Is your house a starter home?

Tell me if this sounds familiar.

You scrape and save to buy a house. You spend weekend after weekend driving around town with your realtor. You get exasperated with the realtor and start cruising neighborhoods on your own. You have all the local real estate companies' sites bookmarked. You spend your lunch break looking at MLS listings. You have a favorite online mortgage calculator. Your loan officer's number is programmed into your phone and you know the first names of all their kids. You become obsessed with your credit score. You hound the city offices for maps of school districts. Your heart pounds every time the Fed meets to discuss interest rates. You have soul-searching conversations with your spouse about whether you REALLY need a second bathroom. You make a list of deal-breakers, deciding you can live without off-street parking but you must have a covered front porch.

Finally, you find The House. You make an offer and it's accepted. It passes inspection. You manage to find an company that will insure a home with wiring from the 1930s. During the final walkthrough, you are too polite, and you agree that the former owner can leave his old weight machine behind in the basement. You have waited for weeks, months, and finally it's closing day. Your hair turns gray during the final negotiations, but you survive. You walk out of there with the keys.

The keys! You can move in, or start renovations, or both at the same time. You're elated. Your own home! When you say "my house", there's a new, subtle emphasis on the word "my".

But by the end of the first week, the glitter is wearing off. Why didn't you notice during the final walkthrough that there was a broken storm window? It costs how much to have the chimney cleaned? The electrician tells you if you don't break through the walls to rewire, you're risking fried computers at best, and devastating electrical fires at worst. You begin to think about what you can actually live with, and the words "for now" start to pepper your sentences.

"Let's not refinish the floors for now."
"I can live without an oven for now."
"We just won't use the downstairs toilet for now."
"I never thought I'd live in a green house, but it's fine for now."

And then, inevitably, you start to think wistfully of "the next house". You still haunt that trendy neighborhood you were priced out of, and scour the MLS listings to see what you missed. You figure you might be able to buy in a better school district before Junior starts school, or at least by the time he's in Junior High. You set up your home office in the kitchen alcove and talk about how the next house will have a fourth bedroom. You renovate, but you start to reign yourself in. This is not the time to put in your dream kitchen. That's for the next house. You want to spruce the place up, but you're very concerned with resale value.

And maybe it's a good thing, to realize that this is probably not the last house you'll ever own. But wouldn't it be nice if you COULD afford to buy your dream house in the first go round?

Photo credit: Eric Harshbarger. Used without permission, but at least I'm giving credit where credit is due. If Eric wants me to take it down, I will.