What's an absolute "No" in your house search?

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:The benefit to step-downs is a higher overall ceiling height, so there is a benefit. It also provides a separation of space in cases where floor plans are open, which is probably why you see it more starting in the 70s into the 80s when floor plans opened up a lot.

Fair point about the ceiling height, though I'd argue that an extra foot is not really doing much. I'm short though, so maybe it's more of a benefit for tall people? As for separation, the ones I've seen are still pretty integrated with the rest of the house in a way that should just flow, but can't because of the step.

Then you haven’t had a sunken living room. Maybe it’s only a foot, but it feels like 3 or more somehow. If you don’t have an open floor plan (we don’t, I hate them, pandemic proved me right ), then the con isn’t there, and the pros are many: separates the space, elevates the height, allows for enormous christmas tree, allows for dramatic tall cabinets, and at least in our house, is set apart by a back way with three sets of custom french doors that wouldn’t work without the height. So…we like it.

Every sunken living room I've seen is next to a dining room and if it weren't sunken, you'd be able to expand a table into the living room for Thanksgiving and large dinner parties, but you can't, because there's a step.
Maybe I'd appreciate the extra height for the 3 weeks of the year I had a Christmas tree if I celebrated Christmas? I suppose we'll never know, because I'm still walking out of any house with a sunken room.

How many people have large dinner parties that involve making a single table much larger (and have the piece to do it) and don't already have a large enough dining room? I understand your concern, but I'm guessing it applies to maybe 100 people max.

Ugh. I do! (NP) We have a large extended family and we always host big holidays.
We have a sunken living room and I hate it. We can't expand our dining table, which yes, is expandable, so we have to get creative and ads smaller table in the living room. It sucks for other reasons too. This is our first home and we overlooked a few things we didn't realize we would come to hate.

We are casually looking for a newer, bigger house, so I hope someone will love our house enough to have have the sunken living room be a deal breaker.
Funny though, a lot of the things people have put on their list of deal breakers are actually things we are looking for.
To each their own.

If a sunken room or two were a deal breaker for most people, very few houses would turn over in much of the area. No one I personally know cares about that. But it's an issue for some people, just like there's a cadre of a few people who hate basements and won't buy a house with a basement.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:I looked at a lot of homes as was almost a hobby over 20 years. Maybe I saw 100 homes a year.

My favorite bad house had everything all in one. I looked as it was really cheap. Bank listed it directly. Had every bad thing possible
1) mom was a chain smoker like three to four packs a day 20 years. It was overwhelming beyond belief and Sheetrock was black except behind pictures or coach as furniture was tossed and half front lawn.
2) flag lot where it was a long narrow driveway and then 60x100 plot surrounded by four homes staring into house.
3) super fixer upper
4) get ready. Remember foreclosure so everything tossed. Well one room and the connected bathroom had centerfolds from playgirl magazine all over walls and doors and even ceiling. The disturbed adult son put the nude male center folks up. I asked why did bank not remove them aren’t they just glued on? I get that’s not glue guy jerked off and used his sperm to paste it in wall. Workers refused to touch it. My wife already choking from smoke ran out!

Who told you all these details? Like mom was chain smoker for 20 years and adult son who put up the centerfolds with his own “glue”?

Nobody, no one showing a foreclosed house would have that info. For that matter, how would the poster know the nude men were from Playgirl, really stuck around to check text?

[Anonymous]

Road noise (busy road or too close to road).

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:low greatschools

I think we all want good schools for our kids. GreatSchools ratings are problematic though and I hope you're not solely basing your housing search on the GreatSchools ratings.
https://www.chalkbeat.org/2020/9/24/21453357/greatschools-overhauls-ratings-reduce-link-race-poverty

[Anonymous]

No basement for us was a hard no. We were pretty flexible
On everything else. Also no busy street, we wanted to be internal to the neighborhood.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:I looked at a lot of homes as was almost a hobby over 20 years. Maybe I saw 100 homes a year.

My favorite bad house had everything all in one. I looked as it was really cheap. Bank listed it directly. Had every bad thing possible
1) mom was a chain smoker like three to four packs a day 20 years. It was overwhelming beyond belief and Sheetrock was black except behind pictures or coach as furniture was tossed and half front lawn.
2) flag lot where it was a long narrow driveway and then 60x100 plot surrounded by four homes staring into house.
3) super fixer upper
4) get ready. Remember foreclosure so everything tossed. Well one room and the connected bathroom had centerfolds from playgirl magazine all over walls and doors and even ceiling. The disturbed adult son put the nude male center folks up. I asked why did bank not remove them aren’t they just glued on? I get that’s not glue guy jerked off and used his sperm to paste it in wall. Workers refused to touch it. My wife already choking from smoke ran out!

Just wish your other hobby wasn't derailing threads. But flag lot was a nice embellishment connecting back to previous posts.

Is this the New York/New Jersey poster? The one with the anecdote about a woman showing up with a check to buy a house and said “get out of my house”?

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Things that are fixable are not deal breakers for me, so long as it's my budget to fix over time. Location can't be changed - so for me it's a thoroughfare. But even more important that that is living on toxic land - I'm talking about you Spring Valley. I used to own a home there (18 years ago), and to this day it's one of my biggest regrets. Yes we made a killing when we sold, but I also have a DS with significant learning challenges that I relate directly back to living in that house, on that land and drinking that water when he was an infant. I also developed two random autoimmune conditions right after we moved. Could they all be coincidental? Yes I suppose so, but I also believe strongly that there's a link.

I’m sorry to hear about your experiences living in Spring Valley. I agree … the two people I know who live there got sick. One died in middle age, the other beat one form of cancer and developed a second. Both relatively young.

I've always wondered about living in NW somewhat near Spring Valley, even down here in Glover Park. I know my water comes from the Georgetown Reservoir, but who is to say items in the ground didn't migrate from SV south to it and contaminating our water to this day?

[Anonymous]

A big yard to take care of.

Commute > 40 minutes, door to door into and out of downtown DC, during rush hour.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Things that are fixable are not deal breakers for me, so long as it's my budget to fix over time. Location can't be changed - so for me it's a thoroughfare. But even more important that that is living on toxic land - I'm talking about you Spring Valley. I used to own a home there (18 years ago), and to this day it's one of my biggest regrets. Yes we made a killing when we sold, but I also have a DS with significant learning challenges that I relate directly back to living in that house, on that land and drinking that water when he was an infant. I also developed two random autoimmune conditions right after we moved. Could they all be coincidental? Yes I suppose so, but I also believe strongly that there's a link.

I’m sorry to hear about your experiences living in Spring Valley. I agree … the two people I know who live there got sick. One died in middle age, the other beat one form of cancer and developed a second. Both relatively young.

I've always wondered about living in NW somewhat near Spring Valley, even down here in Glover Park. I know my water comes from the Georgetown Reservoir, but who is to say items in the ground didn't migrate from SV south to it and contaminating our water to this day?

That's not how groundwater works. It's not an underground stream connecting Spring Valley to the reservoir. It seeps, very, very slowly. It would take hundreds of years for any spill in Spring Valley to make it to the Georgetown Reservoir.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Flight path.
Busy street.

+1 add near train tracks. BTDT. Never ever ever ever again. When we first bought the house, it wasn't a problem. But, the freight trains started coming through in the middle of the night. I made sure to live much further from any tracks when we were looking for a new house.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:I looked at a lot of homes as was almost a hobby over 20 years. Maybe I saw 100 homes a year.

My favorite bad house had everything all in one. I looked as it was really cheap. Bank listed it directly. Had every bad thing possible
1) mom was a chain smoker like three to four packs a day 20 years. It was overwhelming beyond belief and Sheetrock was black except behind pictures or coach as furniture was tossed and half front lawn.
2) flag lot where it was a long narrow driveway and then 60x100 plot surrounded by four homes staring into house.
3) super fixer upper
4) get ready. Remember foreclosure so everything tossed. Well one room and the connected bathroom had centerfolds from playgirl magazine all over walls and doors and even ceiling. The disturbed adult son put the nude male center folks up. I asked why did bank not remove them aren’t they just glued on? I get that’s not glue guy jerked off and used his sperm to paste it in wall. Workers refused to touch it. My wife already choking from smoke ran out!

Just wish your other hobby wasn't derailing threads. But flag lot was a nice embellishment connecting back to previous posts.

Is this the New York/New Jersey poster? The one with the anecdote about a woman showing up with a check to buy a house and said “get out of my house”?

I don't remember that one, but probably. There was a similarly incoherent yet embellished story in an AirBnB thread, others.

[Anonymous]

Living on Hancock Street.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Deal breakers -
Pipe stem driveway
No driveway
Busy street
No sidewalk
More than 3-4 steps to enter the main door
Yards or driveways with retaining walls, terraced back yards
Neighbors with dilapidated homes, messy unkempt landscaping- either it’s a have for rodents and wildlife or it’s a target for a tear down and I’ll have to live in a construction zone.

If it's no more than 3-4 steps to get to a houses front door, the driveway would be of similar length, rendering it useless as a driveway. The car would be sticking out into the street, or at a minimum blocking the sidewalk.

I don't think you've thought this through.

I believe the PP is talking about steps on a stairway.

This kind of entrance is a deal breaker to me. I don’t want guests entering my home through the garage. I don’t want my mom with 2 hip replacements to have to navigate those steps inside or out to be in the main level of my home.
https://www.zillow.com/homedetails/4413-Vacation-Ln-Arlington-VA-22207/12062885_zpid/?utm_campaign=iosappmessage&utm_medium=referral&utm_source=txtshare

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Deal breakers -
Pipe stem driveway
No driveway
Busy street
No sidewalk
More than 3-4 steps to enter the main door
Yards or driveways with retaining walls, terraced back yards
Neighbors with dilapidated homes, messy unkempt landscaping- either it’s a have for rodents and wildlife or it’s a target for a tear down and I’ll have to live in a construction zone.

If it's no more than 3-4 steps to get to a houses front door, the driveway would be of similar length, rendering it useless as a driveway. The car would be sticking out into the street, or at a minimum blocking the sidewalk.

I don't think you've thought this through.

I believe the PP is talking about steps on a stairway.

This kind of entrance is a deal breaker to me. I don’t want guests entering my home through the garage. I don’t want my mom with 2 hip replacements to have to navigate those steps inside or out to be in the main level of my home.
https://www.zillow.com/homedetails/4413-Vacation-Ln-Arlington-VA-22207/12062885_zpid/?utm_campaign=iosappmessage&utm_medium=referral&utm_source=txtshare

Agree, I want an easy entrance, and leaning toward one story, or all the essentials and a bedroom on the first floor. I say it's for the in-laws but figure that's all of us before long, and I'm really just tired of all the up and down in our current colonial.

[Anonymous]

No sidewalks.
HOA