Reply to Tell me about living in a historic (old) home

Forum Index » Real Estate

Reply to "Tell me about living in a historic (old) home "

Subject:

Emoticons





More smilies

Text Color: Font: Close Marks

[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]This is OP, and I guess we still have to gauge what “updated” means - yes, new kitchen and bathrooms, but it looks like previous owners (flippers) put a lot of money into updating the property.  If it’s more fully updated - and gosh I hope it is - should we still anticipate headaches/needing to provide costly updates ourselves? (I’m talking structural/foundational things like the foundation, electrical, plumbing etc - if these are all relatively new, can we trust that we’re generally in the clear? FWIW I never intended to own an old home but in our very limited inventory town, it’s either 100+ year old homes or new, ticky-tacky new builds.  I would very much like to avoid the latter.)[/quote]

I was the PP who mentioned buying the 1920s bungalow with structural issues. It was flipped by a flipper who told us at the time of purchase all electrical and plumbing was new. Didn’t end up being the case once we had a big leak and had to rip open walls. Saw quickly the only “new” electrical and plumbing was what was in our faces - eg anything behind walls hadn’t been touched. The electrician we hired to fix some of it said the flipper must have hired random guys from the 7-Eleven because none of the new stuff was to code either.

So all that said - look at permits for the property - that will tell you what has and hasn’t been updated properly. If you don’t see permits for the big stuff and it’s been updated recently, run. We did check permits, didn’t see any, said “Hey that’s BAU in Arlington” and have paid the price for that decision (literally). All said and done we’ll need to put another $150-250K in.

Also make sure to hire an actual structural engineer (PE) if there’s a hint of structural concerns. Make sure they are an actual PE licensed with the state.[/quote]

This. Flipped homes are suspect IMO, as they do it cheaply for a profit rather than with an eye to staying there themselves. Although I lived in a home where the guy did live there for 15 years but did everything himself and absolutely nothing was correct or to code. Every time a professional came over to fix something, they'd say "what the hell is going on here?" It was expensive and sucked.

Agree you want to pull the permits before anything else, at least for anything related to plumbing, electrical, or structure. In our current house (not the one above) we redid 85% of the plumbing and the permit guy came out for a serious inspection. The prior owner finished the basement for rental and had to get permits - we pulled them. Same with the expansion they did. All above-board. The basement was cheaply done in terms of finishes but it's all up to code and solid and that's what matters.[/quote]

Options

	Disable HTML in this message
	Disable BB Code in this message
	Disable smilies in this message

Review message

Search Recent Topics Hottest Topics