Home Purchase

[Moirae]

For the first time, my husband and I are making enough money to be pre-approved for a mortgage ($200,000 to $225,000). We definitely don't intend on spending that much because I think it might make things difficult for us. For many reasons that I won't go in to here, this is a very wonderful thing and we are happy as hell.

But with the current market prices are going back up and what the homes we're looking at seem meh at best. There's a few that seem beautiful but I think that will likely also mean that they will go quickly.

So I had another idea. Being that I live in a hurricane zone, this has definitely been a concern for me. So I started doing some research and discovered modular homes.

These are not the same as a mobile home in that they can't be picked up and moved once they are set down. They become a permanent structure. They are built in a warehouse to your specifications and brought to the land you have chosen, the foundation laid and the house attached. They are actually quite beautiful as the designs have very much changed in the last ten years or so, and you wouldn't be able to tell them apart from a site built home.

They are cheaper than a traditional site builder home, they take around four weeks from start to finish (including foundation) of the installation on site. They are built in a factory so aren't exposed at any time to the elements. And according to scientists and government programs like FEMA, they survive hurricanes much much better than regular homes because they are built with 30% more material than a traditional home due to the need to move them from the location they are constructed to the permanent site.

I am, however, getting a little frustrated.

There are many suburbs here and I can only find information on building modular homes in one of them (they require special approval by the suburbs "government"). I cannot find any information on any of the other suburbs in the area. I've tried several keywords and they all bring up the sales companies for modular homes in my area. That doesn't help at all.

I don't want someone to sell me something, I want to educate myself so I don't get screwed (that goes for all things housing). I'm one of those people that wants as much information as humanly possible before I take the plunge on everything and I'm known to obsessively research things for months.

So I have two questions...

1. I imagine many of you have bought houses before so do you have any advice?

2. Do you know where I'd go to find this information? I go to my Parish website and there's information on financing there but not about the laws for this itself and no indication of what I would talk to to find out this info.

Thanks for your help.

[NecessaryCatharsis]

As frustrating as salespeople can be, they are probably the best ones to guide you to get information on using their products in different subdivisions, they would be the ones who have had that experience before.


As far as buying or building a house, the absolute best advise I can give you is put your money into the stuff you can`t see, and don`t worry about the stuff you can see right now. Examples:

Don`t put in an electric panel that just fits your needs, spend the extra grand and put in the next size up. If in a few years you decide you just need more plugs in the spare room for a computer desk, it will cost a few hundred dollars to add one to an existing plug. It will costs you several thousand to replace the panel first with a bigger one.

Don't put in a furnace or AC at the top of its limit. If your house is 17 500 cubic feet, and your furnace/AC is rated for 15000 to 18000 cubic feet it will be running at its peak all the time, and will not be energy or fuel efficient and will not last as long. Buy the one for 18 000 to 22 500 cubic feet.

Put a shut off for every tap, every toilet, dishwasher, outside line, every floor and one for the incoming water. Put a drain after the tap at the incoming water so you can drain all the water lines in the house fully without plumbing anything.

Put in the most energy efficient windows, doors and insulation you can.

Upgrade the framing from just meeting code to `solid as can be`.

All of these things are really difficult and expensive to fix after the fact, it is really easy to change cheap countertops to granite, upgrade light fixtures to pretty ones, and change taps to better than builder grade.

As far as buying a house in your area, talk to local people to find out, based on the age of the house, what the likely building practises are, what things typically need fixed. Get a home inspection. Get two, one from a home inspector, and one from a reliable renovator who can tell you what it will cost to do the necessary and wanted repairs.

Congratulations!

[TheSHAD0W]

Don't put in a furnace or AC at the top of its limit.

Don't buy an A/C that's over-rated for your house, either; that will result in humidity problems, as the unit won't run long enough to suck the moisture from the air.

Modular homes tend to cater towards the higher end of the home price spectrum. They're less money than a stick-built house with similar features, but you can get a pretty decent house with the same square footage for lower if you find a good contractor. Also, I strongly recommend shopping the existing home market for a while before trying to build your own.

[Seshat]

Having lived in both a cyclone and a flood zone, educate yourself out the wazoo on where in your city is prone to flooding. Not just in the last decade or two, but as far back as you can get information for. (Yes, I know Katrina was the worst in NOLA in living memory, but don't JUST rely on the info about Katrina.)

Also check for what flood protection measures have been made, which places have been drained - and where they've been drained to, and .. well, everything like that.

Don't be on the top of a hill, either. It's very tempting to be there; but it exposes you to the hailstones. You don't want to have to replace your windows every hailstorm - nor everything that's been soaked because the windows were broken.

Keep an eye on your travel routes as well: if your house is safe but you're stuck until the floods drain, it can be annoying. Not dangerous, necessarily, but annoying.


As for the house itself, allow me to agree with everything NC said. Invest in the soundest, most reliable house you can afford. You can replace tap tops, door handles, paint, carpet and other aesthetic elements much more easily than you can replace your wall studs, windows, and electricals.


If you do build, you will need to have tradesmen installing your plumbing, electrical, and perhaps other specialist-work elements. Do your best to get reliable people! We now have to replace our electricals, and we just plain can't afford it. It sucks.

If you buy a pre-existing house, have a tradie check out the electrical and the plumbing. NONE of our research recommended that we do that - and boy do we regret it now.

[Moirae]

Well, part of the beauty of the modular home is that they have professional tradesman to do that stuff during the building process before it's brought to the site. But I do definitely agree.

I'm just worried about buying a house that already exists due to the number of problems that could be involved. I did have a real estate agent tell me its much more complicated to have a house built than it is to buy an existing structure, however.

Thank you everyone for your great advice.

[EricKei]

Flooding - for the NOLA area...well, that's "everywhere," pretty much. Almost all of it is below sea level and protected by levees, so one degree or another. Specific info should be available via the US Geographic Survey website, iirc. To hazard a guess, easterly areas (using the City itself as a reference point) will be less-protected; areas to the West (Metairie & Kenner) will be better, and the Westbank (which is, of course, to the South -- where else?) will vary. Note that it was the first area to really come back post-Katrina, at least in terms of businesses; Metry followed soon after. Plus the obvious -- as pretty as the Lake is, if you can see it from your hunk o' land, chances are that floods and high winds will more easily kick your house's ass.

Maybe one thing to consider, if the 'burb in question is appropriate for it, is to build the house raised a few feet. Can be done such that it looks nice and purdy, too

Aaaand @ Seshat: "Hill"?....O_O I'm not familiar with that word...You mean, the High Rise? Those big concrete things we drive along that rise up into the air? ^_^

Not much hail there, either, tho the one notable time it came when I was living there (a warm January day, oddly enough), we had baseball-sized chunks of the stuff everywhere.

[Ophbalance]

You are going to get a MASSIVE amount of pushback on a modular home, and will have to rely heavily on the sales folks there as to where one can be built. For as much as they are NOT a mobile home, there's a lot of "Not in My Backyard!" with where they can be placed. We looked at having one built in 2007, and even found a set of lots with one already in place that was nearly identical to the one we wanted. When we called owner of the lots about it "Oh, we don't allow modular homes". When asked why there's already one there? "Oh, yeah... THAT one. We changed our covenants once they put that thing there." Well screw you too buddy.

However, fun facts time! My best friend that I grew up from Kindergarten through graduating High School worked at a mobile/modular home plant in Lock Haven, PA. Kevin Sorbo of the TV Hercules fame purchased his modular home from the company which my friend worked at, and said friend got to be one of those working on it. So to me, if it's good enough for Hercules, then by God it'd be good enough for me .

[Seshat]

Okay. If flooding is everywhere, look into getting/building either a house on stilts, or a two storey house where the bottom storey is nothing but disposable rooms: all the necessities are upstairs, and you never EVER put anything you value on the bottom storey.

Queensland, Australia has a long history of stilt houses, for several reasons. Floods being one, and the other being allowing breezeways under the house for coolth. The stilts also allow waterflow under the house without disrupting the house itself - and high stilts means the stilts and the foundation and underfloor constructions can be easily inspected.

Another trait of the traditional Queenslander is passive cooling: a wide verandah along at least the sunward (north for us, south for you) wall, and often the east and/or west walls as well. The verandah shades the windows, is often a pleasant living area, and provides a shaded, rainproof place to hang out clothes to wind-dry.

The internal architecture provides for breezeways. Fashions over how the internal space is segregated have changed over time, but our architects always allow for breezeways if designing a passive-cooling Queenslander.

The roof is peaked, and has some form of venting that encourages excessively hot air to vent out to the atmosphere; the oldest form is the simplest, the roof is actually a double roof. Imagine a pyramid with the top truncated, with a smaller, floorless pyramid on top of it, with the walls of the two pyramids overlapping. The hottest air goes to the peak of the smaller pyramid, and pushes the next hottest air out the gap between the two.
But because the two pyramids overlap, rain - even if pushed horizontally by a cyclone - can't get into the roof.
The roof is traditionally corrugated iron; the material seems to be particularly functional in these circumstances, though I'm not sure of the reasons.


Now, I'm not suggesting that you should buy/build a Queenslander. I'm just thinking 'semi-tropical or tropical, humid as hell, extremely hot, prone to floods, prone to cyclones. Hey, I know of a building style that has appropriate features for that!'
Pick and choose from the features that the Queenslander has: some you might want. You might want none! But at least if I offer them, you've got the choice.

[Moirae]

Yeah, living in NOLA is difficult due to the possibility of flooding. While older homes will be built on slabs, this became a serious problem when Katrina hit in that any of them near a levee problem were wiped off the face of the map or so flooded that they will never be recovered.

Typically houses built in the last 20 years were usually built on 3 foot high pylons and you have to go up a set of stairs to get to the door. However, even that wasn't good enough when Katrina hit as the water was up to about 15 feet in the lowest lying areas (though that's places like the little fishing villages that get wiped out every time a storm hits) and around 8 feet on average.

I think they changed the laws on how high a house must be built. Meaning, I think the new laws say that the front door must be at least 5 feet from the ground, though I may be wrong on that. Alot of the really new places I've seen built since Katrina can fit the car underneath the house as the parking area. There are a new set of duplexes about 8 blocks from my house that do this.

[EricKei]

Stilt houses are relatively popular around the area -- but mostly on properties that are direct waterfront property (meaning, either it goes lawn > one-lane-road > water, or the driveway leads around back to a dock). Elsewhere, one can find houses that are raised 3~6 feet or so, providing a crawlspace underneath (for non-NOLA peeps, this is an example of a shotgun house). Winters there are normally mild, but people still need to be prepared to wrap their pipes if a freeze may be incoming. In such cases, the crawlspace/underneath part will have a decorative border/wall with ventilation holes in it, mostly set up to look pretty.

edit, as Moirae ninja posted ^_^ -- Yes, I do believe you are correct. Check the local ordinances for the areas you're looking at. If houses in that zone already are built that way, it will probably make things easier.

[wolfie]

Put a shut off for every tap, every toilet, dishwasher, outside line, every floor and one for the incoming water. Put a drain after the tap at the incoming water so you can drain all the water lines in the house fully without plumbing anything.

With shutoff valves, most places I've seen use globe valves (like an old-style tap that uses a washer, and takes multiple turns to open/close). Avoid them - when (not if) the washer deteriorates, they'll stop shutting off properly, so you'll need to close the shutoff upstream from them and change the washer. Ball valves (literally a ball with a hole drilled through it) are a LOT better. When the handle is parallel to the pipe, they're open (and unlike a globe valve, have virtually no restriction to water flow). When the handle is crossways to the pipe, they're closed - very easy to see their state.

Also, shut-offs are available with a little cap that unscrews on one side of the valve. These are used in climates that go below freezing - they are installed with the cap on the "downstream" side when used as the shutoff for an exterior tap. After closing the valve, you open the outside tap and the cap - the cap lets air in to drain the water in the "stub" to the tap. For interior taps, you don't want to use these - one more thing to leak. For the main shutoff, a regular "hose bib" is probably better than one of these as a drain for the whole system - the capped hole is small, so it would take a LONG time to drain the whole house, plus it would put the drain valve right at the main shutoff. With a hose bib, you can put it in a more convenient location.

[Seshat]

In the Queenslanders, the stilt area is sometimes semi-enclosed: basically, they're fenced in like a picket fence. Plenty of room for water - even floods - to flow through underneath, but damaged pickets are easily removed and cheaply replaced.
The car is almost always parked under the house; and the under-house area may or may not be paved or given a concrete floor.

A Queenslander, depending on the floodiness (yes, it's a word now) of the region, is often on stilts high enough to technically be a two-storey building. If you get a house in an area that's 8-feet or even 12-feet flood-prone, then build your stilts 9 or 13 feet high.

Personally, I'd prefer not to be in a place that floods quite that high, but meh. NOLA is a very special environment, I get that.

One thing to note with a stilt house: build it strong. You want it constructed so that even if one of the stilts is knocked out by cyclone-tossed debris, the structure stays put. Especially in someplace like NOLA!

And get hold of an inflatable boat, keep it upstairs along with your flood supplies. Also keep a brightly coloured tarpaulin.
If you're flooded in and the house is safe, use the tarp to signal your presence and/or need for emergency supplies.
If you're flooded in and the house has become unsafe, the boat is your escape route.


Anyway... I guess I'm just saying you can explore how multiple different cultures handle floodiness and cyclone (or hurricane, or typhoon) type weather; as well as day to day heat, humidity and mild winters. Take the best of each.

I also have ideas about garden design in that sort of environment; but I'm sure you're not anywhere NEAR that stage!

[Moirae]

Living in NOLA, don't worry I have a healthy paranoia of hurricanes. We are always prepared, though we don't have an inflatable boat and a brightly colored tarp, those are good ideas.

Really, we likely won't be in NOLA for 30 years, but at this point, it's a much better idea to buy than to rent. Rents are increasing exponentially, landlords generally seem to be completely awful in this city (I really haven't heard of one that isn't in the 8 years I've lived here and our current is the worst landlord I've ever had), and the cost for things like water and electricity in this house are just wayyyy too much. Plus we don't use even half the house anymore ever since my husbands grandparents passed away, it's just too much work.

If I'm going to pay the same price for a mortgage as I would for rent (likely rent will be higher unless you live in a really bad area), and I can make sure repairs and anything else get done immediately instead of waiting possibly years for it to get fixed, I'd rather have a mortgage.

Interest rates are low now, and I can always sell later if I need to. Housing costs are still in the realm of reasonability though that likely won't be true a year from now so we can't wait.

[Moirae]

Oh I should add that they enclose the under areas sometimes here too. My current house is three feet off the ground with a crawl space underneath. I wouldn't mind getting even higher than that, but that's just me and it can be expensive. I really don't like slab foundations, they aren't good in this area and can lead to flooding easily. Really the biggest issue is the condition of the nearby levees. The worst break during katrina actually hit not far from where I live now but it broke the other side of the levee so this house didn't get any water. We got lucky.

Lots of the new houses in the area have the car parked underneath. The older houses in the area have slab foundations and the car takes up part of the front yard.

[Seshat]

Buying-specific advice:

We used a buyer's advocate. WELL worth the price, well worth it. The advocate is a real estate agent, but one who works for the buyer, not one who works for the seller.

The advocate helped us find houses to look at, and explained why he chose the houses he chose. Because we were looking for a cheap house, he went for the mantra 'the worst house on the best street' (that we could afford).

For us, that meant that appearance was not an issue, just a sturdy house that met our needs or could be restored/repaired to meeting our needs (and still be under budget). But because the street is the one it is, the LAND is now worth more than the house+land cost us, ten (fifteen? Oh god) years ago.

Important things about our location:
* We're within easy (for a healthy person) walking distance of fixed public transport: the suburban train station is ten minutes walk away. (Bus routes move, train and tram don't. Or not often.)
* Right near the train station is a set of small shops where someone can pick up milk and the paper or other little-shopping for mini-shopping trips.
* There's one shopping centre for the weekly shop ->thattaway, just across the railway line. And another <---thattaway, just past the schools.
* Oh, and there's a K-12 (ie, 4-5 years old till 17) school <--- thattaway, within walking distance for a healthy 7-8 year old, and possibly walking distance even for a 4 year old (accompanied by an adult, duh).
* There's a private secondary school over the train tracks, within walking or cycling distance of a secondary school student.
* There's a small tertiary college on the other side of the train station.
* There's a library, a police station, an ambulance station, the local magistrate's court, and a number of other useful administrative areas in the same general zone as the shopping centre, tertiary college, etc over the train tracks. The fire station is on our side of the tracks.
* Our specific street curves, and is not an easy or useful street for 'rat-running'; so it's unlikely to ever become one. Especially since we're in a spot that's blocked off by the train tracks on one side, and a zone of 'commercial B' at right angles to that. (Warehouses, mostly). So the only way to 'cut through' from one road to another would be diagonally, and we're in the wrong part of our rectangle for that.

And lastly...

* the area is slowly being gentrified. A developer who owns and is trying to sell updated housing in my street may well one day make an offer for ours just to get rid of an eyesore.