DH regretting house purchase - don’t know what to do

[CoffeeBooksRats]

Has anyone else got experience of this or advice on what I should do…?

Me, DH and our three DC moved house 6 months ago into what was meant to be our “forever” house. We’ve already done a significant amount of work to the house and garden, kids are really settled, walking to school with friend who live on the same street etc.

DH now saying he regrets the house purchase due to location of the house (he likes the area but not the specific street due to traffic noise). He thinks that any changes we can make to the house (eg soundproofing) will never be enough and that we should put the house back on the market. For context it’s a b road in a city suburb. There is traffic noise, but it doesn’t bother the rest of us at all. We seem to be able to zone it out, but DH says he cannot.

I’m absolutely devastated and don’t know what to do. I find the stress of moving house incredibly difficult and I don’t want to uproot our family again. AIBU? What would you do? Does anyone have experience of this kind of situation?

The secondary glazing will make a huge difference. We had double glazing put in to our kids rooms recently and I can't believe the difference it makes. Though - obviously that's when it's closed 😆

Just don't waste your money on triple gazed windows and a high end front door thinking it will make the noise quieter. We don't actively notice the road noise but it's definitely noticeable , especially when a lorry rumbles the house or motorbikes fly past, or even now that it's been raining and the cars seem a little louder because of it. But yeah, doesn't seem any quieter than when we had double glazing.

As with most things, I think he just needs time to adjust and agree with pp, maybe have a time frame for him to try to settle in better so he doesn't feel like he's sold his life away to be permanently irritated.

We did this after only 18 months somewhere. We'd bought it with the intention of putting on a big extension but decided we didn't love it there enough to go ahead. The investment didn't make sense unless we really loved it. But this was a long time ago, before stamp duty rises and massive house price rises. We managed a quick sale without too much of a financial hit.

But this move now will probably mean quite a chunk of wasted or lost money for you. And it's a crap time to sell so you may not even get a buyer. Ask him to try some compromises and give it a year or two for the market to pick up. If he still feels the same then you can re-consider it. If you are in a front bedroom can you move into a back one and swap the children to the front? Perhaps install air con so that he doesn't need the window open at night?

I'd say you will consider it if he hasn't settled by the Spring of 2027 - the trick is to not to overule his objections to the house (which might make him super sensitivie to the noise) but to put off the selling for a while whilst he adapts. If he still feels adamant about it by 28 February 2027 then I would give it a good look i.e. work out costs/look at options and then discuss it. I think giving a hard no would make him focus on the noise much more. Some people are more sensitive to noise than others.

I absolutely hated this house when we moved in, thought I had made a huge mistake. But I didn't want to move again quickly because I couldn't bear the thought of losing money. Apparently it's a fairly common phenomenon.

Been here five years now and won't move for another five at least! Is it perfect, no, but I can appreciate its good points, have spent time decorating to my taste, making memories here, making the garden nice.

There is no such thing as the "perfect" house. Maybe agree to reassess in 5 years -- apparently that's the minimum amount of time you have to live somewhere mortgaged in order not to lose money on it.

This is an awful thing to do. You’ve wasted people’s time and money. Nasty behaviour

This sounds fair to me. We moved to a new area about 18 months ago. I absolutely hated the whole area from the start, it was so run down and horrible. I also

My husband hates traffic noise too - but there’s no way he’d have agreed to move to a house in this location in the first place.

OP, we live in the middle of a busy city, up high on a hill so noise carries and we are on the ambulance/fire route for a major hospital and fire station. We have triple glazed windows (and AC) and our house is silent. Definitely recommend looking into this plus a heat pump and mini splits for AC. Even all that will cost A LOT less than moving.

Is he a generally anxious person? pulling out of two purchases last minute, isn’t a horrible thing to do and now he’s fixating about this house?
He’s either unwell or incredibly self centred.

At the risk of being an armchair psychologist, do you think this is definitely about the house? Do you think there could be something else that he's unhappy or anxious about and it's surfacing as unhappiness about the house?

Portable aircon tends to be pretty noisy too😕

I agree with others that you won’t notice the noise once you’ve been there for a few more moths.

@CoffeeBooksRats I am not in UK but moved to a new apartment (which will be my 'forever' home, barring earthquakes and civil unrest - sort of joking but 🤷‍♀️) - and I found the traffic noise shocking. Coming from a very quiet neighbourhood - think world heritage site type of place - to a very convenient building but located on a busy through road. I got fed up with the tourist congestion around my first apartment to be honest !
I thought I had made the biggest financial mistake of my life and that I would never get used to it 🙈 Then had double glazing fitted at the front (big balcony frontage), now I can even have the doors open and cope as long as it's not rush hours. I can zone out of it...
I barely slept for the first three months - also invested in loops. It is a question of mindset as well. I was basically homesick until I adjusted, I realised. DP should persevere. The upheaval and expense would be OTT. Best of luck 🌸

Oops post too soon !
I was also angry with myself, I think deep down I knew it wasn’t right but I didn’t have the courage to speak up and back out. I should’ve trusted my instincts. I became so anxious and had awful problems with my mental health. We put the house back on the market within a year, sold early this year . We spent that year really working out where we wanted to be, found a plot and are soon to start building. This means we will only pay a very small amount of land tax, although we will still have other associated moving costs but it’s worth it for our happiness. I appreciate that this might not be a good time to move, put a time limit on it eg spring next year might brake the pressure off him a bit. I know I literally couldn’t have stood living there much longer, it really affected me badly.

Another option to reduce noise could be planting trees or a hedge. Obviously, takes a few years to be sizeable unless you are willing to pay more for mature specimens. They physically block noise as well as overshadowing it when breezy.

If you think about the cost of moving again so soon, it would be cheaper to get your aircon and triple glazing done (we had triple glazing when we lived beside a railway line and it was very effective indeed).

A constant buzz from a road is far easier to get used to than say a high street with motorbikes accelerating down it at 3am and sirens from ambulances and police cars racing through. So if it’s the former he may acclimatise. The latter, you simply have to block the sound.

A white noise machine might help to desensitise him if he is struggling to sleep at night.

Our garden practically backs on to a railway line. We loved the house but worried the noise would be too much as the trains are fairly frequent. A few months later we hardly noticed it and now, 2 years on, I can sleep with the window open in the summer and the trains don't wake me even though they start at 5am. I adore my house.

It must be quite common to feel a degree of buyer's remorse. I know DH and I spent our first few weeks in this house aghast at what we'd done. That was twenty years ago. We told ourselves if we continued to feel that way we would move, in spite of the expense. Letting it be an option, however unrealistic, helped a lot, while we went about changing the things we had misgivings about as best we could.
We're planning to downsize soon, so I'll bear this in mind when the next place inevitably turns out to have its shortcomings. It's easier in theory than in practice, I'm sure. I still remember that sick feeling that we'd made a huge mistake. I hope your DH feels happier soon.

Get triple glazing or whatever might help - tell him it'll increase the value if/when you sell. Then insist you stick with it for at least a year - it takes a while to stop hearing noise that's constant.

I wouldn’t consider trying to move now- you will almost certainly sell at a loss given what’s happened to the market, you will have stamp duty and fees on top of that, buyers will smell a rat which will bring the price down even more. Plus there isn’t anywhere suitable that has come up. And even if you managed to do it, he may well find fault even then.

We moved house 8 times when I was growing up. It’s not fun. I would really resist getting into a cycle of constant moving and instead do what you can to address his concerns- triple glazing, air con, maybe plant some trees at the front if possible, thick curtains etc. Almost certainly much cheaper than moving again.

We back onto a B road and don't notice the road noise now (5 years). We also have a hill and sheep across the road. The sheep are really noisy at times, especially at 4am! The road is fine and the sheep noise is lovely. Previous poster said about trees or hedge. They can make quite a difference.

Yes, this is the main reason to refuse to move now - because there's absolutely no guarantee that he'll not pull the same stunt repeatedly.

The day I moved into my house, I panicked - it was TOO SMALL and TOO NOISY.

Then I loved it for five years before it was TOO SMALL again (WFH and having a child will do that to the property that was fine when you were using it as a base whilst travelling a lot in your twenties).

That's quite normal - but switching up your reasons like he's doing is extreme, and those feelings can't be trusted.

Imagine… you might buy a super quiet house - with horrible neighbours 😱

Like many others, I've had this too. I think it's a mental problem not a physical one. I bought a house I loved (and now love more than I can say) but between putting in an offer and moving in I felt sick to my stomach that we were making a huge mistake and could only see the flaws. It settled! Interestingly, same thing happened after I named my second child - was so scared we'd made a mistake. Now I love his name as much as I did when I chose it but at first I thought a lot about why we'd tied him to it for life. It's like a commitment fear or something.