Buying A Home
OtterJ
member
Dear Community,
Our tech team has launched updates to The Nest today. As a result of these updates, members of the Nest Community will need to change their password in order to continue participating in the community. In addition, The Nest community member's avatars will be replaced with generic default avatars. If you wish to revert to your original avatar, you will need to re-upload it via The Nest.
If you have questions about this, please email help@theknot.com.
Thank you.
Note: This only affects The Nest's community members and will not affect members on The Bump or The Knot.
Our tech team has launched updates to The Nest today. As a result of these updates, members of the Nest Community will need to change their password in order to continue participating in the community. In addition, The Nest community member's avatars will be replaced with generic default avatars. If you wish to revert to your original avatar, you will need to re-upload it via The Nest.
If you have questions about this, please email help@theknot.com.
Thank you.
Note: This only affects The Nest's community members and will not affect members on The Bump or The Knot.
Discoveries in a new home
We recently bought our first house. Yay!
Since closing, we've been doing a lot of repairs, during which, we've found lots of surprising little hidden jewels in our house. We suspected that part of the house was added later, but when we broke into a wall to get to plumbing, finding an exterior window (still intact) hidden within the interior wall was our confirmation. Since then, it feels like one big treasure hunt....what else are we going to find? So far, we've discovered:
Since closing, we've been doing a lot of repairs, during which, we've found lots of surprising little hidden jewels in our house. We suspected that part of the house was added later, but when we broke into a wall to get to plumbing, finding an exterior window (still intact) hidden within the interior wall was our confirmation. Since then, it feels like one big treasure hunt....what else are we going to find? So far, we've discovered:
- The property extend farther than we originally
realized (we discovered this before closing, when we received the survey)
- We confirmed that our kitchen/dining room (in the back of the house) & front door/entry closet are both additions
- we knew that our garage was built out of cinder blocks, but as it turns out, the original house was also built out of cinder blocks (which explains why most of the house retains cool air so much better than the additions!)
- we have double windows. Not double pane windows....one window - and then another, totally different window attached over it - on all of the windows. I realize this one shouldn't have been so hard to notice, but they line up fairly close, so you're still just looking through glass. Also, we haven't done much with the windows, other than making sure they latch.
- We have crazy light switches in a few rooms: 2 fans with light fixtures
attached to each in a small bedroom - switches by the only door control
both fixtures - on one side of the room you have more switches to
control just one fan/light, and on the opposite side you have another
switch to control the other fan/light. All in one tiny little bedroom.
It's like that in more than one room....why all the extra switches?!
- We have about 15 thousand different phone lines running through the house
- We also found the reason why we always
seemed to have dead bugs in the corners of each room - they're coming
in through large gaps hidden behind the baseboards - and then they die
in our barrier of poison. Muahahahaha. It's something else to add to our ever-growing repair list.
All
of the changes made to the house make us insanely curious to know what
the original layout looked like. We thought that we would at least be
able to find the old kitchen plumbing, but the additions were done pretty seamlessly on the interior.
So what odd repairs, changes, or surprises (pleasant, or not) have you found in your house while inspecting it before closing, or after purchasing it?
Re: Discoveries in a new home
Our current home had a crack in the heat exchanger in the furnace...leaking CO. Our inspector caught that (thank goodness). While we didn't get a whole new furnace out of it, the sellers did replace the heat exchanger.
Once we took possession of the house we discovered that the sellers hadn't bothered to clean up after themselves...we moved in to pubic hair and urine stains in and around the toilets.
We also HAD a gas dryer from the previous owners...then one night it started leaking. After we were safe and the gas was turned off, DH discovered that the vent was backed up with dog fur, lint, socks, and a whole host of other garbage. We have since gone to an electric dryer.
Basically, everything we have found has been the result of previous owners who did not clean as well as we do and weren't up on basic maintenance.
It's been frustrating to unpack so slooooooooowly, but I keep reminding myself that we are focusing more on repairs, and that before we can unpack an area, we have to do major deep cleaning - all of which take time.
The night we moved in was a mess, it was raining all day while we packed the truck and then we had to sit through both closings (buy and sell) and we finally got the truck to the house, dragged the mattress in and all I wanted was a hot shower and to go to bed. Weeeeell we found out the hot water in the master shower wasn't working.
A support beam was also installed incorrectly in the basement, and we still haven't been able to figure out what a good 10% of the light switches in the house actually go to.
We're still finding little things but those are the ones I can think of right off the bat.