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?

You can't afford to.move and would lose money. The house wants doesn't exist, or isn't in budget. He's messed up 2 previous moves with a change of mind and no doubt stressed you out and wasted time and effort, and he now dislikes the 3rd. He can't be trusted to know what he wants and 4 of the 5 of you are happy. He'll just have to try to live with it a bit longer and maybe review it in a while.

My relative moved then spend months bugging the council about the noise of the local seagulls (yes, really!) but now doesn't notice them at all.

Does anyone else find the concept of 'forever home' really weird?

I hate every house I buy for the first few months. He’ll get used to it. Then love it.

Interested that he's already on Rightmove and curious to know how long it took you to move/how many chains you were in or houses you looked at. Scanning houses on Rightmove can become addictive in my experience, particularly if it goes on a long time and you have to let go of a lot of imagined plans that didn't work out. I think the house you eventually end up moving to can end up not standing a chance compared with all those imaginary perfect houses and maybe he was always going to find something wrong with this one just because it's real and it's actually yours.

It took me years to find my current house and I had a lot of plans fall through along the way. You'd think I'd be glad to get off Rightmove but it still feels as though it holds so much promise whenever I'm a bit dissatisfied with something about my life here. It's not even necessarily about the house itself, so much as displaced anxieties about how things are working out generally.

I'd ask him to give it more time but secretly work on the principle that the problem is more in his head than in the house. Just a thought. Might be wide of the mark.

I think you’re onto something there @ServietteUnion. It took us a couple of years to move, he refused dozens of properties that I would happily have bought, and pulled out of two. He was fixated on a house which could have been amazing, but needed major building work that we never could have afforded or lived through. The finished version of the house would have been hundreds of thousands of pounds out of our budget. All of that time we were crammed into an unsuitable rental house (not enough bedrooms, mould on the walls, terrible landlord who wouldn’t fix anything etc). It was awful and the stress of the whole thing made me very unwell. I have a long term condition that flared up and landed me in hospital. It’s been a very difficult few years, and finally when we moved here I thought it was over 😭

I agree with soundproofing, air conditioning and agreeing to consider moving at some point in the future. In the meantime, plant a nice evergreen hedge (privet, viburnum tinus) ) and a few trees (birch, anmalanchiar) all around your boundary to help absorb the noise. DO NOT plant bamboo or leylandeii.

Yes I do, life changes, no such thing as a forever home.

Rather than attempting to placate him, can you say that renting made you unwell, he was fixated on a house you'd never have been able to afford and he needs to prioritise the health and happiness of his family rather than chasing an unobtainable dream.

Can you say calmly ‘our rental put me in hospital so I hope that you are glad we did buy this one, as am I. It’s not like you’ve found something else since, so the options were this or my health. Can you please make sure you remember that as it feels a bit like you regret us getting the space for the kids here and a house that works for my health, which makes me feel like those aren’t important to you. They are really really important to me.’

What's a 'boomer bungalow' please?

Get triple glazing and fixed proper installed aircon. Job done. It will cost money but frankly we are all going to want it in next few years…! And your house will be lovely. And it is so so so so so so so so much cheaper than moving (which is obviously utterly bonkers int the short term)

We have a long back garden with a train branch line at the end of it. It was noisy when we first moved in but now I don’t notice it
unless I’m in the garden. We barely hear it in the house.

OP, I mean this kindly.
Be very careful of such a man.
He is never happy.
He always needs to be dissatisfied.

The toll on your health is huge.
He 100% puts himself ahead of you and your children.

It is very covertly narcissistic that after all these years of stress, 6 months in he has started up.

He's not a good man and he doesn't want you well.

Stop listening to him.
Start looking into his constant dissatisfaction.

You need to access therapy and to focus on yourself.
You will never have any peace with such a man.

Stop listening to him.
Focus on you and if this really is what you want.

Your health will never be good living with someone who is do content in destroying your peace of mind.

Look at covert narcississim.
He loves your focus on him and his dissatisfaction.

Not read the full thread, but having proper fitted aircon in the noisier rooms would probably be a lot cheaper than moving house again (my friend has been quoted £6k for top range units in four bedrooms, less than the stamp duty on a £500k property).

Then you could have super noise insulated windows and not need to open them.

Is the back garden noisy at all? Could you add extra fencing and/or planting to block some of the noise, or put a lovely seating area furthest away from the road in the quietest part of the garden? If he likes music then some noise cancelling headphones with music on whilst he potters around could help, I usually have an audiobook whilst I do housework to escape the tedium!

Far too soon for him to declare

I think you need to be blunt that you can’t afford what he wants and there will always be a compromise. That the noise is better than the mould, being cramped and you being seriously ill in the last house!!

This is exactly how I would respond and he’d get it with both barrels. He dicked about while your DC were in a house with mould and now he’s upset about traffic noise? Bloody hell, I wouldn’t be buying him anything, I’d be booting him up the rear. He needs a dose of reality. He’s a parent and his DCs’ needs come first. He sounds like a spoilt prat.

Get him to do a hearing test.

I've lost a lot of my high frequency hearing, and am now MUCH more sensitive to low frequency sound (which road noise is). It drives me mad, whereas when I was younger and could hear a much broader range of frequencies, such noise never bothered me.

I definitely acknowledge that, and I can recognise that using that language with him hasn’t helped. I was trying to emphasise the point that after 3 years of renting and the stress of buying this house, I really didn’t want to have to do all of that again. But I would never say never!

It will take months and months for any move to actually happen and all the stress with it. Wondering if something else is going on with your DH. A friend living alongside the M1 in the UK calls it his river. He honestly has programmed himself to think of it as running water

Hated my house when I moved here in covid (v difficult time in life causing the move) but after 3 yrs of building work am settling in and couldn't think of anywhere else that would be home

Good luck! Try changing the words from traffic to water and see if renaming the problem helps addressing it and softening it with your DH

Can you take on board what @Wagyue and a couple of others have said.

Your husband is either supremely selfish or a narcissist. He will never be happy and will ALWAYS find something to find wrong and to complain about.

More importantly, he doesn’t care really about the wellbeing of his family. He doesn’t have your back and is not on your team. Don’t let sight of the fact that - for YEARS!!! - he chose for you all to live in substandard accommodation, simply to assert his power.

And now, instead of focusing on ways to improve the home you finally have, he chooses to continue to make you miserable.

Don’t let him!!

Honestly, I would start to lose my shit with him over this.

My DH could be a bit like this too although we didn't move very often. His own Dad sometimes too. MIL and I got totally fed up with the whinges about the drawbacks to our houses and we both told them that they could move if they wished, but we would be staying put. Which put a complete stop to the conversation.

Your DH is looking for the perfect house, which doesn't exist. You are maybe being too passive. Tell him to put a sock in it. You might (no guarantees) revisit things in a few years, or you might not. Or he can move if he wants to, alone.

Yes I can definitely take this on board, and I recognise it. I’m not sure I’d say he’s a narcissist, but I do think there are things going on under the surface here that are about more than just the house.

And I definitely need to recognise the impact that has on me (it’s mostly me but also our DCs) and find ways of minimising that impact.

It’s not ok for the rest of us to constantly bend and compromise to always make sure he is the one getting what he wants at the cost of the rest of us.

I think you should stop trying to solve this for him. Stick to some useful phrases when he's grumbling such as, Ah that's shame, That sounds hard for you, etc. without getting drawn into a discussion. He can buy himself ear plugs, he can organise soundproofing, just let him get on with it and don't engage.

There's nothing he can do, you're there now and moving again has to be off the table for a few years because of the expense and the high likelihood that he will complain about whatever house he's in anyway. If he talks about moving just say Maybe, one day and change the subject.

You're happy there, the kids are happy there, just try to enjoy it.

You might not need to do anything?

what if you just run the numbers with him and then send him off to find the house something like

“darling I am exhausted from the moving process. You know how sick living in the crappy flat made me and I’m really enjoying the space here. However, I love you and want you to be happy so why don’t I leave it with you. We’ve just gone over the numbers, so you know the finances and you can let me know once you’ve done the first visit on a house and think it might be suitable. I don’t want to know the ins and outs.”

Then just never mention it again and it’s on him to find the house and do the first visit. He sounds like he wasn’t happy with heaps of them so you might find it takes him 8 months to even find something he likes 🤷‍♀️