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I'm on my 3rd house and I realized no matter how closely I examine a house before the purchase there will always be surprises waiting for me.
1) I hear mice behind the wall in my bedroom at night
2) My 2nd floor bathroom has a leak and I see mold growing on the 1st floor ceiling
3) I don't live anywhere near an airport, yet I hear/see airplanes flying by right above my house everyday
I didn't even know airplanes were required to take the same path to the airport even at 30 miles away, so how unfortunate it is to buy a house right on the flight path without knowing ahead of time!
When we moved in to this home, we had been in it maybe a week and noticed a water spot in the first floor ceiling below the bathroom. Called in the plumber through the home warranty and they confirmed it was an old leak. $60 for piece of mind!
My last two homes have been bought new. Found a few minor things as we went along (leaky toilet that stained the vinyl under it, leak on ceiling from vent pipe on the roof, jamming garage door, creaking at some places on hardwood floors, etc.) but nothing major ($$$$ or safety) has happened.
1) The seller left a bunch of crap in my attic. It's all still there a year later. I'll get to it at some point, as it's not an easy spot to get to, which is probably why it got left there in the first place. I got rushed through my walk-through because the seller was being difficult about the time for settlement at the title company. Maybe that was by design... Had I gotten a chance to go up there during my walk-through, it would have been a sticking point.
2) The kitchen range hood was beyond DISGUSTING. My wife started doing a major cleaning of the kitchen a few weeks after we moved in. When she got to the range hood, she called me to take a look. I decided I'd be replacing it that day.
3) A whole mess of wallpaper (in several rooms) was applied to unprepared drywall, as in not primed or painted. Boy was that a ***** to remove.
We were lucky enough to have the son of the previous owner walk through the house with us and show us some of its idiosyncrasies the one thing he forgot to mention was that the well house needs to be heated in winter or we have no water.
Another was the fireplace which was gigantic 9 x 6 ft in the living room with a brick wall behind it, he told us his father had worked for the local cement company and had rebuilt the fireplace/hearth area a number of times. What he failed to mention here was that the hearth is part of the fabric of the house, it took a jackhammer to demolish the top layers and we ended up flooring over the lower 2 feet of poured concrete and brick.
I have an 8' tall privacy fence around our back yard. Behind the fence is a large yard for the middle school. The school rents the field on weekends to the junior soccer league, so during soccer season I hear ref whistles and parent cheering ALLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLL weekend long......sunrise to sunset.
There are no games during the holidays. It's been great.
But, how was I to know about that during my house hunting?
We bought "new" (actually built a year prior but never sold).
The one thing that surprised me and continues surprising me 20+ years later is the amount of sump pump action after rainfalls. My dinky lot is pretty much on a small rise with the lot sloping in almost all directions (one side is level with one neighbor's however their downspouts don't impact our connected plots and most of their yard slightly slopes away down toward the common area woods where all of our houses' main drainage is supposed to go), yet our sump fills with water rapidly after each rain, the pump dutifully pumping it out with alarming frequency.
It's almost as if a semi-active spring underlies our house that becomes totally active during a rain, draining via our under-slab drainage system into our sump (this actually might be possible since "under-slab" is sufficiently below ground level that the rise we are on wouldn't matter).
The amount of water doesn't make obvious sense to this naive homeowner - the house's downspouts all have extensions to send THAT water away from our foundation but that's literally to no avail.
The water table was low during construction and right after we moved in.
Then it went up by a bit (1-2 feet).
Water spewing all over the front lawn, across the sidewalk and into the street.
At least the sump pump worked.
$3000 later the problem has been fixed.
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Water
