Monday, September 15, 2014

Why I'm Not Moving

You might be thinking, vis a vis yesterday's post: Um, why don't you just sell your crazy house and buy something else?

Great question! I've spent much of the last 15 years wondering the very same thing :-)

The truth is, there's no less pricey option than the one I'm currently in, unless I'm prepared to get out of the market. And I'm not. To wit: My house has almost tripled in value since I purchased it. I couldn't break into the housing market in my current neighbourhood, if I hadn't bought when I did. In fact, and I think I've mentioned this before, in the three years I dithered over buying a house (back in the late 90s), I was priced out of the 'hood that's 4 streets east of mine.

(As an aside: I tell this to everyone, so I might as well tell you too: If you want to own real estate, no time like the present. It's never going to get cheaper than it is right now (unless you live in a small town in America and the economy fails). The larger and more desirable the market, the more this rule applies. If you can't afford it today, you really won't be able to afford it in a year. Cuz the price will have gone up considerably. It's never easy to justify the expense of your first home. Just do it, eat some Kraft Dinner for a year, and we can argue about the merits when you're on the flip side.)

But back to me... I happen to live in an extremely desirable location, in a city where location trumps everything. When I say this, I don't mean I live in Rosedale (alas). I mean, I live in a "real" neighbourhood that's been on the path of gentrification since I got there. Hell, I'm one of those gentrifiers (hence my financial misery). What my 'hood has in spades is transportation options. I can't tell you how unaffordable it is, at this point, to find a place that has subway, bus and streetcar access - all within a 5 minute walk. My home has all of those things - plus a parking spot - and it's in the concentric zone that's right around the urban core. This is how I can walk or cycle to work. (Fun fact: I spend practically no money on transportation. No car, no transit pass.)

Furthermore, and this was more accidental than considered, I live very close to one long-standing, noteworthy urban drag, and another that's popped up in the last 10 years. It's the area where most of the good restaurants live (depending on who you talk to - and trust me, you're talking to someone in the know). There are numerous community services and amenities to be had. Whereas one time it was at the periphery of "good neighbourhoods", now it's well within the spans. From an infrastructure perspective, this is one of the best places in Canada in which to live.

Now, what my neighbourhood lacks - which is why it's still vaguely affordable for your reasonably-tenured, double-income, white-collar family - is architectural homogeneity. There are some pretty ugly vistas to be had. If you don't like graffiti and the occasional front lawn full of garbage, if you can't get with a house that needs some serious help abutting one that's worth a million bucks, this ain't the place for you. Let's just say, it's suburbia's polar opposite.

But let's dwell for a moment on my home itself...

I live in a diamond in the rough. Depending on how long it's been since the last serious expenditure, it's more or less diamond. It contains @2000 square feet of entirely livable space (not including the basement, which is a nightmarish pit) over three floors. It has 4 bedrooms of decent to large size, 3 bathrooms and a third room on the main floor (very rare in houses of its type). It's beautifully landscaped (and yes I am bragging). It has 2 decks in addition to front and back gardens (which I've worked very hard to bring to life and to sustain). The third floor is gorgeous and renovated to suit our needs specifically. The kitchen is large (by downtown TO standards).

In order to replace what I've got already - if you factor location into the equation (and keep in mind I've already invested a couple of hundred thousand bucks to maintain and improve this place), I'd likely end up having to spend 200K more to move than it would cost me to improve what I currently own. And those improvements wouldn't be tailored to my personal specifications. Furthermore, that new-to-me place would decay, just like this place has decayed, and I'd be once again be on the hook for maintenance and improvements...

There's also the fact that I don't like the look of most new homes. Sure, I'd be thrilled with a true mid-century find (very rare in these parts), but that's still pretty old (from a maintenance perspective). I love Edwardian and Victorian options. They're beautiful and stately. The ceilings are high. They speak to a time and place we can barely imagine. I don't want to live in a new-build town home - even if I don't want to pay to live in a century home. What can I say, I'm fussy.

But what really cinches this reno (vs. move) is that I'll probably get back 2.5 dollars for every one I spend once I sell this place - and I'll be improving the quality of my life until I opt to do that. That kitchen will reflect my every desire (within the realm of what I can reasonably finance). It'll work for me in the way someone else's kitchen layout is unlikely to. Of course, I've been living with kitchen hideousness for 14 years, so apparently the ideal kitchen is hardly a necessity when it comes to getting the job done. But you can see what I mean...

Let me close by acknowledging that I do know this is an entirely first-world problem. I'm profoundly lucky to be firmly entrenched in the first-world - even if the renovation-to-be will not be negligible for my bank account (or my fortitude).

Today's questions: Why do you stay in the house where you live? Do you love it? Is it the lesser of many evils? Have you had the means to perfect it? Do you secretly want to build a tent in the wild and be done with all the stupidity of home ownership (or renting)? Let's talk!

36 comments:

  1. To anyone who would ask why you don't just move I'd say, because it's an expensive pain in the ass!! Our current home sucks. The layout is nice, the proximity to my son's school is nice, and the colors that I painstakingly applied to all but two rooms is nice. That is as far as the love of this place goes. I would rather move my mother's abandoned farmhouse (even after being empty for 10 years it looks basically identical to when I was growing up--yes, it was rough back then) to a better location (and we did consider moving it to renovate) than this place, but I was overruled. I hate 1960-1970's era homes and their complete lack of character, but, this was somewhat in the budget* and available, so you gotta do what you gotta do. *meaning we could afford to buy it, but not actually fix it...

    Personally, in an ideal world, I'd have an old Victorian farmhouse (and I know where there's one that's well-laid-out and built like a tank! ;-) ) either on top of a hill WAY off the road (with my pretty little Herefords frolicking below) or hidden in the trees (sans Herefords)--I like my privacy. Sure living in town is convenient (pizza delivered to your door! Running water even if the power is off!), but I'd much prefer hearing the sounds of the crickets at night, seeing sunsets and stars, walking around my house half-naked with the windows open....there's nothing quite like a Kansas thunderstorm and being able to watch it unfurl for miles with an uninterrupted skyline is a sight to behold. And I'd be thrilled to fill my bathtub with water to wait out a power outage if I could just have that again. Not quite a tent in the wild, but rustic, just the same. ;-)

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    1. You are impassioned! And I'm sorry you were overruled - but I know how that goes. This marriage shit is all about the compromise. I can't even imagine a world where there's that kind of peace and quiet - though whenever I find myself in a country-like setting, I am amazed and I get calm fast. Alas, my life is where the chaos is. I've grown to find the gentleness where I am - but it can be hard.

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  2. I'm never moving again. We bought 2 years ago further east then I thought we would but we loved the house and have fallen in love with the hood. We could never afford our current house if we had waited. So yup, I'll be waterproofing my basement this year...cause I'm not moving!

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    1. I forgot to say that moving is so horrible to think about that renovating's almost better :-)

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  3. 30 miles out of Portland is pretty affordable, so that's where my parents and my husband's parents bought their houses years ago. When we grew up and got married, it was still affordable here, so that's where I and my husband bought our house. The local economy is not great, and the commute to where jobs are is lousy (so I telecommute), there's very few restaurants (mostly nasty fast-food joints), and our town just got rated the "most boring" city in Oregon by Movoto, but with family nearby, we usually have plenty to do and it isn't like we can't go a few miles out of town to find something to do. As far as the house goes, we have plenty of living space, which we wouldn't be able to afford in a more urban area. It was built in the 1960's, so the floor plan is "dated", but plenty functional, so I wouldn't move, just because trends say things should be "open". We need to do some fix-ups in the bathrooms, and the basement could use an update (shag carpet!) but we don't plan to move and my kitchen is pretty gorgeous since we re-did it a few years ago. We've got plenty of time to keep fixing it up, and it's mostly just wear and tear, nothing massively structural (that we know of)

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    1. C'mon - being rated the most boring city is cache, no? :-) Love your descriptions Cari!

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  4. I always feel like such an outlier when I post here! :)
    Our neighbourhood is currently making the transition to gentrification; as our real estate agent said: 'pray for hipsters'. :)
    We did a ton of work on this house - which is part of the reason that a young single woman feels comfortable buying it as her first home. There a lot of things I'll miss - the great Korean place (which they named 'Korean Restaurant' so as not to alarm the gaijin), the butcher shop, and the Italian bakery/deli, all within a block of the house. Now I'm going to have to actually plan my meals in advance like a sucker. :)
    But I will not miss the Hells Angels clubhouse across from the school (even though it did cause a dramatic reduction in crime in the neighbourhood; the bikers had a chat with the drug dealers and the prossies about how they didn't want police attention in the neighbourhood). And most of all I won't miss the kids who've never been in a house where people own books, or having to explain that bird daddy and I are married, and are my son's 'real' parents (one little girl didn't think that was allowed; she thought you could get married to a man, or have a kid with him, but not both).
    Sorry - got a little carried away there. Hope you don't mind.
    So to try and wander back to what you were asking - I will miss the details of this house, but I'm kind of liking the 60s and 70s architecture that predominates in the neighbourhood we're moving into. So many windows... and layouts that assume that a family may actually want to have some sort of contact with each other even if they are in different parts of the house (we've been seeing a lot of back splits - the idea that the child could be in the rec room and I could be in the kitchen and we could have a conversation is blowing. my. mind).
    Once again, my apologies for rambling on...

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    1. (one little girl didn't think that was allowed; she thought you could get married to a man, or have a kid with him, but not both).
      That made me laugh, really and truly out loud laugh. I love how kids create "rules" based on their experiences.

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    2. B: I don't think you're an outlier. I can totally relate to your former hood :-) And a great split-level can be a thing of architectural delight. There's a neighbourhood in the north of Toronto called Don Mills and it's all mid-century - a planned community of another era. I LOVE the layout of that neighbourhood, and the architecture. Alas, it's really far from everything.

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  5. I love my house. It's in a great central neighbourhood that has lots of services and close to green space. Our house is over 100 years old and is very cozy - we added a family room/eat-in off the kitchen about 11 years ago, which added about 300 sq feet of living space. We have a big garden and great neighbours. It's not perfect - there's only only one bathroom on the second floor and it's tiny; the basement was built for hobbits; the lack of a cold-air return vent in the master bedroom means it's too hot in summer and too cold in winter and there's no storage space/closets on the first floor. If we ever have a spare 10K, we could retrofit the carriage house at the back of the property as a workshop (for me) or hang-out space (DS). We don't intend to move until we have to.

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    1. It sounds awesome Susan. I want a carriage house!!

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  6. It sounds like you are the perfect candidate for love it or list it!

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    1. Are you secretly my mother?? That's her perspective and we do live in the mecca for HGTV. Thing is, I'm not gonna move, so I don't think that I could apply.

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  7. We live in a house built in 1907 in Portland, OR (hi, carihomemaker!) that my grandparents bought I the early 40s. I've lived here since 1975 with 2 different husbands (not at the same time!). The house is not particularly interesting architecturally (a typical "four square" of which there are many in our city) and it's beginming to need a lot of love.....major plumbing work sometime soon, electrical that's old, kitchen is just bad, furnace possibly iffy, only one bathroom, which is upstairs. We both have bad knees and, while the house is paid for, the property taxes are rising each year. I recently retired from our city government, and while my husband will still be working for 5-7 years, we truly don't think we can afford to live here through our "golden years," plus there's that issue of the 14 stairs as we get more decrepit. It's a really tough decision to make because we don't know what else we can afford. Plus, I really like the part of town we're in - 3 blocks from mass transit (and we have a really good transit system), 4 blocks from a big wooded park, close to shopping, 7 miles from the downtown core.

    It's a tough one.

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    1. My aunts had a similar concern about their house's stairs (they both had pretty severe arthritis). They ended up getting a chair lift (is that the word? basically a seat on rails that goes up the stairs). They fought it for a long time, since they weren't "old and feeble", but once they got it they were glad they did - and it meant they could stay in their house.

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    2. N: I hear that Portland is gorgeous. Of course, property taxes are absurd. Mine have doubled in the last 15 years. I hear you about the stairs and their potential impact as one ages. I'm not really at a stage that I'm thinking of this, but of course, one has to think of everything eventually.

      What do you think of B's suggestion?

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  8. We live in a not so pretty 1950s house in a lovely village about 7 miles from a big town. It's commutable to London which makes it expensive (but less so by a long way than living in London! ). We ended up here kind of as a last resort - we were moving due to schools and had sold our house but the one we were buying turned out to have subsidence. We needed to find an alternative to avoid losing our buyers quickly and so looked to the village where we are now. It's not the prettiest house but it's solid and in a great location. We are steadily improving as we go on to make it work better for our needs.

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    1. That sounds gorgeous - and to live in proximity to London is something that most of us can only imagine. I watch this show called Location, Location, Location and I LOVE all of the near and in-London homes.

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  9. It's so nice to read posts like this. The sewing community has become more international in the past 2-4 seasons, and while many sew the same patterns and buy from the same on-line (US) stores, our lives are still very different.

    As a young couple we're renting a 47 square meters apartment in Jerusalem, Israel. That's a one difficult place to live in. We lack not only proper public transportation but also my place of employment (which is the biggest hospital in Jerusalem and probably one of the 3 biggest hospitals in Israel) don't even have a sidewalk leading to it. So I have to get there by car. And you can imagine how awful parking is... Also we don't have public transportation at all and most restaurants are closed during the weekend.

    But... we have great neighbors. That must be a rarity. We'll stay in Jerusalem until I finish med-school and then probably move to the center of Israel.

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    1. Thanks Roni! It's so nice to get such awesome commentary on this sort of post. I love what everyone's got to say! Great neighbours are the things that make any house a home. And I do hope that you will get a place in a different part of Israel, that provides more space and better transit options.

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  10. Well having just sold our house and bought a new house...

    I knew our house wasn't the forever house. It was the "either we get a 2 bedroom apartment or we buy a house" house that was suppose to last 5 years and we stayed 10. There are many things I love about the house I sold. The floor plan made for great entertaining, the big room in the basement is cozy and where we spent most of our time. My sewing room which sadly was full of non-sewing stuff most of the time but it was in theory for sewing. But I knew it wasn't going to be where I want to raise my kids. I wish we could stay where we are, but not without extending the mortgage farther than we want and my husband has had enough of attached houses.

    So we're moving closer to friends, to a house almost twice the size but not that much of an increase to the mortgage. It's what makes sense for us.

    Having been in your house, I'd stay. The renovations are simply the cost of making the house what you want. You aren't going to find that elsewhere.

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    1. I know - you're the lady to talk to about reno vs. move :-) It sounds like you have made a terrific decision (and had excellent luck). And I appreciate your perspective having seen my house...

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  11. I thought I wanted to move before this baby arrives, but I had a BIG change of heart over the summer when I realized that 1) I am 3 miles from one of the top 5 hospitals for giving birth in the entire tristate area. 2) I am walking distance from my midwife, who has rights to deliver at that hospital. 3) The stress of moving while pregnant? no thanks. 4) Boxing ourselves into a time frame/limiting our option based on when we need to be in a new home vs finding the home we want and fixing it up right even if not by my due date. 5) new commute vs my very easy commute. 6) We have lots of family support where we are. So, we are staying put and will begin to look for a more permanent home after we become a threesome. ;-)

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    1. I know that many people move when they're pregnant (or when they have a new baby - hello!) but it's absurdly stressful and I cannot recommend it. You have excellent resources in your family and a living situation that works well for you. Sure, moving may happen at some point in the next couple of years, but I urge you not to stress with an infant. Those times are challenging enough for other reasons.

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  12. Well, I only wish I could stay in one place for a long time. The last time I lived in the same house for more than two years was in 2003. Since then, I've moved nine times, including three transatlantic moves. What I really want to do is buy an older home and take time to fix it up the way I want it. And then live in it for many years.

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    1. I really don't know how you do it Alexandra! That's an incredible amount of work - a full time job really. I hope that you will find your fixer-upper in the not-so-distant future and that you will have a chance to enjoy staying put for a while :-)

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  13. I would absolutely move in a heartbeat if I could afford the Victorian/Edwardian villa of my dreams. But in my neck of the woods they are out of our price bracket at the moment. I can fully understand why you'd rather do the work than start all over again. Despite the fact that our house is so fugly and small, what we have planned for it will utilize every square inch of space available to us, add lots more much needed storage, make the house completely weatherproof (and hopefully keep the ninja slugs at bay) and be lovely on the inside. Add to the fact that we are a 20 minute walk to school, close by all our friends and ameneties (albeit mostly by car) and a couple of hours by train from London, and it all adds up to not being that bad at all.
    And, having moved 15 times in the last 20 years I'm glad to finally have somewhere to call home.
    But I'm not giving up on the villa! ;-)

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    1. Price brackets ruin everything. And honestly, if I'd moved 15 times in the last 20 years, I'd lose my mind. No need to give up on the villa. Just make it a second home :-)

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    2. I'm just cracking the whip on the husband! Siberian salt mines have nothing on me...
      ;-)

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  14. I love our home despite a few limitations resulting from having renovated the existing cottage (a cedar "kit") to preserve the proximity to the beach as well as preferring not to waste. We will move to a city condo eventually, and I worry about how well I will adjust to losing the view, the space, the island pace. . . .

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    1. I can imagine that would be a very disquieting transition. Mind you, you don't have to do it till you're ready - and really, city life has a lot of things to recommend it. Still, that view you've got is one in a million. Sell the house to your kids and make them keep a room for you :-)

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  15. I'm renting an apartment and this place is definitely the less evil.
    I rented it because it was 10 minutes walk from the office were I worked then and it didn't include soviet time furniture (very usual thing in Ukraine). I work from home now, but still renting the same place, because location is really great (there is very good restaurant only 4 minutes walk in high heels from me, and the place is quiet, but it's very close to a major avenue where you have great shops, restaurants, banks and so on, so on, there are also a nice park with a natural spring 10 minutes from me.

    Drawbacks? You can film a horror movie or something about ghetto life in a hallway: it's gloomy and filthy and it stinks. There were attempts to improve the situation, but code lock on the hallway door was broken the next day and half of the people refused to pay for cleaning. When I left my old car near the house I lost a full tank of gas and a tank lid (now I don't risk, so I have to walk 10 minutes to a guarded parking). The nice looking renovation prev. owner of this place did was very cosmetic and later I found that under a new floor cloth there was the old one with mold, yikes! How I found that? because I got a flood from old soviet time pipes and I had to remove floor cloth to dry it. And an elevator often breaks, so I have to walk to the 6th floor, but usually it's not really a problem for me.

    So I live in a like/irritated relationships with my apartment and I really glad it's rented, so I don't really take its problems close to my heart.
    And no tent for me! There is no list of house problems long enough which can make a tent sound good when it's -30!

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    1. Ha! I know what you mean about the hallways in those old apartment buildings. And honestly, if your weather has turned miserable already (as ours has), your commentary about never taking the tent option is all the more reasonable.

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    2. It's not that miserable as it's going to be in winter (we have 31 hour of sunshine in avg. in December and in January it can be as cold as -32F), but it's not pleasant: it's something like 40F at night, days are warmer, but I already unpacked all my cashmere sweaters and I'm actively wearing demi-season coats.
      And wearing them makes my days warmer not in the physical sense only ))

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  16. I love your house and you'd be crazy to give up the location. Quite frankly, the issue you are having with your place are typical of older Toronto homes. It is the price of living in the city in a place that has character, if you know what I mean. As for my house, you know it is not attractive, but I'm hoping the new floor, the wood stove and some sage decorating will make a difference. Now I just need some time to make it happen. On the flip side, I love the property and I find living in the County quite awesome.

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    1. Thank you A! And, the more research we do, the more your perspective is corroborated by peeps in the know. You house is cozy, delightful and so beautifully located!

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