Home buying thread

Lanx said:

yea all my friends that have new construction homes in the last 10yrs have loads of structural problems.

one time i stayed over and got the basement, and i was like "wtf, why do you have a cavern sized cracked on your wall"!

he said the house probably shifted and its only along the seam of the drywall.

then i walk around the basement and i was like "theres another crack"!!! and he's like yea, it shifts!

i heard about houses "settling" after a few years but this was literally like a 2yr old house.

oh and their living room was all plastic'd off cuz the patio hanging off on top of started to leak through.

and of course they're talking to "the builder" since they have a "warranty" welp the same builder built 4 other houses on this development property and they all have some sort of leaky shit, and they all have to band together to get their lawyer on.

Click to expand...

My house settled, it's about 50 years old. It's annoying. It made a crack in the drywall I had to fix on both floors and all the doorframes are very slightly out of square now.

Just sanded down a bunch of doors. I ain't gonna replace every doorframe in the house just to resquare them. It wasn't a lot either, juuuuuuuust enough.

You're in kansas though, right? My mom lived in kansas as a kid (army brat). The school that she went to had a crack big enough to see into the next classroom, that building had settled so much.

Yeah, i'm operating on hope when it comes to that!

God, I don't want an inspector out here to tell me it's a 50 thousand dollar problem. heh. Even if it's true!

I hadn't really thought of that. I'll have to find one.

Depending on the framing and the placement of doors it may be the joists or a wooden beam settling. If the joint runs vertical from the edge if the door its probably a drywall joint (drywallers like cause less joint to finish but it's more prone to crack). Diagonal it's more serious imo.

It just means there's been true settlement whether in the framing or foundation, shearing solid drywall requires some pretty serious stress where a taped 14" drywall can crack from thermal movement or much less settlement.

How bad is it is a harder question. If it's on the 3rd floor of a 6 month old house mid span it's a little more understandable than if it's directly on a concrete slab that's been there 50 years.

To put it bluntly. Some of the damage described above is worse than the historical fire damage my contractor uncovered. We now understand the repairs that were done 60+ years ago. Those repairs are nothing compared to what is being described above. Then again we are not on a slab but on a typical stone foundation in the Northeast.

Today is the big day sometime in the next 4-6 hours large men with a truck will come and liberate my belongs from my condo and take them down to where me and my folks are going to be living, Since we are consolidating most of the furniture is staying, so this should be a pretty simple move. Next week I have to get a hold of some charities and a recycling place to take all the rest of it. Feels weird, like all moves have, but I am excited.

moonarchia said:

Today is the big day sometime in the next 4-6 hours large men with a truck will come and liberate my belongs from my condo and take them down to where me and my folks are going to be living, Since we are consolidating most of the furniture is staying, so this should be a pretty simple move. Next week I have to get a hold of some charities and a recycling place to take all the rest of it. Feels weird, like all moves have, but I am excited.

Click to expand...

Cool, congratulations. You're moving in with your parents? Basement?

Izo said:

Cool, congratulations. You're moving in with your parents? Basement?

Click to expand...

Upstairs. Did the basement before. Twice.

So any new house advice for someone moving from NJ to Florida? House is new, more thinking of essentials/furnishing do's and don'ts for a northerner moving south. It's northern FL a little west of St. Augustine

Next time you move try not to pick the only state on the Contintental US that's worse than the one you already live in.

The value of a house is completely subjective. You can gauge a value based off comps, but the true value is what someone will actually spend on it.

If you list a house at 100k and 3 people are interested, it's worth 100k. But then if one of those 3 gives you an offer of 125k, now it's "worth" 125k. Comps may only cover it for 100k, so the additional 25k would be something the buyers would need to come up with. A mortgage won't cover it. But that's pretty much how it works.

The name of the game is comps. And they're a huge industry with many many ways to comp the same property. Different methods may work better than others, but there's no "this is the right way" type of thing.

I remember when Hawaii started buying properties in order to build the rail, there was a big argument between an owner that had a very old barn that was a business on a property, and nothing else was even close to what he had. So they had to really figure out how to appraise it appropriately. It went to court and he eventually made a fair amount for it after the "new" appraisal offered a lot more than the generic one the government had used to give him some money.