I’m Rachel and I bought and lived in a $47,000 house I’ve gotten a few requests to talk about more house stories, more home purchasing homes, selling stuff, so I thought why not talk about the house after that which cost us a lot more than $47,000 this was a house in Atlanta it was in a suburb of Atlanta and we paid a hundred and sixty nine thousand dollars for this house but here’s the big difference the forty-seven thousand dollar house was built in 1950s this house that we paid significantly more for was new construction so I sort of wanted to go over some of the differences that we have found from living in an older home to living in a brand-new house because there is a very large difference so we’ve been looking for a house in the Atlanta area around 2014 and prices had recovered quite a bit from when we bought the forty seven thousand dollar house so when I first moved to Atlanta you could find houses all over the place for like 50 grand 70 grand and when we were first looking we were definitely thinking along that price range clearly we’re very cheap and we like to find good deals so we were hoping to find a house that was definitely under $75,000 but here’s what we ran into the Atlanta market for homes was pretty interesting and what I mean by that is that it was very difficult to find a well-maintained home that was in our price range in fact it was really hard to find something that was in good shape for under a hundred and fifty thousand dollars I’m not kidding you we looked at quite a few homes that were 10 20 years old in that were like almost tear downs they had extreme termite damage and really bad mold issues and those two things or something you don’t want in a house I’ve heard somebody say that water is one of the biggest enemies to a house and so true you do not want you do not want mold in the house it literally can destroy the entire house and termites can also clearly do a lot of damage to a house and one thing I would like to say there’s a big difference between dry wood termites and subterranean termites the forty-seven thousand dollar house we had in Florida at one point had dry wood termites but those are like the slower moving ones we saw a lot of homes in the Atlanta area that had subterranean termite damage and those suckers do damage really quickly so that’s not something you want we saw some homes that were built in the90s that we weren’t even sure how they were still standing we also noticed that a lot of the homes we saw in Atlanta just we’re not well taken care of we’re not maintained it almost kind of seemed like the people that were buying these houses they like stretch themselves to the limit and then they didn’t have the cash to pay for all the things that come with home ownership and there are quite a few costs that come with owning a home it is not always cheaper than renting do not believe that that is not that is not the truth I hear people be like oh well you’re just throwing your money or your what away on rent and owning is so much better in some circumstances that may be the case but owning a home can be very expensive and if you don’t have cash to pay for it you could get yourself into some trouble here so when we’re looking at homes we the price range we were looking at kept going up and up because we were just we’re not finding anything suitable and we were not gonna get into a home that was that was had a lot of surprises or had projects that were like where we were in over our heads for instance we’ve been on one house this house had some potential it was it was mostly brick it had a really cool basement with super high ceilings although there was some radon in it and but the biggest issues were definitely you needed a new roof it had animal damage and there were some structural things going on with it like it had a fireplace with a chimney and the chimney looked like it was seriously like falling away from the house and it definitely had some like cracks in the brickwork and it was it was one of those homes I believe it was a short sale or something like that but they were not we put in a bid but the people were not willing to fix some of the damage so we ended up like walking away from it so eventually we came across this builder that was building new construction homes in a suburb of Atlanta that was not too far away from downtown at the time I worked downtown so I needed to have a commute that wasn’t super crazy and something you should know about the Atlanta area is that traffic is insane so even if you live a few miles from work it could take you an hour to get there I’m not kidding you so which part of town you live in is super important especially depending on where you work so we found this builder that was building and what had happened was during the recession in like 2007-2008somebody had run out of money they had started building this community like they put in a road I think they put in like the underground electrical and then they ended up not doing anything with it so our home builder ended up buying that land and then decided to build 50 homes there so when I found this neighborhood no one had purchased city homes there the price ranges for the homes were like169 to like 180 something so we decided to go with that because in here’s why its because at least this home this home was about 20 grand more than the150 price range we had kind of been at for a while but at least we knew this home wouldn’t have any major issues and right off the bat because it was brand-new so we decided to do that it was too late along in the process for us to pick out a lot of the finishing so some of the stuff in this house and I’ll show you some before pictures some of the finishes were definitely not what I’ve chosen like the cabinet color was was pretty bad the wall color was horror it was very unflattering we ended up having to get the whole house painted later on I’ll show you some before and after pictures and like some of the I think I have to pick out the type of light fixtures like what color they were and I think I got to pick out the carpet which the carpet ended up being an okay color fairly neutral and we ended up just keeping that now these are very these are very builder grade homes so there was no like tile like the bathrooms all the bathrooms in kitchen all had like linoleum or like vinyl flooring you know the shower just had like the bathrooms just had that like fiberglass insert thing you know so I get again these this was just very builder-grade stuff so we ended up going with this house it was a four bedroom two and a half bath house with the two-car garage I also made sure to pick this because we were the first people to move in I picked out a lot where we only had one immediate neighbor to the right of our to the left of our house if you’re looking at it straight on there was a little bit of a wooded area and then there was another house across the street there was like a little bit like a retention pond or something so we didn’t have a neighbor across the street we just had a neighbor to the right side of her house and again I’ll try to show you some pictures Sam was a good selling point our house was the cheapest house in the entire subdivision and we ended up being the first people to move in by like a couple months so some things you should know about new construction homes the good is that our utility bills were super low because everything was like up to the latest codes and standards for building our utility bills were lower in the four bedroom house then in a one-bedroom apartment in Atlanta I’m not kidding you our electric bill was lower in the house and at least we knew that we didn’t have any like major home maintenance to go along with it for a while so that was good some of the downsides are I would say so we’ve ran into this pretty major issue with mail delivery apparently our builder in the United States Postal Service had a bit of bad communication so let me talk about that so when we first moved into the house they put in mailboxes forever one and I tried like I I assumed mail would be getting there so I changed her address to this address the address was existing with the post office but like through some back-and-forth I learned that the post office has some newer regulations that any newer home instead of getting into individual mailboxes I think this is for logistics purposes and again to kind of cut some corners a new neighborhoods apparently are required to have what’s called a cluster box or like that kiosk with mailboxes in it and our builder apparently did not get the message also when we moved in I had to call the county our builder kind of dropped the ball on a few things again this is a lower-priced new construction still a good deal I mean now where can you find a brand new single-family home for under 200 it’s a little bit tough now but I felt like at the time that was the the best option for this situation so the Builder had definitely not dotted all their eyes and crossed all their T’s with some of the government stuff so when I called the county we were living in they apparently didn’t know anyone was living in the neighborhood we had no street signs so like we technically didn’t exist I had trouble getting deliveries of mail like delivery services even pizza for two years people had trouble finding her house it took a while before the neighborhood was on Google Maps so that’s something I did not anticipate about moving into new construction that you should definitely know about if you’re if you’re getting into that especially knowing that new neighborhoods you won’t you won’t get your own mailbox you’ll have one of those kind of unsightly kiosks which after going back and forth the Builder argued with the post office for awhile and then finally ended up relenting and getting the cluster box but for six months the post office refused to deliver bail
to us which was was super fun and when I would go to the post office they would get me a really hard time about it and I’m like look people you it’s not my fault that the Builder you know didn’t communicate with you guys and did not put in these cluster boxes why are you taking it out on me so that was sort of that was definitely a very frustrating experience also the fact that I had to call to get our own streets line also a little irritating and I will say a lot of these home building companies definitely look at their customer service because after the sale it was very difficult to get in touch with our builder and to get any sort of response or some sort of help or assistance from them I finally ended up getting the email to the prom’ building company president and he ended up being the one to kind of take care of the post office issue but the salesperson I’d been working with like totally ghosted me and and kind of lied to the president saying that she’d helped me when she really hadn’t I ended up being the one to be the liaison with the post office and that was a total nightmare I probably spent 40 to 50 hours alone just working on that seriously this company should have put me on the payroll so that’s one gripe I have about moving into a new construction home but I’m sure not all companies are like that you just I would say if you’re looking at new construction definitely look at the service record talk to previous customers and look at reviews to see like post sale is this company responsive will they take care of issues after they sell you the house or are they just gonna leave you high and dry like my builder did so that was definitely very frustrating it was really nice being in a newer home especially after being in that 1950s house again just things were up to date although I will say because we were in kind of a lower price new construction home the finished work out our house is a little shoddy like they used the wrong caulk and all the trim so after we were there for a while like it was pretty obvious that it was not working with the trim again things were pretty builder-grade so we ended up upgrading things later on but again this was not like the finest quality work I’ve ever seen in a house but for 169 you know we weren’t really complain about it so we ended up doing some we didn’t have to do a whole lot to the house although since since we were in a four-bedroom house and we have no kids and we don’t really entertain a lot I know not everything’s like the people on HGTV’s house hunters we ended up turning our living dining room into a workshop for my husband like a woodworking shop so we ripped out the carpet I will link some photos I’ll try to insert some photos because I do have a few of those so because it was built on a slab there were no there were no basements in this house although interestingly enough these houses went really quickly so by the end of like they were building these houses one by one towards the end they jacked up the prices on some of the later homes and they started putting in some nicer features this was a good thing because that kind of brought the value of our home up as well like they started doing some cool architectural stuff like rosin garage doors some of the later homes have wrought iron railings on the staircases inside ours did not so they they were starting to realize hey we can drop a little more money into these homes and people pay for them and a couple of the houses in our neighborhood actually had a walk a walk up bait like a like a walk in basement which was pretty cool so I think the last house in her neighborhood sold for two hundred and twelve thousand dollars and at the end of this video I’ll kind of share with you what we sold it for and also what what’s happening with the neighborhood at the end of the time we were living there we did transition that back into a living dining room just for resale purposes we’ve realized not everyone wants a workshop in their house so we decided to do that and the garage is in the these this subdivision they weren’t very large so you had room to park your cars in there but not a whole lot else although somehow my husband figured out how to get a riding lawnmower into the garage like very carefully we were the only people in the neighborhood with a riding lawnmower and we also had a very small lot which is another story but my husband really wanted it so towards the end we decided to sell the house home we’re really going up and one of our neighbors had sold their house for like two I think 25 and they didn’t really do anything to it so we had a Realtor come in we worked with a Realtor named Lindsay Brayden I’ll leave her information below because she was she was good to work with she gave us some suggestions for what we could do to the house she suggested painting the cabinets white putting in a solid surface counter top that did not come standard with our house and she had us repaint the whole house and do just some minor things like she had us replace the carpet and the living dining room with engineered hardwood which we ended up doing I did another video on our home makeover so I will also link that below and up in the cards if you want to take a look and get more of an in-depth look at what we did to the home but we ended up spending about 10,000 dollars and while we initially bought our house for one hundred and sixty nine thousand nine hundred dollars we didn’t up selling it for 225 so two hundred and twenty five thousand dollars and we only put about ten grand into it so we ended up definitely getting all that money back and we ended up walking away from the sale we got a check we got checker wired into our bank account sixty-eight thousand dollars so we got all of our down payment back we got all of the money we put into the house and a little bit more so we ended up using all of that money to pay off our student loans so that’s how we became debt-free which is which is a cool story I know I’ve talked a little bit about that hereon this channel and I definitely plan to do more with that but I will say one another benefit to paint a little bit more for the house which was definitely something we did not plan for is that the house appreciated more as well like for instance we sold our previous house we bought it for 47 and we sold it for 85 so that was a price increase of about $40,000 but this house we had a price increase of of definitely about Lexie so we bought for about little under 170 so we had a appreciation of it $50,000 plus we got the the down payment back so one benefit to pay more for house is that you have more room to go up so anyways I just wanted to share a little bit about our latest house if you’re interested I was thinking about talking about a condo before I met my husband I was a homeowner when I probably shouldn’t have been but I bought a 64 thousand dollar condo in Houston Texas unfortunately I really have no photos of the place so that’s why I’ve been sort of hesitating about talking about that particular home purchase just because I don’t really have any visuals but leave me a comment below if you’d like me to talk about it anyways I would be happy to I’m just you know I just realized a lot of people want to see pictures of the house and II didn’t have enough foresight to realize that I would be doing this later on so I don’t have any really good photos so anyways if you have any questions about home ownership or just want to leave me a comment or a thought let me know what you think I’m Rachel I love talking about just about anything and I’ll see you again.