to pay anyone, and it was easy:  we didn't have to install the box that the light goes in - our new light fit on the old box that was there.  In the coming days we'll change two more side mounted lights, and three more challenging hanging pendant lights - but we definitely like the sense of accomplishment that comes with these repairs.   I blogged several weeks ago about how I managed to jump start my lawn tractor.  It probably seems stupid to some, but for a city boy, it was an accomplishment!

After our bathroom toilet became clogged (not with doo doo - the bowl was clear, it just wouldn't flush so much as a piece of toilet paper) my wife shut off the water,  removed the entire toilet from the base, drained the water from the tank, and, at the advice of her father,  snaked the "s" curve with a piece of co-axial cable (my idea!) with a sock knotted around the end of it.   I later heard her whispering to her dad about something, and I busted into the bathroom to find her holding the obstruction:  a sponge that she'd left in the toilet while cleaning!  She was scheming with her dad about how to blame me for this one - since she assumed it was one of my massive dumps that had done the deed in the first place.  She settled on blaming me for "shitting on the sponge,"  but the point is that her ingenuity resulted in an educational learning experience in home plumbing with a simple solution caused by a simple problem - rather than a $300 call to a plumber. 

We are dealing with one total clusterfuck right now - getting a chimney lined.  Our house is an antique home with original chimneys, and every mason who comes to the house to look at it tells me something different. Unfortunately, this is not the kind of thing one can do himself, so I'm stuck continuing to evaluate different proposals and decide who I can trust with this major job.

Anyway - I've learned one thing quickly in the few months in our new home - if you're buying a home for an investment, good luck to you.  I happen to have very little doubt that I overpaid for my home, and that I wouldn't be able to sell it for my purchase price any time in the near future - but that doesn't matter, because we bought it to live in - not to make money off of.  Hopefully, we'll be here for a long time, and in the end the cost benefit analysis of buying and selling a home with its embedded costs of ownership will be favorable to the costs of renting.  If not, we'll have incurred some sort of net cost over the long run, in exchange for owning our own home that we can make decisions about - rather than living under a landlord's roof and being subjected to his whims.  In any case, we're not counting on making money our home - that would be gravy if we did.

-KD