What to Know When Buying and Selling a House

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In my previous post Young and Naive I wrote a bit about our experience in selling our old house to Castletown Shopping World.

There sure is a lot that I don’t know that I wish I did know about buying and selling a house. A lot of what I wish I knew can be read in the following article: Get Rich Slowly » What I Wish I Knew Then About Home Buying. That article gives a pretty good commentary on another article over at Yahoo Finance: What I Wish I Knew Then About Home Buying.

Like many things in life (like having kids, getting married, etc.) stuff like this can sometimes only really be learned after actually going out and doing it yourself. That said, if you can pick up even just a few pointers from the article it could be helpful.

Sometime soon I want to find the time to write a bit about our experience in purchasing our first house as it was a bit of an eye opener into what people will do to sell a house.

LG LX-M240 Micro HiFi System

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This weekend Tamara and I went out and had a look for a micro HiFi system for under $200. Our main three requirements were that it looked good on our book case (more Tamara’s requirement than mine), it had decent sound and it played MP3 CDs.

We tested out pretty much every system under $200 and decided on the LG LX-M240 Micro HiFi System as it gives fantastic sound for that price range and it met all of our requirements. There is certainly a large selection of sound systems out there in this price range and with these specification though.

LG LX-M240 Micro HiFi System

The temptation was definately there to look at the $300 multi-disc changers and to look for more, but since we only needed something small this was a good fit for us. Because access to the system would be pretty easy and it played MP3 CDs, the need for a multi-disc changer wasn’t very great.

The main reason why we were in the market for a micro hi-fi system is that with our living room reorganization we had lost most of the room on our entertainment unit. The old stereo didn’t fit in the bookshelf, so we were stuck with the old one sort of hidden behind the TV. The new system has helped us to better organize our space. The only downside is that our chrome moose had to find a new place to live on the desk instead of on the bookcase.

House Concrete Slab is Complete

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The concrete slab under our house was finished a while ago now, but I was a little distracted and haven’t posted the photos and update yet on this site.

Below are the photos of our new concrete slab. Tamara jokes that she has been looking for the gold in slab and hasn’t found it yet. It’s not much to look at right now, but at least I can visualize what will be happening down the track.

The Front of the slab is 50cm above the ground level
Front of the slab

Looking back over the slab - still curing in some areas
Looking where the rooms will be

View of the Slab from the back - You can see the in slab plumbing
You can see the plumbing at the back of the slab

There is about a 30 cm drop in the ground level from the back of the slab to the front of the slab. This is great for the water flowing off our property but it means that the slab at the front is 50cm above the ground.

House Removals – Relocating a House

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Because of the nature of the construction of many of the houses here in North Queensland it is not uncommon to actually see houses relocated from one location to another. This is what actually happened to our old house that was purchased by Castletown. Because they were really only after the land so that they could expand the shopping complex they sold off most of the houses that they had purchased for removal. You can see our old house before and after the house removal in my previous article Where did the House Go?.

Having the houses built on stumps actually makes it quite an easy process to transport a Queenslander or similarly styled house. All they need to do is back a flatbed trailer under the house and lower the house onto the trailer. They even have specially designed trailers for this sort of work that can raise up to meet the house, making it even easier to remove the stumps. I have even seen one of these trailers driving down a narrow road actually raise up one side of the house to go over a parked car! I sure wouldn’t want to have been the owner of the car looking out the window and seeing that.

House Removals - Specialized Trailers

There is quite a bit involved in actually organizing for the removal of a house. Our old house would have been relatively easy to relocated as it was only 6 metres (about 20 feet) wide with the front enclosed varanda removed. If a house is bigger than 8.5 metres wide from what I have read it actually has be to be cut in half for transport. We had toyed with the idea of relocating our house to the area that we live in now, but decided against it as there is very few empty blocks of land around here to put it in.

There is a really good discussion about the removal and relocation of a house over at Cracker Classifieds, Removable Houses?. Some of the people participating in the discussion have actually gone through the process of relocating their house and it has fairly up to date information.

Here are some more links for information on the removal and relocating of a house:

Probably my only real disapointment with the whole process is that I didn’t get to see it happen with our old house. I think that I would have liked to see it go and to know what’s actually become of it…