4 ms·

I've done it, doing it. Not extreme countryside but bears, coyotes, turkeys, deer, etc. roaming through the yard everyday. Garden, few acres owned, hundreds of

I've done it, doing it. Not extreme countryside but bears, coyotes, turkeys, deer, etc. roaming through the yard everyday. Garden, few acres owned, hundreds of acres of woods around. Major thing I'd note which bit us more than we expected: a typical "farmhouse in the countryside" is roughly equal to another full-time job when you add up all the time and money you have to put in. So if you have an SO, then another half-time job each. I'm comparing this to renting an apartment or condo or even a cookie cutter in the suburbs, of which we've done each also. And I'm not talking about the cost/time to install that deck of your dreams. I'm talking about your water pump breaking in a heat wave, your heat dying during a snowstorm, your basement flooding in torrential rain, the slow decay of exterior woodwork begging to be replaced, etc. The plumbing in general...my god the plumbing. We've been in the house for over two years working our butts off and haven't made any real forward progress yet, just battling entropy. Anyway not to doom and gloom, just wanted to drive that point home. I highly suggest it regardless. We're much saner and a little more financially ahead compared to living in a city, but we're not exactly sipping mimosas watching the sunset every day. The house will be much more demanding than you think, so just something to put in bold on the balance sheet.

deleted 8y ago
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ncphillips 8y ago
This is a great example of why I have no interest in buying a house. Sure, you get an asset and a mortgage is probably cheaper then rent, but rent is ALL my expenditures on housing. Besides that, I just don’t think about any of that stuff.
- pjc50 8y ago
  Very much depends on your landlord, or you get into a situation where not only is the plumbing broken but you've got to wait for someone flakey to organise its repair.
ptero 8y ago
This is an excellent point and agrees with my experience and which is why I like my condo with extensive green walkways, pool, tennis courts and the exorbitant fee that pays for a management company to take care of all of this. I think countryside living would be attractive to a lot of people (it would to me) if I could get a "limited maintenance" setup. Either something that takes <30min / day to do myself or something that I can outsource relatively cheaply. I wonder if technology could help. Current setup for most houses in the country needs a hacker: someone who is comfortable tinkering with everything from plumbing to roofing (or at least can competently assess those). Could a low maintenance setup be bought / developed, even if its sticker price is higher? Basically, instead of an old custom truck I am looking for a Toyota Corolla: expected trouble-free operation for a long time with basic maintenance. If the answer is yes there may be a significant number of buyers.
- MattRogish 8y ago
  I agree. We moved from NYC to suburban Philadelphia (walk score of almost zero). We both work from home, which is great. But the house has been one project after another, and although there are ebbs and flows, there's likely always something going on. We're financially better off (our house is like 1/3 the price of our small 2 bdr rent in LIC) but the never-ending trickle of work is mentally taxing. We needed to replace our washing machine when we bought the house, so I did the research and got the best front-loader we could afford. Turns out, due to $reasons, it vibrates throughout the whole house (it's on the second floor) and although it's working fine, every time we do the laundry we shudder at the annoyance. Now, we eventually will have to settle for a lower-performing top loader but I'm still not 100% certain that it won't cause the same problem, so we feel stuck. Keep the good, but frustrating, washer, or take a risk that another almost thousand dollar washer will have the same problem. Outsourcing these decisions and annoyances to a landlord is appealing. Fighting entropy is a great way to put it - we had things come up that resulted in our inability to tend to the garden, and in a month, it's overwhelmed with weeds. That's my weekend project. Could we pay someone to clear it? Sorta. Service providers don't like (for obvious reasons) small projects, so nobody will return our calls when we say "It's like 2-3 hours of weeding". Could we find someone (say, a college student or something?) to do it? Probably, but it'd be almost more work to find and vet someone to do the work than it is to just do it ourselves. And, there goes a weekend. A weekend that, if we were still in the City, would be spent doing anything else. I wouldn't trade it for almost anything, but it's not clearly the best solution for everyone. I would totally pay the equivalent of a "condo fee" for someone to manage all this nonsense.
PerfectElement 8y ago
I think it depends on how old the house is and what you are comparing it to (condo or detached house). We moved to a 10 year old farm house and the house maintenance has been easier than our older suburban home. Most maintenance time is spent outside because we have a couple of acres, an orchard and we enjoy gardening. But there was nothing stopping us from getting a house without acreage in the same area. One thing that has improved, maintenance-wise, is snow removal. In our suburban home I used to spend 40-60 minutes removing snow from the driveway. Now we have a bigger driveway, but it's very affordable to get a professional snow removal guy to come with a plower and take care of it in 5 minutes. I started to enjoy winters much more after moving. Plus the white winter scenery here is much better than the muddy winter in the suburbs.
ggg9990 8y ago
Yeah, it’s easy to forget how hard the Second Law works against you when someone else is taking care of it for you. It’s like how some developers today don’t realize what it was like to run a web service before AWS. I once lost a box and had to drive down to the data center and found that the fan bearing had blown. But it was an expensive hardware firewall from eBay and I couldn’t easily get another. So I had to go out and buy a new generic fan at Micro Center. Except it didn’t fit so I had to then go buy a file at ACE hardware and file down the fan until it fit. And I had to epoxy it down. Of course back then a half day of unplanned downtime warranted a phone call to your big customers but wasn’t really a dealbreaker.

deleted 8y ago

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ncphillips 8y ago

This is a great example of why I have no interest in buying a house. Sure, you get an asset and a mortgage is probably cheaper then rent, but rent is ALL my expenditures on housing. Besides that, I just don’t think about any of that stuff.

pjc50 8y ago
Very much depends on your landlord, or you get into a situation where not only is the plumbing broken but you've got to wait for someone flakey to organise its repair.

ptero 8y ago

This is an excellent point and agrees with my experience and which is why I like my condo with extensive green walkways, pool, tennis courts and the exorbitant fee that pays for a management company to take care of all of this. I think countryside living would be attractive to a lot of people (it would to me) if I could get a "limited maintenance" setup. Either something that takes <30min / day to do myself or something that I can outsource relatively cheaply. I wonder if technology could help. Current setup for most houses in the country needs a hacker: someone who is comfortable tinkering with everything from plumbing to roofing (or at least can competently assess those). Could a low maintenance setup be bought / developed, even if its sticker price is higher? Basically, instead of an old custom truck I am looking for a Toyota Corolla: expected trouble-free operation for a long time with basic maintenance. If the answer is yes there may be a significant number of buyers.

MattRogish 8y ago
I agree. We moved from NYC to suburban Philadelphia (walk score of almost zero). We both work from home, which is great. But the house has been one project after another, and although there are ebbs and flows, there's likely always something going on. We're financially better off (our house is like 1/3 the price of our small 2 bdr rent in LIC) but the never-ending trickle of work is mentally taxing. We needed to replace our washing machine when we bought the house, so I did the research and got the best front-loader we could afford. Turns out, due to $reasons, it vibrates throughout the whole house (it's on the second floor) and although it's working fine, every time we do the laundry we shudder at the annoyance. Now, we eventually will have to settle for a lower-performing top loader but I'm still not 100% certain that it won't cause the same problem, so we feel stuck. Keep the good, but frustrating, washer, or take a risk that another almost thousand dollar washer will have the same problem. Outsourcing these decisions and annoyances to a landlord is appealing. Fighting entropy is a great way to put it - we had things come up that resulted in our inability to tend to the garden, and in a month, it's overwhelmed with weeds. That's my weekend project. Could we pay someone to clear it? Sorta. Service providers don't like (for obvious reasons) small projects, so nobody will return our calls when we say "It's like 2-3 hours of weeding". Could we find someone (say, a college student or something?) to do it? Probably, but it'd be almost more work to find and vet someone to do the work than it is to just do it ourselves. And, there goes a weekend. A weekend that, if we were still in the City, would be spent doing anything else. I wouldn't trade it for almost anything, but it's not clearly the best solution for everyone. I would totally pay the equivalent of a "condo fee" for someone to manage all this nonsense.

PerfectElement 8y ago

I think it depends on how old the house is and what you are comparing it to (condo or detached house). We moved to a 10 year old farm house and the house maintenance has been easier than our older suburban home. Most maintenance time is spent outside because we have a couple of acres, an orchard and we enjoy gardening. But there was nothing stopping us from getting a house without acreage in the same area. One thing that has improved, maintenance-wise, is snow removal. In our suburban home I used to spend 40-60 minutes removing snow from the driveway. Now we have a bigger driveway, but it's very affordable to get a professional snow removal guy to come with a plower and take care of it in 5 minutes. I started to enjoy winters much more after moving. Plus the white winter scenery here is much better than the muddy winter in the suburbs.

ggg9990 8y ago

Yeah, it’s easy to forget how hard the Second Law works against you when someone else is taking care of it for you. It’s like how some developers today don’t realize what it was like to run a web service before AWS. I once lost a box and had to drive down to the data center and found that the fan bearing had blown. But it was an expensive hardware firewall from eBay and I couldn’t easily get another. So I had to go out and buy a new generic fan at Micro Center. Except it didn’t fit so I had to then go buy a file at ACE hardware and file down the fan until it fit. And I had to epoxy it down. Of course back then a half day of unplanned downtime warranted a phone call to your big customers but wasn’t really a dealbreaker.