The trouble with buying a place

Lately, Finnur and I have been looking at houses/townhouses/row-houses to buy. To do so, we’ve been watching fasteignir.is, which is the main real-estate website, and lamenting how very primitive it is.

For example: They do not offer a map-view of all the properties for sale (check out redfin.com and zillow.com for a good example, we used to live in zip: 94043), nor do they actually list the number of the property, only the street-name. I guess this is for ‘privacy’, but then anybody at all can ‘send in a request’ and get emailed a ‘sales-sheet’ which lists ALL the information. I would argue that all this stuff should be on the website. It sure would save me a lot of trouble!

Also, there is no way to look up what other properties in the same neighborhood have recently sold for.  And we’ve been told that the asking prices are in some cases totally insane, but gauging just how insane is hard.  This is partly because many of the larger real estate deals these days are ‘swaps’, because financing is hard to come by, and during a ‘swap’ it is beneficial for all parties to significantly inflate the prices of both properties.

Anyway, leaving aside the map-handicap, and the price-handicap, Finnur and I have now looked at enough properties to get a small sense of another problem we face.  Ourselves.  As in: We’re lazy, so we’d like to buy something that doesn’t need a lot of work. The big question is: How much work is too much work?!

For example, if a kitchen is in pretty good shape, but the doors are ugly, and we’d like to get new ones, is that ok?  What about replacing an old kitchen, particularly if the layout of the place is perfect, just old?  How crazy is putting in a new kitchen?  And just how expensive?!

Bathrooms are another headache. We looked at a place where the main bathroom looked really nice, and was probably only slightly over 5 years old. The problem was that the owner was a ‘bath’ person, so the bath was under the large window, while the shower was tiny, smelly, cramped, dark, still wet from usage from floor to ceiling, and in an inside corner – aka utterly unusable.

In that case, the rest of the house was pretty ok, so the bathroom would be the only thing to go, but is it defensible to rip out a perfectly functioning bathroom just because one would like the shower in a different spot?

Making things ever worse, in my mind anyway, is the fact that I know that I have really really crappy ‘taste’.  Well, let’s put it this way: I like things to be rainbow-colored.  Like our plates for example.  I think they’re very pretty plates, and just the sight of them makes me happy.  Happy colors = Happy Hrefna.  The trouble is that rainbow colors translate very poorly into room design, which these days is all monochromatic, dull and duller.

Which is all a long winded way of saying that I don’t trust myself to ‘design’ or even just ‘decide’ on designs of others.  Well, that’s not true.  I know I would make decisions (I’m good at doing that), but I fear that in the grand scheme of things, they would add up to crazy cacophony.

Now, perhaps I’m wrong, but I’m starting to suspect that this may be a renter’s affliction.  As in, we’ve always rented, and therefore have never really had any say what so ever in the look of our housing, just the furnishings.  (The only exception was our first five years living together, where we were free to paint the walls, and did so with really quite atrocious results in some cases.  Perhaps I’m still damaged from that!)

So yes, finding the ‘perfect’ place will be neigh impossible I fear.  And boy oh boy will the two of us have to brush up on our communication skills if we’re ever going to get through this without grievous injury!