Houses and Home Ownership

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Honeydew exists and you crap on Pears? :-p

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Not if they’re a grape vine or a fig tree/bush or raspberries or blackberries. That’s all I can speak from experience on though.

Those 4 however, once they’re planted and reliably making it through the winter, require exactly 0 maintenance. I guess sometimes I water them when I am also watering the zucchini but sometimes I don’t bother. So not 0 maintenance just intermittent watering whenever I realized it hasn’t rained in a few days or it’s been particularly hot.

You guys know we have a Fruit thread, right?

While we were away on our summer trip/honeymoon the tree was sorted.

And to clarify a second time, we aren’t about to start planting any new trees on our property, let alone any fruit trees. We just have to make sure four new trees are planted somewhere local. They will be the most boring, location-appropriate trees possible, planted by professionals in a reforestation scheme.

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Thanks to a probable housing bubble, I was indeed able to leverage my equity into a nice low-interest HELOC with a sufficient credit limit to probably allow us to tackle 7 or 8 renovations in the next 5 years, as well as consolidate a couple of higher-interest loans into a much lower interest rate.

Among the many projects we’ll be tackling is a small kitchen upgrade - I’m planning to ditch my crap electric resistance cooktop for a swanky induction, and to install a high-powered island range hood (because I literally do not have any cooking ventillation currently).

I’m thinking about two different higher-end models of cooktop:

https://www.subzero-wolf.com/wolf/cooktops-and-rangetops/induction-cooktops/36-inch-contemporary-induction-cooktop

Overall, I think the Bosch is more likely to fit my needs (the two FlexInduction zones are very flexible), but the Wolf can be mounted flush with the counter and can theoretically turn into a single very large cook zone (16") which could come in handy.

But the range hood is a lot more vexing.

I really like the looks of this Wolf hood:

https://www.subzero-wolf.com/wolf/range-hood/42-inch-cooktop-island-hood-black

But I don’t know if I really want to throw that kind of money at it. The cooktop sure, I cook a ton, but literally almost any vent hood willl be dramatically better than what I have now.

Something like these still look good, and are much less money:

https://www.homedepot.com/p/ZLINE-Kitchen-and-Bath-ZLINE-42-in-Professional-Island-Mount-Range-Hood-in-Stainless-Steel-KECOMi-42-KECOMi-42/206922170

And then there’s this ceiling-mounted style with which I have no experience, but damn if it doesn’t really open up the space:

https://www.lowes.com/pd/FORNO-Ducted-Wall-Mounted-Range-Hood-Stainless-steel-Actual-27-6-in/1002982974

Anyone have experience with this last type of hood? I like the idea of mounting flush with the ceiling, but I’m not sure if it might be too long a travel path to be as effective as I’d like.

That said, went for a walk around the back of our house today and randomly found a fruit tree in the forest. It’s a Mirabelle plum tree: very tasty.

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Soon…

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The fun of living in the Northeast. Woke up this morning, felt cold. Now, I keep my house cool, but after a bit, I went, “this cool?” So I check my thermostat. Should be 53, is 45, and dropping.

I poke at the furnace, but I don’t know what I’m doing. So now I’m waiting for an emergency furnace repair guy.

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in that vein, the pipes to the clawtub bath in my my main bathroom froze with the cold weather, but no leaks/damage I can see anywhere, just no water coming out. Additionally my freeze door didnt close or my freezer is broken, hoping its the former and everything refreezes overnight

The fridge & freezer were confirmed dead the next day. Thankfully had a backup fridge and freezer in the basement (previous owners saved their old whenever they upgraded) and was able to fall back on that. We ordered a new fridge on Feb 19th and then it took over 2 months between supply chain delays, required upgrades in the location of the shutoff valve for install and shenanigans by the delivery contractor.

Finally though, the fridge was delivered and installed yesterday and it was well worth the wait for the big boi that barely fit in the door. They dook the door off the hinges, they took the fridge doors off their hinges, but we got it in.

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Not sure if this discussion would be best located here or in the Urbanism thread or elsewhere. I just saw yet another post on the local subreddit for my nearest major city complaining about continued rent hikes, which continued on to people sharing how much they pay in rent and what they get. It was pretty disturbing to read what people are paying for low quality and/or low square footage housing. I am paying far less on my mortgage payment for an entire house (that I’ve owned for almost a decade) than many people are paying for a fraction of the space in an apartment/condo. It is a pretty common issue of complaint around here and the cost of housing is generally an important and frustrating issue for many regions in the US.

For many reasons I would love to not live in the car-centric suburban hellscape that is North America’s fiendish creation of the late 20th and early 21st century. But one thing that keeps me where I’m at and that I appreciate is knowing (pretty much exactly) what my housing & home energy costs are going to be month after month forever. Yes, that also brings with it the burden of unexpected or otherwise costly maintenance & repairs. So the thing I’ve been wondering is if single-family homes (or similar housing) ownership with a mortgage is the only broadly available way to be able to live at the same location for the same cost for the long-term? I am aware that rent control, or really rent freeze, is a thing in some cities, and I haven’t been a renter in nearly two decades so I don’t know what options exist in my local market.

Am I missing something with this line of thinking, or is that the trade-off that we are forced to make in our society: home ownership which brings predictable monthly costs but potentially high maintenance & repair OR renting which removes the upkeep & repair burden but subjects you to unexpected rent increases?

Given the ways in which rent has been rising in the last decade (I only joined the home-owner group three years ago), I’d say it’s not so much unexpected rent increases as explorative. In years where “inflation” was at 2%, my rent habitually rose 8-10%. The rise in my housing cost last year? Five dollars because of a change in taxes needed for escrow.

This is a problem that feels like it’s bigger than just housing and might fit in this thread, urbanism, or any number of other threads. Because I think you’re right in identifying the tradeoffs we’re being forced to make.

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If you buy a condo or are part of a co-op owned building then you have a lot of the price stability that you would see in a SFH plot, you just have to navigate the political and financial ties that come with owning within a shared enterprise (but this is balanced by, ya know, getting to live and build equity in a dense city with all of its amenities). I can’t speak from direct experience since I my own experience is buying a twin within a city.

No, you’ve got the right of it, except I think you are being too kind to the rental market. Landlords - by which I am mostly referring to multiple-property-owners who try to make their living by renting places, as opposed to like, your grandma renting out her back room - literally can only exist by exploiting the need for housing and coercively using the threat of instability to get paid more. That’s literally it. Rent is a fuck, landlords are scum.

If you think about it, rent will always be more expensive than owning, because the landlord is trying to make money, and the only way to do that is to charge more than the total cost of the housing - which is the cost you would pay with individual ownership. Sometimes corporate landlords can negotiate better deals on services though (property maintenance), so that is one legit place where they might have better leverage.

Co-ops and condos are the better version - you have shared maintenance costs with a stable payment. Yes you need to navigate board approval and such, but the benefits are usually worth it. Owners band together and get needed services for less money; everybody wins, except the people excluded for bullshit reasons.

The single family home model is partly about seeking stability, and also (at least in the US) about racism - many of these single-family developments were the product of white flight, and zoning laws are often aimed at maintaining the status quo, which prevents upward mobility.

All of which is to say: housing is a human right, abolish landlords, support public housing, support increased density and walkability of communities.

Yes I have pamphlets.

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Given things the way they are now, and their unlikelihood of changing dramatically in the near future, this is true.

But we’ve all watched these videos already about how suburban life is heavily subsidized.

This is the reason that a single family home in the suburbs is affordable. If taxes were adjusted to make suburban people pay for their way of life, instead of having people in denser areas paying for them, there would be an enormous housing crisis and suddenly nobody would be able to afford to live anywhere.

Only the very affluent and wealthy could afford the tax burden of a suburb. The cost of land in the cities would be even worse than it is already. People might be forced to live in truly rural areas with no/minimal infrastructure. Hopefully some people would be able to eventually rebuild and rezone various towns to create affordable, more densely packed, homes with a higher standard of living.

Yeah, I hate renting and I hate the idea that someone can even be a landlord. There are many reasons I begrudgingly choose to rent despite all that, but the biggest one is just time. I’ve got one life to live. A certain number of hours on this Earth. The average American spends 111 minutes of their day, 4+ years of their life, in a car just driving around. That doesn’t even account for any life-extending health benefits from walking to place all the time instead of driving. There’s no financial price I can put on that time.

Housing is a human right, and that’s a fact. I’ll do what I can to make it a policy as well. But until then, I have to pay whatever the price is in cash in order to get my time back.

That said, I don’t begrudge anyone for choosing differently. Given the policies currently in place of course people are going to choose suburb and car. There are extreme financial incentives for choosing that way of life, and people aren’t rich. Of course that’s what they’re going to do.

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