Tuesday, January 02, 2007

A frustrating start to the new year and a dilemma....

We welcomed the new year in as good as we did last year...

We went out to a chinese buffet for lunch, and was quite disappointed with how the place has come down in quality...in our opinion. Then we ran home and let the dog out, then headed to hubby's brothers for a visit there. The 2 older kids were going to sleep over, but Mr. Hockey started puking!! Yeah, fun. So, we came home straight away, we didn't want to pass anything on, and he went to bed. We watched Charlie and the Chocolate Factory with the girls and got them to bed afterwards.

When hubby went to lay Pooky down, the dining room light blew. I thought it was odd, since it was one of those newer lights. We had replaced a few to see if there was a difference, and I couldn't figure out why it blew so quickly. Then I started to hear dripping, then a steady stream of water...um, where was that coming from?

Through the light fixture, in the ceiling, where the light just blew. Hm, I stood there with a cup, catching all the water and clearing the table off (we were looking through some old pics, trying to figure out which was Cutie Pie and which was Princess...I will label my pics from now on!!) and yelled upstairs for hubby to come down right away.

We asked Cutie Pie if she had water in her bedroom at all, and she said no. So, I sent hubby up to double check, cause that 'lie detecting' thing that moms have was going up and down in my mind...

For sure! She had a bottle of water in her room that spilled on the floor and it was leaking through to the dining room. Great. We figure that the water shorted the electrical and the light went out, then it just dripped. Hubby went up to take the fixture down and dry it up and that is when we realized that it is, most definately, knob and tube wiring there.

Our house is around 80 years old. When we bought it we had a home inspector go through it and tell us what was wrong. He said that we only had knob and tube wiring in the basement and the attic, and it should be fine. uh, uh...he was wrong. So now I am worried about what is in the rest of the house.

Now, we have a decision to make...we have been wanting to sell the house for a while, but can't afford what we really want. Would it be bad to sell our 80 year old house, located in not so desirable downtown and buy a townhouse, or semi in a more desirable area for a decent price?

I worked it out like this in my head - (smell the rubber?) We sell our house for 150,000 minimum, we buy for 120,000-130,000. Our 70,000-80,000 mortgage transfers over to the new house and we down payment the rest. Then we still have moving and closing costs covered with the extra. We live in the newer house for 5 years and work on saving and then buy the dream home I am waiting for 5 years to buy that we had planned on buying anyways?

What do we do? If we stay here we are looking at between 10,000-20,000 in repairs to be done...electrical and upstairs flooring (including sub flooring too) (the bathroom also leaks to the front hallway) and outside work-soffit, fascia, siding, yada, yada, yada.

Yeah, so Happy ******** New Year to us!!!

2 comments:

  1. Fix and sell I'd say... A nice, newer townhouse sounds good to me. Especially one built since we were born...

    Get an estimate on the cost of repairs, you'll need to know that anyways for selling it.

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  2. I would say its time to sell. You could start looking at forclosure homes, and estate sales, maybe you could find something reasonably priced.

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