Ahh! HGTV. Where would I be without it? Heaven knows I certainly wouldn’t be feeling inferior about my countertops, flooring and tub size.
This weekend I watched a handful of those little HGTV throw-away shows which go by different names but are all essentially the same root concept–you get to see inside other people’s houses. In one show the other people are selling their house and looking for a new one with more bells and whistles. In another, the people are getting their house appraised by a realtor in order to see if they can put more money into fixing it up. You get the general idea, I’m sure.
I’m a terrible voyeur, I’ll admit. It’s why I like to read other people’s blogs, and why I hate reality TV. (It’s too edited and staged, most of it. The true voyeur appreciates Reality TV for the Beginner Voyeurism that it is .) But I have to say these “Price My Flippin’ House!” shows were bugging me after about 20 minutes.
Doesn’t anybody buy a home anymore? You know–a place where they plan to live? After watching these shows I feel as though most people look at house-buying the same way they view playing the stock market. Just another buy-low sell-high experience.
What happened to having the kind of house where you plan to stay forever? Where you pencil in the growing child on the doorjamb? Where you bury pets under a tree?
When we bought this house 8 years ago, it was our intention to stay here as long as God would allow. (Which we hoped meant at least 30 years.) Any of the HGTV realtors walking through would have a heart-attack. Most of our rooms have vivid paint jobs–bright yellow, turquoise, amethyst, sapphire. There’s no bathroom on the main floor, other than the master bath. That’s because the only place to put one in would have been too close to the kitchen, and I won’t have a bathroom near the kitchen because of my phobia.
So, yeah, we may not be able to make several hundred dollars off the sale of our house, but I don’t plan to. I didn’t buy an investment. I bought a place to make memories. I don’t think all of our memories will appraise highly.
Yep, yep…Agree w/ ya about the “Flippin’ Out of My Mind & My House” shows. They drive me nuts, too (from an engineering standpoint).
My wife and I are currently re-doing our one-and-only bathroom in our 1250 sq. ft. house. I’m hoping before too long we can add another one (as well as another bedroom!).
Anyways, you feelin’ any better?
;-p
Some better, yes.
Why do those shows drive you nuts from an engineering standpoint?
Well, you can’t buy a home. You can buy a house and make it a home, and one reason I liked the real estate agents who helped us find our house is that they never, not once, suggested that we were looking at ‘homes’. But with that reservation, yeah. If we get really old and frail and need to move into an apartment in an elevator building, then I guess we’ll start worrying about getting someone to come in and make our place look neutral.
DIY is as bad, and maybe worse, because they’re teaching you how to do it at the same time. “Yes, you too can renovate both of your bathrooms into palaces of luxury in about eleventeen weeks without having to move out.” Or pee. I guess. 😉
Hope your kidney stone episode is over & done with. I’ve got 3 that are closer to me than some family – literally, dang it.
[…] a weekend of HGTV, Kat is pondering the purpose people purchase homes for these days*… Doesn’t anybody buy a home […]
I think a house is both an investment and a home.
The Boyfriend&trade and I are planning on being in the house we’re building long enough to warrant designing it with the aches and pains of old age in mind (everything on one floor, except the basement of course), but that doesn’t mean I am not concerned about the value of the house.
I know a couple who bought a home they planned to stay in for a very long time. Then one of them died, leaving a lone income that couldn’t cover the mortgage. With the current home market, the house is now in foreclosure.
Then, take a situation such as my parents. With my sister finally out of the house they decided they wanted to put a sun room on the back of the house (I think that goes into making a house a home). They got a home equity loan in order to do that so the value of their home became important precisely so they COULD make their house a home.
[…] Sep24 Nashville Area Blog Links, Kingston Springs, Buyers Market, Selling, News and Information Katherine, in a post linked by Music City Bloggers, asks an interesting question: Doesn’t anybody buy a […]
I’m late in commenting, but wanted to add that I agree with nm that you don’t buy a home; you buy a house and it may become a home. That’s what happened to us. We bought this house, crazily enough, thinking we could fix it up a bit and then flip it. I laugh at that thought now, knowing how much insane work has gone into just the amount of fixing up we’ve done, but it’s not just the amount of work that’s kept us here longer than we may have planned — it’s the fact that after a short while, this place just felt really right to us. Sure, the house has gone up in value and if we wanted to, we could sell it for a tidy profit, but it means much more to us now than that money would be worth to us. So yeah, we bought a house and ended up with a home.