Posted on 02/08/2020 8:40:39 AM PST by Mean Daddy
My wife and I are considering selling our existing home and building a new home. Our approach is to sell the house, rent a furnished house/apartment (we have a yellow lab) while the house is being built.
We don't want to worry about having two houses. My question is, what did you do to minimize the amount of moving? Store furniture in PODs? Store semi-trailer? What tips do you have? What would you do differently? Anyone sell & build at the same time? Did you use a realtor who'd purchase your house if it didn't sell after XX numbers of days/months?
Check out Houzz.com for design and decorating ideas.
Millions of photos on just about ever house style in every city in the world.
Very searchable down to things like “white cabinets”. You will he provided with 100,000 photos of any search. Use an IPad and just swipe till you are blue in the face.
Create an account with email and save anything you like to a folder labeling each pic with what you like about it (wall color, cabinet style etc)
Then you can email or message your ideas to the builder or decorator or contractor.
Visit as many open houses as you can to see knew styles and ideas.
Do all this very far in advance so you won’t have buyers remorse wishing you had know of certain options before you made a decision.
I’ve remodeled kitchens and baths for hundreds of customers and decorators. Most use a method similar to this.
It might just be me, but I like having things settled before I start making financial commitments (i.e., sell first and close that sale, and rent til the new house is complete). That minimizes the surprises...and surprises are gonna happen.
And never trust a realtor to do anything but act in their own self-interest. Any realtor that has a good buy option/contract on a house is not going to work hard to market that house if he/she has money to make in it NOT selling. Remember, everything that works to your advantage has a cost attached to it...a cost that you are going to bear.
I never accept a realtor's word for what they think my property is worth. NEVER.
A realtor wants a property to move ASAP. That means pricing it to sell (i.e., too low).
Gotta quote Bob Dylan's 115th Dream here, "I just said 'good luck'."
2 X 6 exterior walls, foam filled. Fill every drill hole in the 2 X 6s that carry elec wire with foam. Use pink batts for interior 2 X 4 walls for sound.
Use R-60 blown cellulose in the ceilings. Design big overhangs to protect interior rugs and furniture.
Consider a geothermal heat/cool system. Ours has a thermal floor switch for the coldest months. Add a energy recovery ventilator for cooking or when you have a houseful of guests. Put the switch in the kitchen.
Best double glazed windows. Don’t go cheap. Andersens stand out. Ditto Andersen exterior doors. Double wrap the house corners with white foam sheet. Corners are where most leaks occur.
Good luck and make sure the builder has experience with geothermal...
Consider an exhaust fan for the roof to keep the attic cool.
Add a 1/4 hp circulating pump to your hot water heater. Saves water and gets hot water to where its needed without wasting fill in the pipes.
There is something to be said for owning the lot for a bit before building and spending time at it with various floor plans imagining how/where it will sit on the lot and how the light will come in the various windows, etc.
Pay attention to where the front door faces in regards to wind/rain prevalence. My front door faces into the prevailing bad weather. Had I thought about it I would have flipped or mirror imaged the layout on the lot so the door was on opposite side and sheltered by the house.
Do you and your wife have the fortitude to live in a camper while your house is being built?
Take posts #2 and #4 to heart. Make sure you have a great lawyer for #4.
Someone should have given us that advice when we moved into our house in 1976 and it was already 70 years old :)
Urban pioneers, yeah baby!!
Interestingly, the builder has geothermal in his house and recommends against it. Thinking about it from a re-sell perspective.
I’d ignore the advice you’re getting here if you’ve never been a landlord before. Run don’t walk away from a piece of rental property! Invest the money in something where you don’t have to play mommy and daddy to idiots. Based on the experience of others I would sell at a loss before putting myself through that.
I did 40 years in all phases of real estate. I would stay in the current house and save the rent payment and hassle. Why move twice? I have some tenants right now whose house burned down. They’ve been with me two years and aren’t in their new build house yet. Their cost estimates are now a joke.
About a year and a half ago we decided we wanted a second home. We’ve had one before, converted it to a rental.
We found our desired town, bought a modern home, had it carpeted and painted and moved in. We are on our second winter and things are great. We would still be waiting if we had tried to build.
There are only so many years left.
If you do rent out your home, use a property management company. Mine is terrific. They prescreen the tenants, they collect the rents, they handle maintenance issues and they prepare a W9 at the end of the year for tax purposes. All at a 10% management fee.
Once you figure out where you want to live, buy the Land and order a Modular Home. (Not a Mobile Home, a MODULAR Home)
You can be living in your new House in two Months time, maybe less.
I’ve made a fortune on rental property and it’s the reason I was able to retire at 60. Now I’m selling my rentals at 70 because I don’t need that income anymore.
I would stay away from renting like the plague.
Not worth the aggravation, IMO.
I had a modular home built. Still took 6 months.
I would stay away from renting like the plague.
Not worth the aggravation, IMO.
I’d rather sell it outright and invest the money.
You’re in for an adventure... :)
I think there’s some cynical “law” out there that says whatever you put in storage, even if you haven’t needed it in decades, will become needful in proportion to how hard it is to access it. Expect, then, many trips to storage facility.
Personally I would never buy (commission) a house that is not already existing, unless I knew the builder and his work product. What you see is what you get. What you don’t see, who knows what you get.
And I stay as far from realtors as possible, and would never trust them to buy what they can’t sell. Why would they do that?
As for renting, make sure you check out the neighbors, the landlord, and the premises thoroughly. Find former tenants if possible and learn what they had to deal with, especially with regard to pests and plumbing.
In all, I do think you’d have a lot less chance of adventure, if you just went with “worrying about two houses,” rather than worrying about four places: your house, your storage facility, your rental abode, and your future house. You can only watch one in real time. Three others, you need to trust people who don’t love you, and one of the three is completely invisible yet you’re financially bound to it.
Cost of rental, cost of storage, cost of moving to each (several costly events). Cost of insurance on existing home (which may be different if the insurer knows it’s vacant) and cost of insuring your personal property at the rental.
Lots of extra costs, including two partial moves, to avoid one complete move.
Then there’s the yellow lab, who may be unpredictable about adjusting to the rental property.
Find out what the average duration of a listing is in your area, ie, how long might you be waiting for a buyer.
Realtors come in all varieties but most do not devote a great deal of time to selling one property. I always sell my own, single-minded, focused, and one at a time. You’d need to find an exceptional lean-and-hungry realtor to match that.
You have a lot riding on a house that is, at this time, solely a concept. (And so is the timeline for building it.)
But, good luck to you.
“Sell EVERYTHING you can!”
Yep sell all old furniture if putting into storage unless really nice stuff.
Our house sold 8 hours after we listed it-and the new buyers wanted to move in less than a month-they paid cash so no long closing.
We really had to scramble to move our stuff. That was 3 years ago and we replaced 3/4 of our furniture since then-wish we had just sold it.
We prefer Rockwool rather than fiberglass.
It’s more expensive but very good and helps with sound.
Foam is in there forever and makes adding anything very difficult. You can’t feed something through the walls later if you want to add something.
We bought a smaller house next door to the one we were living in that needed a lot of work. It took two years to get it ready and we moved in around Christmas. It was easy to move things since it was next door.
Since it was smaller we had to downsize considerably. Big job. Huge yard sale, throwing oust, burning etc. It is not easy to do. I have to fight with myself to let stuff go.
Getting ready to sign the closing papers on the original house. We used the flat fee MLS. I highly recommend doing that. So we showed the house ourselves and saved the sellers commission. Buyers had a realtor so we have to pay that, but she’s been a great help even for us.
So we owned two houses for a while. It worked for us.
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