house buying design re-evaluation

After moving in

A couple of days into looking for houses on the 11th of March 2017 a house flagged up as a potential, the following Saturday March 18 we viewed the house and put an office in on the Monday.

We moved into the house in June 2017, it is now January 2020. We have had enough time to get over the stress of getting the house in order and enough time to re-evaluate all that has happened relating to the house. Here we re-evaluate this design using a SWOC analysis to understand the Strengths and Weaknesses of the design along with the Opportunities, and the Challenges the design presented along the way.

Strengths

The checklist was a useful tool to help me focus on what I decided beforehand would be of importance. Once I began to look on the internet at houses for sale I would run over the checklist for each house, along with my knowledge of where these houses were located, I would visualise each house to see how realistic they would be for the lifestyle we want to live.

During the first few days of committing to seriously looking for houses, the exception house appeared on a local estate agents’ website. From the very beginning, everything about the house looked too good to be true, the location and the size of the house were perfect, the price was good. The gardens were a little on the small size, but it had two of similar size and I felt I could make good use out of them.

After we arranged a viewing, the days leading up to it I spent many hours going over the checklist questions answering them the best I could. The last thing I did before turning up at the house to meet the estate agent was to run over the checklist once more making sure the questions would be fresh in my mind.

Once inside the house, I went into each room answering all the questions held in my mind after having spent so much time thinking about them beforehand. Once I got back home I then set about working through all of the questions in a more organised way. I spent a lot of time thinking about the garden and how I could make good use out of its small size. There were some major grey areas that I had not thought about in the checklist, but due to the excitement of the possibility of buying this house, I let these grey area questions go and went with my intuition. We both loved the house and put an offer in to buy the house straight away.

After a few days, our offer was accepted, we had a meeting with an exceptional mortgage adviser and with the minimum of input from ourselves, he organised and arranged everything. Buying the house was so easy for us, I could not understand why some people reported so many bad experiences of buying houses. I understood this a little better later when it came to those grey areas inside the house that I knew nothing about.

Using OBREDIM as a theme to organise questions helped guide me to think about what was important in different areas. Splitting these areas into questions for the house and questions for the garden added extra value to the design by allowing me to not have to keep thinking about the whole all at once.

Weaknesses

Probably the biggest weakness with the design was my lack of experience in knowing what to look for when buying a house. The questions I came up with were great when it came to choosing a location or creating a permaculture design for the garden but quite basic with regards to the actual house and the state of the building. I had little knowledge of how much building work would need to be carried out and the costs involved.

Opportunities

If I were to buy another house using this design, I would spend time talking to builders and other trade people who have experience in the kinds of things that need to be taken into consideration before buying a house. I would also add real costs next to some of the questions on the checklist to remove the need of having taken guesses.

I would also take the list of answers relating to building work to a builder and go over them to make sure my answers are close to the truth.

Challenges

Not knowing very much about topics such as house electrics, plumbing, heating, kitchen fitting, general house maintenance, and the costs surrounding them, things could have turned out much worse than they did. Relying on intuition for the above gave me a lot of stress that could have been reduced by having a more comprehensive understanding and a plan of how to address each of the topics.

I knew nothing about buying a house and it showed in the coming weeks and months after we got the keys to the house.

As a side note, not having thought about asking any questions relating to paranormal activity became quite a challenge a little time after we moved in, but that is another story.

Summary

Putting an offer in for the house straight away after our first viewing was perhaps a little rushed. We were missing so much information around costs it was remarkable how everything worked out as it did. We were very fortunate to have ended up with a house that needed only the amount of work it did.

The design worked well for me in the areas I knew lots about, like the direction of the prevailing wind, the path of the sun over the garden, the location of the house in the town.

If I do ever buy another house, I will pay much more attention to areas around the structure of the house and the amount of work involved in fixing it up with a whole new section of questions on costs.

Using permaculture principles has prevented us from spending thousands of pounds which we do not have on work that would be only cosmetic to the house. We have found many different solutions to improving what was already in the house such as doors, floors, and fittings thanks to my partner Carrie spending her time upcycling these things with amazing results. My favourites are the upstairs flooring, which is now brown wrapping paper ripped up, glued to the old chipboard floor, and then varnished leaving an effect that looks like it cost hundreds of pounds and not the cost of the paper, glue, and varnish. My other favourite is the toilet seat which was a nice solid wood seat but looking a little chipped and faded, it is now painted to look like the red mushroom with white dots on it, a magical place to sit.