About Melissa Batai
My husband and I moved to New York in August. We only had one week to find and put an offer on a house. Initially, we looked for smaller, more affordable houses, but almost all of them were in rough neighborhoods or required major fixes, which we didn’t have the time for. We put in several offers on different houses, but the one we got was 450 square feet larger than our former house and had a yard triple the size. While I’m sure the house will have good resale value, we’ve discovered many drawbacks of buying a house that’s too big.
More Items to Fix and Maintain
The larger the house, the more items there are to fix and maintain. For instance, the windows in our house need to be replaced because they are old and some are damaged. We have 18 windows total in our two-story house, plus three egress windows in the basement. A smaller house would likely have far fewer windows, saving us hundreds, if not thousands, of dollars in window replacement costs.
More Space to Clean
A bigger space means more to clean. We’ve never lived in a house with a basement before, but we find we have to clean the basement regularly or the cobwebs build up. Then, there are the other 12 rooms in the house to clean. Our old house didn’t have a basement, and there were only nine rooms, so cleaning was faster and easier. (There was only one floor, so we didn’t have to lug a vacuum up and down stairs.)
More Furniture to Buy
In a larger house, you need more furniture to fill the space. Our new house has two living rooms. We still haven’t bought furniture for the front living room. Right now, the room only has bookcases and a treadmill. I’m not sure when, if ever, we’ll buy furniture for that room. Likewise, we have one bedroom that is also empty. We’re trying to mindfully use our money to update and maintain the house. If we have extra sometime, we’ll buy additional furniture.
Higher Taxes
Taxes in New York are high no matter where you live, but because we live in a nicer neighborhood in a bigger house, we pay more taxes than we would have in a smaller house in a more modest neighborhood. We’re easily paying one or two thousand dollars more a year than we would have paid on some of the other houses we looked at.
Higher House Payments
Likewise, our house payments are higher than if we had bought one of the more modest homes that we looked at. I would like to pay our 30-year mortgage off early, but with the current interest rates, I don’t see that happening. If we had a mortgage that was 2/3rds the size of this mortgage, I could envision a plan to pay it off quicker.
Higher Utilities
Because the house is larger, we have to pay more in utilities. This winter, I didn’t want to pay as much as we were in gas to heat the house, so I turned the heat down to 64 degrees during the day and 61 degrees at night. We’re wrapped in blankets all day. If we didn’t have to heat such a large area, we could keep the temperature higher.
Final Thoughts
This house will likely be easier to sell in the future because it’s in better shape than the more modest houses we looked at that needed significant repairs. However, we’ve found several drawbacks of buying a house that’s too big. If we would have had more time to house hunt, perhaps we could have found a modest house that wasn’t in need of major repairs.
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