Please tell me about your experiences being homeowners and give me any advice you can based on my situation below. Was it easier/harder than you imagined? What are the things that you didn't know about home ownership before you started? What are your least favorite things about home ownership?
Some of the reasons I'm nervous about owning a house:
Yard work (mowing lawns gives me an allergy headache from the grass). I think with a small enough yard this will be OKAY.
Shoveling snow in blizzard like conditions. I think this will be okay and I can buy a snow blower if needed.
I think it's going to end up being more expensive than the condo.
Worried about expensive repairs and dealing with repairmen / contractors.
I'll have a longer commute (my current condo is across the street from my work). The areas I'd look for houses in are 20-30 minutes away in traffic.
I am not single. But I am an experienced home owner and can give you some opinions.
By the way, I used to have a lesbian colleague who blogged about how hard it is to be a homeowner with 2 women. You need to fill all the typical man's jobs yourself. She considered it a challenge.
If you are not handy, you will have to hire a repairman regularly. E.g. my mother is living alone and she had called a repairman to fix a tumble dry that didn't work. Turned out it was just the fuse. My mother also hires people to paint the house, repair the roof and to work in her garden. Owning a house is indeed quite a lot of work. I am lucky to be married to an engineer who can fix most stuff. Living alone, I would likely prefer living in an apartment. Maybe a very new house would do the trick, but we just bought a 5 year old house that turned out to have more problems that it should have had.
What we have learned is that owning the correct tools often makes any job at hand so much easier. As a new homeowner you don't have all that stuff and you need to count on making a lot of investments or hiring the tools that you need.
Some of the challenges that we had with our houses:
- Mice in the attic. Solved by setting up mouse traps and emptying them. Can be done by a women.
- Washing and painting the outside walls, also the high parts. Can be done by a woman.
- Replace roof shingles. You need to read up on how to do it. I helped with a lot of the work. But you'll need to be handy for the finishing details.
- Leaking dishwasher. Find the reason it leaks. Or simply installing a new one and connecting it to the water and the drain.
- Replacing a very heavy washing machine or refrigerator. You don't stand a chance to move that on your own.
- Renewing the insides of a room: replacing ceiling plates, painting walls, painting woodwork. Replacing the ceilings is difficult. Painting can be done by a woman if you know how to do it well. In general: internet is your best friend in learning techniques about everything.
- Water flowing into the house. Digging channels around the house for better drainage. Also emergency channel digging in the forest behind our house when there was a lot of heavy rain.
- Our private gravel road flushing partly away because of heavy rain. Working with shovels to repair it. Plus yearly repairs.
- Trees in the garden that grow too high and need to be cut.
- Fighting back the forest that would overtake our garden. Shortening trees and bushes.
- Car won't start. When DH not home, I needed to get the neighbour.
- Repolishing the wooden floor with a polishing machine. Pretty difficult to start with. And painting neatly afterwards.
- Water in the kitchen isn't flowing away like it should. Opening the mushroom neck, empty it and put it back so that it doesn't leak.
- Hanging up a new lamp and connecting the electricity to it.
- Cleaning the chimney.
- Replacing the old kitchen. My DH removed the old one, replace the floor and some of the wall plates. We ordered a carpenter through the kitchen shop to place it for us. That was done in one day and saved us a lot of time. Cost 10% of the kitchen cost.
- Replacing the old bathroom and stripping everything from walls, floor and ceiling. We did everything ourselves. This cost approx 1/3 of what it would have cost if we would have hired someone.
- Redoing the big hall downstairs and building a walk in room. My DH was not working at that time and built the whole thing with a bit of me helping with decorating and painting or just lending a hand. It is very practical to have a second person helping you.
- Just any major renovation. If you are handy, you can do it yourself. Alternatively you need to buy yourself out of it. That costs.
This list above is far from complete. And some of the things are of course also true for living in an apartment.
Cleaning up heavy snow can of course be done by a woman. My DH has been physically inhibited to do this for 2 winters, so I have cleaned snow with a shovel during 2 whole winters, and half the time for another 15 winters. Nowadays we share a big snowblower with the neighbours. As long as it works, I can use it.
Removing grass can be tricky if you are allergic. You can of course take medicine and nose spray before you do it. Or you could replace the grass with tiles.
We have had to hire a contractor a couple of times. I have noticed that they do not always arrive on the agreed time and then come up with some lousy excuse, so that you took a day off for nothing. I usually announce the jobs on a Norwegian website where we can do that and where companies can send you can offer. On the website you can see their rating and feedback by other customers. When we replaced the whole fuse box, this was a much cheaper alternative then the local electrician, like 40% cheaper.