Big house..lots of work

[afrikat]

We are just about to go on the market and have started looking for potential houses to buy. We've looked before around here and know roughly what you get for your money and know we will need to compromise somewhere. Our absolute must haves, are a good garden and open plan kitchen/dining (or at least the potential to make one) and good school area.
We saw a house yesterday that fits the bill in terms of size, location garden and potential but absolutely EVERYTHING needed doing. Bathrooms, windows, floors, the kitchen work, the garden..potentially the electrics too. The place was a hole tbh and overpriced for the state it is in.
Would we be mad to even consider buying it, if we could get the price right down? We could add so much value but do we want to live in a building site for years?? Has anyone done it, with small children?

Can you afford all the work? If you have to pay someone to do it, you probably won't add more value than you spend. If you can do a lot yourselves you might add more value than it costs you.
If it's livable and you can do it gradually, and you both enjoy DIY, it can be fun, but we struggled with working Monday to Friday then spending all weekend on the house, so it's taking ages as we've cut down to one DIY day and one "day off"!

I think we could afford it, so long as we haven't underestimated. But things always come up don't they? I'm pretty sure we have decided against it as neither of us are keen on spending all our spare time doing DIY so the search goes on..

We bought a complete renovation 3 years ago (1960 house with lots of 90's botched DIY) when we had an 18 month old, we now have a second child.

It's been much much harder and expensive than we expected. The worst bit is that we really have missed out on lots of family time as all our spare time is spent tag teaming the kids either decorating, or sourcing/making decisions about the house etc. The rare child free time when relatives have taken the kids out for the day or we've both taken annual leave together have been spent clearing the garden or DIY and it has worn us down a bit.

We have spent double what we expected (mostly debt borrowing loans and remortgaging last year). So very stressful and a risk if for some reason we had to sell up in the medium term.

But. . .we have a long term house with still more room for an extension in a few years time. It's been short term financial and time pain for long term gain and we have a gorgeous house which we couldn't have bought done up within our budget.

I don't know if I would do it again though, there have been a lot of tears and arguments and it's really put a strain on our whole family. But we also moved areas and my job and had some issues with a development behind our garden so its felt very up and down. I kind of wish we'd bought a smaller, finished house (which we had been looking for originally) in a slightly nicer area of town and looked to move again once the kids were older and more independent, but then I look around and know it will be a great family home we can stay in forever if we want to.

Sorry if that's quite negative, I had a sinking feeling when we bought this house and I do sometimes question if it's been worth it! Do your research and consider how long you really can live in a run down house. We thought we would be ok but once we moved in living in a dilapidated, leaking bathroom and freezing cold rooms with wet windows etc. meant we felt forced to do the work more quickly than we had expected and planned for as it was depressing and some things were in a worse state than we realised.

We had to do everything in our last house. There was only the two of us and it was a slog but worth it. This time round we passed on a house that needed a similar amount of work as we have two small DC and we just couldn't face it, especially as the 70ft garden was a jungle as well. A small part of me is still disappointed, especially as it's still on the market but I love our new house and the fact that we haven't had to do anything except change the decor.

We bought a house before having kids that needed lots doing to it. Weve had 2 extensions and done every room in the house. My DH is a big fan of diy and does most of it (carpentry, decorating, some plumbing) himself but i have to say it was quite tough being a diy widow evenings and weekends when the kids were small. Now after about 3 years of having a complete house DH looking for new projects!!

Several years ago, my husband and I considered buying a real fixer-upper. Lovely home but it needed TONS of work, and even though we are very handy people, we decided it was just way more than we wanted to take on. We now know how wise that decision was because we happen to know the people who did buy it, and it was in FAR worse shape than any of us realised, even more than the inspector discovered. These people have been through hell and back with that house. I feel like we dodged a bullet.

Thanks for the insight all, we have definitely decided it's not the right choice for us just now so carrying on looking for less of a project 😊