We put mini-splits with heat pumps in the NY house, except for a first floor furnace. Heat pumps are way more efficient than any other form of heating (although they won't work down to 50 below ... I think 20 below is their capacity, and that's if you get the ones designed for cold weather climates, though). I remember putting one in my attic in Massachusetts ... the heating guy told me that it was so efficient it couldn't even be shown on the same scale as the furnace. In the summer, he suggested leaving it on 24/7 for energy efficiency and letting the cold air drift down.

Also, mini-splits can provide room-by-room cooling, so they are far more efficient than central air too. (You can get the same effect with dampers, but dampers break.)

I had my mini-split in Massachusetts for almost exactly 10 years, and I think it worked just as well the day I left as the day I installed it. I never had a mold problem.

quote:

Originally posted by piqué:

quote:

Originally posted by Mikhailoh:
Beautiful house. Great town. Perseverance pays off.

Did they take the radiant heaters out of the rooms? Doesn't sound like they would have done that if they didn't install baseboard heaters. if the infrastructure is still in place, it should be pretty easy to get the boiler replaced and running. The house doesn't look so old that the pipes and radiators would be bad.

thanks, Mik. the house was built in 1948. They replaced all the plumbing. I think the radiators are original, just judging from pictures. they are still there. A high-efficiency new boiler would likely run about $10k. That should be an easy gimme since we are paying $30k over asking. my concern is if the lines and radiators all work, which hopefully the inspector will investigate.

I noticed the house has no basement. That raises a significant issue if the piping for the hot water heat is not sound. If the house is over a crawl space, there would be some access to repair any problems with the piping. If the piping is embedded in a slab, then repairs become impossible without jackhammering the concrete to get to the piping. That would be an outrageous burden and expense.

Big Al

quote:

Originally posted by ShiroKuro:
Ugh, yeah, that's a lot of inspections, but it's an older home, so it makes sense to do them each individually.

BTW re your earlier comment:

quote:

what is really annoying is my agent's attitude of "just let me do this the way I do it and trust my expertise."

This would kind of drive me crazy.

I had a moment of friction with my real estate agent as well.

I get that she's the expert, and she's been doing this, in this community, for a very long time.

But at the end of the day, it's my money, and if anything goes wrong, I'm the one who has to deal with it.

I felt like she wasn't sufficiently aware of that reality. And of how precarious things can feel for the buyer in a way that they never are for the agent.

I would guess that your agent is perhaps similar where this is concerned.

I also think that sometimes agents tend to have a view that anything can be fixed. Well, yeah, maybe but...

i'm glad you can relate. their job is to get to closing, and road rash on the buyer is just part of the deal.

I've had to stand up to her and say, no, this is what we are doing.

a good come to jesus talk and we seem to now be on the same page.

we just locked in a good rate at the lender's and send all our docs, and our monthly payment is going to be less than our current house once we pay down the principal.

quote:

Originally posted by QuirtEvans:
We put mini-splits with heat pumps in the NY house, except for a first floor furnace. Heat pumps are way more efficient than any other form of heating (although they won't work down to 50 below ... I think 20 below is their capacity, and that's if you get the ones designed for cold weather climates, though). I remember putting one in my attic in Massachusetts ... the heating guy told me that it was so efficient it couldn't even be shown on the same scale as the furnace. In the summer, he suggested leaving it on 24/7 for energy efficiency and letting the cold air drift down.

Also, mini-splits can provide room-by-room cooling, so they are far more efficient than central air too. (You can get the same effect with dampers, but dampers break.)

I had my mini-split in Massachusetts for almost exactly 10 years, and I think it worked just as well the day I left as the day I installed it. I never had a mold problem.

this is really good news. i am going to look into them further. just don't know if we will have enough funds to do what needs to be done for the whole house.

quote:

Originally posted by big al:

quote:

Originally posted by piqué:

quote:

Originally posted by Mikhailoh:
Beautiful house. Great town. Perseverance pays off.

Did they take the radiant heaters out of the rooms? Doesn't sound like they would have done that if they didn't install baseboard heaters. if the infrastructure is still in place, it should be pretty easy to get the boiler replaced and running. The house doesn't look so old that the pipes and radiators would be bad.

thanks, Mik. the house was built in 1948. They replaced all the plumbing. I think the radiators are original, just judging from pictures. they are still there. A high-efficiency new boiler would likely run about $10k. That should be an easy gimme since we are paying $30k over asking. my concern is if the lines and radiators all work, which hopefully the inspector will investigate.

I noticed the house has no basement. That raises a significant issue if the piping for the hot water heat is not sound. If the house is over a crawl space, there would be some access to repair any problems with the piping. If the piping is embedded in a slab, then repairs become impossible without jackhammering the concrete to get to the piping. That would be an outrageous burden and expense.

Big Al

thanks al. we aren't thrilled about having a crawlspace again. one aspect of our current house that we despise. however, we feel lucky that all the living space is all above ground (a rarity in missoula) and that there are no stairs, so we can age in place.

we will have the inspector take a close look at the piping--we were told it was all replaced recently.

Re mini-splits, definitely don't rule them out. I think it matters what kind you get, too. We used them in Japan of course, so I'm biased to Mitsubishi...

Re heat pumps, are we talking about the "dual fuel" kind here? Because that's what I was thinking when I mentioned the cold climate heat pump option.

quote:

Originally posted by ShiroKuro:
Re mini-splits, definitely don't rule them out. I think it matters what kind you get, too. We used them in Japan of course, so I'm biased to Mitsubishi...

Re heat pumps, are we talking about the "dual fuel" kind here? Because that's what I was thinking when I mentioned the cold climate heat pump option.

Mine in Massachusetts, and in New York, are all electric. However, our NY village, which is enormously eco-friendly (they go above NY code for things like requirements for energy loss through new windows), very much approves of mini-splits.

I think my unit in Massachusetts was Fujitsu. But yes, in New York, Mitsubishi, which is supposedly top-of-the-line. Their Hyper-X technology has guaranteed heating down to -13 degrees and a SEER rating of 32.2(!).

https://discover.mitsubishicom...IT87Y2BoCN4cQAvD_BwE

It looks like, through an approved installer, you get a 12-year warranty. I confess to not focusing on that.

When we bought our place in Santa Fe, it had no AC at all. That's not uncommon there, at 7,000 feet altitude. But to rent out the house when we weren't in it, the company said that we needed to fully AC the place. The typical renter (from heat blasted Texas) didn't want to hear that their summer rental place had no AC.

So, we installed six Mitsubishi units that can fully cool the house. They can also provide half the heating power, if needed, i.e. if the radiant heat suffered some sort of boiler failure. They have worked very well for the past six years.

Hope the place works out for you.
If it does we are looking forward to a video of the two of you doing your trampoline routine for us.

If I come to your place, can I climb in your kid fort?

I always wanted one.

Inspection revealed too many unnerving issues. Still in Mizzoo enjoying an evening out and celebrating dodging a bullet.

Sorry that didn’t work out.

What was the most egregious issue?

quote:

Originally posted by AdagioM:
Sorry that didn’t work out.

What was the most egregious issue?

the roof was slumping in a few places and the attic under that area of the roof is inaccessible, so no way to know if the cause was moisture, or a major structural collapse. In the small part of the house where the attic was accessible it was moldy, there were bare wires runnning through the insulation. the crawlspace under the house likewise was only accessible in a small area--the bedrooms and bathrooms at either end had inaccessible crawlspaces. I wouldn't care about that but the plumbing looked like it was due for replacement and there has to be plumbing in those areas that we can't inspect. There were also floor joists jacked up with old paint cans filled with cement that had been stacked atop each other.

Overall, the sellers did a bang up job of cosmetics and making the house look up to date and modern with the fancy new bathrooms and flooring, and installing solar. What they should have been doing was fixing the infrastructure. Likely rot under the vinyl siding because the wood siding underneath was wicking up moisture from the ground. The electrical wiring was outright hazardous--burn marks on the outlets, old electrical panels, the outdoor panel had been installed in such a way that it couldn't be closed completely, outlets that had been blocked as usuable. The whole house is a fire waiting to happen because of the wiring.

Lots of other minor stuff, but seeing as home inspections are pretty superficial, I took their ignoring issues that they had to have known about when they bought the house 8 years ago and did their own inspection as a sign that the house had not been properly maintained and what we were seeing was the tip of the iceberg.

Plus, contrary to what the realtor told us, the layout was really weird, and the road it is on is much busier. The real estate agent was bound and determined we were going to get to closing no matter what. She even almost threatened me "If you don't buy this house you'll never find another one in this town". Really turned me off even more than the findings in the house. She just kept saying how perffect the house was for us--except it wasn't.

It's a decrepit 1948 house with a face lift. Not nearly as nice in person as in the photos.

We also talked to a realtor in our current town and she went over to our house and let herself in, brought up contractors while we were away, to do a market analysis. The house is worth about what I expected, but she said if we put more work into it we could get significantly more. Howver, none of the contractors we'd need are available before the fall. And we can't risk paying two mortgages for the winter.

Even if there weren't all these other disincentives, the busy road really was a deal breaker for me.

I am going to be a lot more careful about the next realtor I work with. No more top performers.

Other than that it's been a very good visit.

Pique, ugh. I’m sorry. But also, I’m glad that you dodged a bullet, as you say! Yikes!.

Am I right in guessing that you just did one inspection (an initial generic one) and pulled out after that?

Re this:

quote:

"If you don't buy this house you'll never find another one in this town".

Yeah that’s awful. And such an obvious pressure tactic it even makes me question her savvy.

We had some friction with our agent a few times, so she wasn’t perfect, but one thing she got right was not pressuring us. One house we found that probably had fewer problems than the one you just described, she called it a “project house” and steered us away from it. (She must have been right bc it still hasn’t sold.) At other times, I might say something about the lack of inventory or I would express lack of confidence about a house that we were planning on passing on, and she would say “this town has never run out of houses to sell. There will be another one.”

Anyway, the biggest thing, and it’s the same for you as it was for us, is that you’re not going to be homeless if you don’t buy a house. So there’s no reason to buy what would be not just a “project house,” but a “problem house.” The fact that she didn’t get that is a mistake.

But on the topic of inventory, it is true that inventory is dramatically low. I continue to get emails from Zillow when houses come on the market that fit my parameters. I had thought that after we went under contract, or after we closed, something would come up that I would see and think “oh no, we should have bought this one.” But nope, there’s really been nothing that both checks our boxes and is remotely within our budget.

Someone just posted over at PT about moving for work recently and not being able find a house to buy that would accommodate his grand piano. So they ended up renting for the time being (bc they absolutely had to move) and he just posted photos of his Blüthner Model 1 (9’2”!), which he had to put in a front room that’s like a home office. The room is technically 8.5’ by 10’, but it has a closet with double doors that added another 2ish feet to the length of the room. So they took the doors off, and the tail of the Blüthner is literally in the closet.