House-buying beginnings

Now that we're in Denver, and we know we want to settle here, Torsten and I have started dipping a toe into the whole house-hunting endeavor. Not REALLY, in that we haven't started applying for mortgages and we don't plan to buy right away. But we do want to get to know the area, think about price ranges and neighborhoods, and take a look at the different houses that are available at different price points. We also want to figure out what our priorities are in a house and what areas we're willing to compromise on.

We're starting to figure out our parameters, but we're also in over our heads, I think. We don't want a mansion. We also don't want a tiny starter home that doesn't have room for a family. This isn't the market to buy a little house under the assumption that you can flip it for a profit in a couple years and move on to something bigger. We'd rather spend a bit more up front, lock in a low mortgage rate, and stay in the house pretty much forever.

So we want three bedrooms plus an office/guest room, so that we can have two kids and a bedroom for each of them, plus a place for visitors. We'd like a fireplace. We much prefer hardwood to carpeting. We'd rather a house that's recently been brought up to date rather than trying to deal with contractors and whatnot to update it ourselves. We don't want it to be unmanageably large, but we don't want to feel like we're on top of one another once we have a bigger family, either.

And we found a house that is very nearly perfect. It's two stories. It has hardwood upstairs and down. It has four bedrooms plus a fifth in the full finished basement. It's recently been redone. It has a two-car garage. The kitchen is spectacular. It has a living room and a family room, each with a fireplace. The bedrooms are spacious, with large closets. It has a really nice yard and patio. It's in a good neighborhood in a good school district, not downtown but not too far away either. It's near a light rail station and a Whole Foods. It's in our price range; in fact, it's cheaper than we would have expected. Literally, there is not one thing that we would change about the house itself.

But its location has a flaw, which may or may not be fatal. It is literally right next to the interstate. But it's not as bad as it sounds. The yard is roomy, and there's a fence, and then behind the fence is a huge gray concrete wall, and on the other side of the wall is the highway. You can't see it, and certainly you would never end up with a car accident in your backyard. But you can hear it.

I actually don't think I mind. You can't hear it in the house, only in the backyard, and because it's a highway and not a city street, there's no stop and go and honking and whatnot. The cars going by make a steady whooshing sound, almost like white noise. Torsten thinks he would mind it more than I do. There are probably ways to minimize the noise, like planting trees along the wall, or putting in some sort of water feature in the backyard.

I also like the wall itself, because it means that you have total privacy. Nobody can ever build a house directly behind ours so that we can see into each other's windows. I like that.

So of course this raises questions. We have a realtor but we didn't exactly seek her out. She responded to an email query and has sort of become our realtor by default. She has basically dismissed this house as a contender, saying that the noise may not bother us now but it might bother us later. She might be right, but on the other hand I think it's likely that we would get used to the noise and stop noticing it altogether.

The realtor also says that we have to think about the implications of the highway when we consider trying to resell the house someday, which is true as well. But then she did research into other houses on that block and said that the highway wall doesn't seem to have affected the prices much. Plus, we aren't trying to make money off our house. We just want a house at a locked-in mortgage rate so we can pay it off and own it and not have to worry about renting and moving and inflation and all the rest.

So I can't totally figure out why she is trying to talk us out of this house. It's a good deal because it was a fix and flip and the flip part hasn't happened due to the market. Its price has been reduced by $54,000 since it first went on the market five months ago, and we could certainly get it for well under its list price. It has everything we want. And what she is telling us is that to get another house that meets our criteria in that or a similar neighborhood, we'd need to pay $100,000 more, at least. Or else we'll have to live 45 minutes outside of town.

So then the question is, would we pay $100,000 more to live in that house not by the highway? Or is the highway not really an issue for us, and therefore it's actually good that we've found the perfect house by the highway because it saves us some money? Except that she says that in the past the highway hasn't affected the price... but maybe now in such a buyers' market, people can afford to be pickier? Really, which houses sell and which don't seems to be kind of a random thing as far as I can tell.

And why isn't the realtor discussing this with us? Does she somehow know better than we do what things we should and shouldn't put up with? My mother suggested, and I think this is a very good idea, that we see if we can get in touch with someone else who lives on that block, and talk to them about what it's like to live next to that wall.

In the meantime, we aren't really doing anything. Our realtor knows what we're looking for, and we've seen some other houses and lots of other listings, but nothing that we've liked nearly as much, even at much higher prices. And that's the other thing. Even if we did decide to pay $100k more for the same house not on the highway, such a house doesn't necessarily exist. We have very specific things that we look for in a house, and it's rare to find them all in one place.

So, we're looking, trying to get a feel for things in and out of our price range, for comparison. And so far everything that I've seen makes me like this house on the highway more. I could see raising our family in that house. But we aren't in a hurry. Although I know that I'll be very sad if we find out the house has sold. That isn't a reason to rush into anything, but maybe it's a sign?

I just don't know. We've never done this before, and that's not helping either. But I really, really love that house, and so does Torsten. I guess that's a starting point.