Want a house? Forfeit your soul.

It all started because my 9-year-old daughter and my 6-almost-7-year-old son share the same smallest bedroom in the house. Therefore, my daughter spends a lot of time in the bathroom they share with their older brother and any guests (not that that has been an issue for the last year) with the door shut. Just to be by herself. She needs her own space. We're going to blink and she's going to be a teenager. And her big brother might not move out of the house the minute he graduates from high school. Something needed to be done.

Also, I've been working from home for over a year and we're all over each other. It's the 2021 version of Charlie Bucket's house, but instead of everyone being in bed arguing, everyone just stares at their computers and phones and iPads and runs into each other.

We hired an architect who had a fantastic vision for what our house could be, including the addition of a bedroom. We said, Yes this is what we want, and he continued on the plans. In the meantime, I started to do the math in my head. That was going to end up being a lot of money. 

In the meantime, my wife found a house nearby that was a really good deal and wasn't selling. We went to look at it and fell in love with it. But it was above our budget. I called our loan broker. He almost hung up on me.

Nothing in our neighborhood was in our budget and still, things only stayed on the market for a day or two. I knew this was the problem of having snuck in here during the market crash 11 years ago. Location, Location, Location they say. Great. Now I'm stuck unless I want to make my kids change schools. An idea I started to entertain. By entertain I mean think of ways to convince my wife it was a reasonable idea.

Where are all these people moving into this neighborhood getting all their money? It's like I'm completely surrounded for miles by the 1%.

Then something at the very top of our budget came on the market and it checked every box. If I pulled every last dime out of our current house it would end up costing about the same as the remodel (if we went all-in on the remodel). We decided to make an offer. 

Unbelievably, they accepted ours over higher offers. (We had offered the asking price.) We were flexible on other terms.

Now I have to make arrangements for a bridge loan in the more likely scenario where we don't sell our current house until after we close on the new house. I talked to my financial advisor on the phone and could hear the disapproval through the line.

Then our agents and another agent we'd never met came over to assess our current house. Yes, it's a weird floorplan. Yes, it's very lived in. No, we never got to fixing the floors. Or the windows. Or that bathroom. Or that crack in the wall. Yes, those are scuff marks all over the wall from where the children have run toy cars or other toys or themselves into it. 

By the end of all that, I mentally and emotionally collapsed in a heap. I feel better having written it all out. There's still so much to do. But someday soonish it will be over.
It is interesting how different living conditions are around the world. It seems like people like to move regularly in larger cities and other countries.

For me it is completely different. Since I “own” (well the bank) my current apartment, I would never consider moving out except something happened and I would really need to move. My parents still live in their house they built more than 20 years back after I happened and they got married. My grandparents live in their house since the 50s.

Sometimes I wonder what my brother and I will do some day in the future with all those properties.
2021-05-12 13:28:37
I knew this was the problem of having snuck in here during the market crash 11 years ago. Location, Location, Location they say.

Do you not have much land? I assumed that if you just extend from your current place that you only have to pay contractor/architect fees and I imagine those are less inflated than real estate prices?
2021-05-12 16:21:36
By that I mean maybe onebedroom remodel isn't enough? gotta add more!! to make it worth it.
2021-05-12 16:21:57
We could add a bedroom w/in our current sq footage, but it's a pretty extensive remodel and so:

current loan + remodel loan == new loan - equity in current house
2021-05-14 01:44:09
That's the equation I figured from the post. 

However I was wondering whether it might be worth upping the ante. By adding way more than just a bedroom. Living space... office... little library.

This is predicated on the assumption that the highest expense of a remodel is the initial cost of 'design'. And that once you're adding just a bedroom it doesn't cost much more to add all the other things.
2021-05-14 02:57:15
Yeah an entire studio in the back was part of the remodel, so I could have an office and a bike shop! :) Now I get an office inside the house and a garage with enough room for the bikes!
2021-05-15 23:21:24
Well for an office... if you want some distance... have you ever been titillated by what
Wes Bos
recently built as his?
2021-05-16 14:22:38