Do you value being able to customize your own house? Not sure how to feel.

Feeling kind of stupid. I bought a home last year for 595k. In excellent shape it is worth 620-640k now. I guess this is a vent or a warning to people.

Note I'm in a sellers market, in a neighborhood where most homes are pretty small and only a few homes are up for sale for remotely sane prices at a time and anything priced under 540k disappears in days and people pay 475-500k for (fairly large) townhomes.

It did have very good bones, a new HVAC and water heater, 3 year old roof, stunning hardwood under the old carpet. Plumbing, electrical, appliances were for the most part in really good shape.

But it was aesthetically hideous and desperately needed repainting and some floor help, needed a new kitchen, and needed about 10k in window dressing and about 10 windows replaced. By the time I'm going to be done, I will end up spending around 100k updating this house

40k kitchen, 10k on windows, 10k on the entire home painting, floor refinishing and carpeting a bunch of bedrooms, 20k on finishing the small basement (it's a one room sub-basement), 10k-15k painting the exterior, maybe 2k on some lighting fixes

Of these 100k repairs, roughly 60k were time sensitive (kitchen was literally falling apart and a horrible layout that we fixed, painting/flooring had to be done ASAP, windows and dressings were actively causing problems) and the rest are more of a "when you have the money",

So when all is said and done, despite getting a "discount", I am going to end up paying around 700k for this 625k home.

However on the flip side I get:

• Brand new kitchen and basement exactly the way I want it tailored to my preferences
• Every room freshly painted and floored exactly the way I wanted, and fresh lighting
• The house layout my wife and I really wanted and enough space to never need an addition
• One of the few homes in the neighborhood we wanted that will not require us to make an addition later (it's one of the bigger homes in our neighborhood by a good amount)

So essentially I overpaid significantly in order to get what is now my dream house. Not sure how I feel.

Then again, I know people who buy relatively more up to date homes and end up needing a roof and a kitchen remodel inside of 10 years, so maybe I did ok.

submitted by /u/azure275
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source https://www.reddit.com/r/RealEstate/comments/1rx5wat/do_you_value_being_able_to_customize_your_own/