To think DH is being ridiculous (and unrealistic, and insane)

[WhatTheCherry]

Quick background: looking to buy our first house, 3 DC (2 are his from previous relationship and stay 3 nights a week), pregnant at the moment. DH owns a business which is extremely busy and I work 9-5.

DH wants to buy a house we've seen which is cheap but is essentially a shell. It is completely gutted and on further inspection needs quite a lot of work. No central heating, wood worm in floors so they all need ripping up and replacing, possible issue with roof which we are waiting for surveyor to comment on, needs insulation work. Needs complete cosmetic overhaul as is essentially just floorboards and hanging off wallpaper in every room at the moment. It's a dump basically.

His reasonings for wanting to do it is firstly he can do quite a lot of the work himself and secondly, the houses once done, go for an alright amount in that area.

My reasons for not wanting to do it are:

1. We wouldn't be able to afford to rent and live somewhere else until it was done so we'd be living in a building site with youngish kids and I'd be pregnant so very possibly a newborn as well by then.

1. H works all the hours god sends in his extremely busy business. He has worked 6 sometimes 7 day weeks for the past year at least, leaving at 6 in the morning and not getting home until 6/7. He says he'll take 2-3 weeks off to just power through a lot of the bigger things but I know he won't. He stressed about taking a week off at Christmas he's so busy.

1. We wouldn't have tonnes of money to just throw at it straight away as most of the savings would be eaten up buying it and so my worry is that we'll have to live in a shit tip for months and months whilst we get the funds together again to make it at least slightly nicely livable.

He thinks I just don't want to get stuck in and do any hard work and don't have the 'vision'... I think he's unrealistic about how difficult it will be at this stage in our lives and we should buy something at least mostly done and then put our own stamp on it over the next few years. It would be different if it were just us two but with the kids I think it's unfair.

AIBU to think he's insane?

1. Ask him to come up with a to do list and a schedule for what will be done and when;
2. Critically analyse the list and point out the flaws/length of time he expects you to live in a renovation project.

Why is he so set on this house? Is there something about it he loves that you can identify and try to find in another property?

Also its not homes under the hammer and even then with professionals it takes them months-hes living in a another world

On survey our house didnt look too bad, they surveyor isntxallwed to move the owners stuff of which there was loads.
Reality- jew flatdboards and joists in approx half the rooms. Complete re plumbing and boiler, new roads and new bathrooms and loos etc. New kitchen. New floor covering everywhere. Major roof repairs which werent visible from ground level. Complete new rewire. Extensive damp proof treatment to external walls.
We were under the impression it was a modernisation job!
It always costs way more than you expect, takes much longer and is more complicated.
I would completely avoid if I were you. You should be living and enjoying your life with your new baby, not suffering every step through the rubble.

He is so far from reasonable he couldn’t see reasonable with a telescope.

We have done this. We have done everything from cosmetic refurb to back to bare brickwork.

Our current home hadn’t been touched for decades. We tried to open a window and it fell out.
DH worked full time on the house whilst we lived elsewhere as I am the main earner. We had a £50k renovation budget and DH has friends who are plumbers and electricians.

We did everything rewire, replumb, CH, replaster, loft conversion, rear extension, new windows, new roof, new kitchen, bathrooms etc.

It took the best part of a year because you lose time to planning if you are extending and building control inspections etc. The work was quicker because we weren’t in there but it was a massive undertaking.

It would be hellish with young children and would take ages and cost even more if you were doing it piecemeal.

It made economic sense for us as the house was heavily discounted due to the work needed and so we were always going to recoup the cost (mad London house prices). I’m glad we were in a position to do it but don’t underestimate the time and financial commitment

Many years ago I was in a similar position to you. I must state I wasn't pregnant with a third at that point so my timing is slightly different.

It never occurred to me not to do it.

All the comments on this thread are surprising me.

I found a decent large mobile home second hand, had it delivered, cleaned, plumbed up and moved my family in.

Husband carried on working silly long hours.

I employed a nanny to look after my baby and toddler.

Then I project managed the whole thing.

We had to remove every single ceiling, all the floor boards came up. Full re plumbing, electrics, wood burners installed. New kitchens, bathrooms and some building work to move walls.

Finished in 6 months but decorated after we moved in as it was getting cold and we wanted to be out of the mobile home.

I think it just never occurred to me not to.

If you have a budget to do it this way, I'd do it. But I wouldn't do that scope of work whilst living in it with tiny ones.

Whatdoyouthink Your situation is completely different to the OP’s It is not similar at all, you had the money to employ someone to look after your children, money to complete the project within 6 months and money so you didn’t have to live on site, of course it didn’t occur to you not do it, anyone would do it if they were in your position, I don’t know why you find all the comments ‘surprising’ if the OP had stated her situation was like yours everyone would have said go for it, but clearly she is not, hence the comments saying don’t do it.

What @BettyBooJustDoinTheDoo said.

You can't get things done as quickly if you're LIVING in the home at the same time, either. You've got to have a working bathroom, got to have a place to cook and eat, somewhere to sleep, can't have wires and planks and dangers poking out everywhere with children around... You can't just have a team come in and demolish facilities that you need, rooms that your family is living in!

When it's still your home and you've got to maintain some semblance of a real life, projects must be chosen and managed individually. Timing and order are crucial. You can't do all those things at once and still live in the home and have a manageable life.

Well, you can, it's just hell.

My friend was pregnant when her partner ripped out the kitchen of the doer- upper they bought. 4 years and 2 babies later she was still carrying up the dirty dishes to the upstAirs bathroom because he hadn't had the time to sort out the plumbing downstairs.
If he hadn't got time now, how's he going to make time when there's a newborn baby? It'll take a lot longer than 2 or 3 weeks to sort out the issues you've mentioned, and a lot of money. Just replacing the floorboards will take weeks and hundreds of not thousands per room.
And the remaining woodwork will still need treating- you will have to be out of the house for a few days for tha t.
Don't do it unless there's somewhere you can stay while the work is being done.

Just say no. It sounds like a complete nightmare. If you jointly want to do up a house, it can be a longer term project for when the kids are a bit bigger, surely?

I say this as someone who absolutely hates having stuff done to the house - I hate the cold from people coming in and out all the time, the noise, the mess, and the dust. I've got friends who love living like this, mainly for the increase in value on the house.

whatdoyouthink
Houses in a better state nearby are only £20K more so it doesn’t make economic sense to go down the mobile home and nanny route.

Plan on it costing you 35-45% more than you’ve allocated.

DH owns a business which is extremely busy and I work 9-5. DH wants to buy a house we've seen which is cheap but is essentially a shell.

He's suggested living at my dad's but with 3 kids and one spare room I think that's just as ridiculous an idea as the house.

Face it, OP, he's not really living in the real world, is he?...

Did your dad even give an o.k. about that? or was he not consulted.

Tell him he can do it but only if you live somewhere else until its finished, doesnt expect you to look after his kids at all and he hires a nanny if you have a newborn to help out otherwise its a big fat no. Nothing gets done to anything for a good 6-18 months of a year when a newborn comes and when your OH is SE its even worse (I ended up pregnant with twins working for OH until induction, he took 2 weeks off then back to it whilst looking after said twins!!) Just say no

Just no. My parents did a two storey extension on our family home. We had to continue living in it as couldn't afford to rent somewhere local my dad was also of the opinion that the builders would work to the time scale agreed if we were living in it. We all had to sleep in one bedroom. It was freezing all the time. No matter how hard my mum tried everything would get covered in dust. Meals for a long time were omelettes or soups as every last penny went on the extension. My youngest sister was 10 at the time and it was a struggle, I am one of four. I think with younger kids it would have been hellish and so unsafe. My dad looks back on the time fondly but he got away from it as he went to work. Mum was a sahm and hated the whole experience. We do have an amazing family home though.

YANBU and he's being a CF accusing you of having no vision.

This is the last argument of a man who knows you're right and wants to do something stupid anyway.

Don't give in because it's you who will be living on a building site whilst he's at work 6 days a week.

It will take YEARS to get the house straight, you know it and so does he.

If you’re buying a house it has to be one you both like. He’s coming across as a bit of a bully, it’s you who’ll be putting up with the mess and that’s not good with a newborn. Don’t let him force you to buy something you don’t want

I'm not a new voice here since the vote seems almost entirely YANBU, but my dad was a builder and we had times when he would do renovation work in whatever house we were living in (we moved around a lot).

Even as kids junior to senior school age, living in part of a building site was dangerous. I have a few scars to prove it. It was never anything life threatening thank goodness but still, I would never inflict that on a child.

You're not even saving money - if it only costs 20K more to buy a house ready to live in, it's madness. It's going to cost way more than 20K to do this fixer-upper renovation.

If I was the mum of the stepkids, I would absolutely refuse to allow them to stay in such a house and I suspect the courts might have something to say about it too if she challenged custody rights because of it.

This has the potential to rip your family apart, injure you and your children and become a money pit. Please, please don't do it.

If he’s busy at work you hopefully should have good money coming in, you have savings, great. Really good position to be in. Stay put (or go somewhere with no work to do to it). You can be dealing with all that stress and living in a dump. What if you need help after birth and he’s got all that to do. Nothing wrong with wanting to always better yourself but if things are good, then enjoy the now for what it is. Stay clear.

You definitely CAN do it, you just both have to really want to. Our house needed a lot of work, it took bloody ages to exchange on it (thanks solicitors) so we only got the keys 2 months before our baby was born. In theory we'd both really wanted a proper doer-upper, to do the work ourselves, learn new skills etc, but the timing was awful. I worked my arse off on it, but I didn't take a lot of joy from it.

When the baby arrived I totally checked out - she was my project, not the house. It really frustrated my partner who just didn't get why I wasn't invested, and like yours accused me of having no vision. To be honest I just didn't have the bandwidth for "vision". It was seriously tough going - we did it and the house is lovely now, but I do sort of regret having taken it on at that point, because it wasn't the brilliant team project we'd envisioned, it was me feeling abandoned with the baby while he felt abandoned with the house.

If I had my time again, it's not the way I'd have spent my baby's first year. Sorry OP. I wouldn't advise you to do it right now. But maybe you get resentment either way - you say no and you've thwarted his dream; you say yes and you have a horrible time.

simply put....HES BEING UNREALISTIC!

YNBU. I understand the impulse, it may theoretically be a great opportunity, but it doesn't sound remotely realistic with his work commitment and your family situation. And I have to say if I was the mum of his first two DC I wouldn't be keen to have them stay in a building site three nights a week .
When we were house hunting I initially thought we could take on a "project" because that's what my parents did with their first house, so I have a romantic memory of dad digging out the basement by hand and building staircases. But I cannot tell you how glad I am in retrospect that we moved into the best maintained property of all the ones we looked at. It would have been such a slog next to work and childcare.

My future son-i-l wants to do this, but both he and dd have long commutes and high pressure work. A coat of paint is one thing, renovating a house while living in it with children and a new baby is a different ball game. DON'T!

Maybe show him this thread!w

I know a couple who did this. They temporarily moved in with her parents while DH did the work. THREE YEARS later she was still living with her parents, but now with a child in tow. He slept in a camp bed in the one room with a functional roof, forever finding more things that 'needed doing'.

DHs parents did this 50 years ago, when DH was 6 weeks old and his sibling was 2. No electricity or running water to start, sea of mud surrounding the shell of an old house, 150 miles away from the house they had been living in. FIL is very hard working and organised. He had started his new 9-5 M-F job nearby as an architectural technician and had previously trained as a carpenter (his carpentry and joinery are of a really high standard- the treehouse he built DD is probably finished to a better spec than our actual house). Both PILs are very outdoorsy and have spent most of their lives up every mountain in the UK and many abroad, all holidays sleeping in tents and camper vans. FIL's outdoorsy mates are almost all engineers- the hands-on type- and between them had pretty much all the skills covered. Various mates would come up most weekend to help out and go hiking in the nearby area- it's in a National Park. PILs moved in and started work in the summer so it was easier.

FIL has fond memories. There are photos of him and his mates on the roof in the sunshine, shirtless and in shorts, putting slates on; photos of them sitting in a row on a plank after drinking beer and giving the thumbs up to the camera. Living the doer-upper dream; various of the mates bought their own projects later or built their houses from scratch in the arse of nowhere on the sides of mountains and they'd all go and help, discuss the engineering aspects at length and have fun- it was their mates-together hobby as much as the hiking. He ackowledges that it was hard on MIL.

MIL is not a whinger but as far as I can gather she had a totally shit time. She had problems breastfeeding - probably due to the stress. The 2yo kept trying to climb ladders to follow FIL. She had to prise tools out of his hands then would turn and the baby would be trying to eat rubble and mud; by this time summer had turned to winter. They washed in a tin bath that was dragged in front of the fire and ate tins of sardines stirred into rice over and over again. It went on and on- I don't know how long it took but there are house fixing pictures in the snow, and the following summer.

It was worth it in the end; they have lived there ever since in their characterful dream home surrounded by the beautiful garden MIL created from nothing....but it was very hard on MIL and it lasted a long time. 50 years later she remembers so clearly the cold, the shitness of trying to maintain cleanish dry, fed, warm children on a building site, the fear of them getting injured and the bloody boringness of entertaining and keeping safe two children in that environment whilst 20 feet away and 20 feet up her husband was happily engrossed in living his dream.