We purchased a townhouse! This is our first (not forever) house. We picked it because it was one of the few townhouse communities that would allow Matt’s branded work truck to be parked in the driveway. Highbrow HOAs are a pain. It’s in a south suburb of Chicago, and has easy access to the highway so Matt is on his way to wherever work is that day within minutes. The house itself was a complete nightmare though. The only reason we were able to purchase it in the height of the housing market frenzy was that it was a short sale and the place was trashed from an abusive domestic relationship. The house had holes in the drywall, all the kitchen cabinet doors were kicked in, the sliding patio door had been shattered and the house was left open to the elements for over a year.
Due to the damage and trash, the house was un-loanable, so only cash buyers could purchase it, which excluded the majority of interested home buyers. I saw the potential, and worked with our lender to find out the exact letter of their law to figure out how to get the house loan-able. It needed to be ‘habitable’, which to them meant that the house needed to be secure (new sliding door), the holes in the drywall needed to be repaired, patched, sanded, and for some ridiculous reason PRIMED, and the kitchen cabinet doors needed to be repaired (I guess they never heard of open shelving?). Oh, and ALL THE TRASH needed to be removed or tidied. As the owner of the house had no intentions of ever setting foot back in her house again, we had to do this work BEFORE we could buy the house. That’s right. We did reno on a house we didn’t own, months before we knew it *could* be ours. Matt and I spent two or three weekends repairing and cleaning. My parents came to help with a lot of it, and Matt’s dad helped with the drywall repair.
We didn’t have much saved up for a down payment, but between mortgage rates being crazy low, the short-sale, and the condition of the house, we scored a heck of a deal. We paid $185k for our 3 bedroom 2.5 bath 1600 sq ft with additional full (but not finished) basement and attached 2 car garage. At the time we purchased it, some of the other units in the community were going for $225k. While we expect by the time we are finished with repairs to our house and are ready for our next one, the housing market will likely have calmed down, it’s not wrong to think that we will be in a very good position for our next house.
If you’d like to see the nightmare we willingly got ourselves into, our ‘before’ photos are here: https://bit.ly/PineLakeHousePhotos To see what the house looked like while it was ‘on the market’ (talk about catfishing!), their photos are still viewable on Redfin.