Our first house I guess was a starter's house, at the very low end of the marked, mainly because it was from the 70s, had a very steep road and had well water and a septic tank. It was quite big though and we lived in it for the next 15 years. We enjoyed it a lot. During the 15 years we installed a new kitchen, bathroom, draining around the roof, singles on the roof, installed a warmth pump, replaced several ceilings and built a walk-in closet downstairs.
But there were some issues: some big maintenance issues coming ahead, like replacing all windows and installing balanced ventilation. And no matter how much we would modernize the house, the insulation in the walls would still be quite thin. The road was getting worse and worse and we had to maintain it ourselves after every heavy rain. In the neighbour's house, someone rented out to a lot of construction workers (8 to 9 men living in a small house with a leaky septic tank). A part of the front garden was about to collapse downhill. Eventually I really wanted to move to a modern low energy house.
We were spoiled by having a fantastic view from our house and no traffic noise, so these was the requirement for the new house. After some years of looking around we finally found a house that has these two requirements. It was on the very high end of the market, but after selling the old house, we could pay it cash. The view is amazing. But in matters of energy, it is not a modern house. We use more electricity than we did in the old house after installing the warmth pump. I regret buying such an expensive house and the wrong house. We had almost nothing left of savings. This means any FIRE plans include selling this house, moving to some place that costs half the price and moving in itself also has a high cost. And we must hope the house doesn't loose it's value. And as I have learned, when the house market crashes, it's the expensive houses that will go down most in value. I've seen it in the Netherlands where my mother and FIL live. Their houses have both dropped in value to 50%. Our 5 year old house is also not in as good a state as we had expected it to be and we still have several cases against the previous owner. Luckily we signed for a buyer's insurance, so we have a free layer for this. But it costs quite a lot of our time.
I discovered MMM shortly after moving into this new house and found out that FIRE really is an option in a number of years. I am not sleeping very well and sometimes wish we had hung on to that old house, even though that means we would have spent a lot of time and money on renovation. Now we sit with all our eggs in the same basket with no guarantee at all that it will go up in value during the next years. I am desperately investing a about half of my nett income into index funds now to make sure we build up some other stash.