The new home, that is.

Not that we didn’t find one, we did, in Oro Valley, a suburb of sorts of Tucson about 15 miles north. Very nice place, relatively new construction (2003) as opposed to our place (1971), big house on 1/2 acre with a free standing casita (guest house) with one room and a full batch. Commute only added about 5 minutes.

However — there’s always a “however”, isn’t there — however, the place had been vacated, then rented for a year, then vacated and put on the market. During that time clearly a lot of the maintenance was “deferred”. I began suspecting trouble when I noticed that the lawn in the back — that in itself was a bit of an issue as people in Tucson mostly don’t have lawns — was dying from lack of water. One inspection later, it looked like we had at least $6,000 in remedial work plus three AC units nearing EOL (in the Tucson heat, 13-15 years is about it). Replacement cost: $20,000. And then there was the work that we wanted to do — fix bathroom shower, redo flooring — that would have been another $18,000. So about $45K above our offer and our offer was 5K above where we wanted to me.

Our agent thought we might ask for the remediation to be done, but didn’t think we could ask that anything be done about the AC units as they were in working shape. “You’ll have insurance”, she said. I pointed out that it was kind of like buying a used car with dicey tires. You wouldn’t wait for the tires to blow out to replace them, even if they “worked”. Ditto AC units that go in the middle of summer (it’s scheduled to be 109° on Thursday) when everyone else’s AC is on the fritz and the HVAC guys are backed up a couple of weeks. That means moving into a motel until it’s fixed.

So we walked.

Now what? Well, we are looking now at that remodel. We have a good contractor, but doing what we would need to do here is not going to be cheap: new addition (16 x 22), new bath, remodel of another bath that going to need to be torn apart to run the sewer from there to the new bath, new flooring, tear down of old car port for remodel, creation of new car port on opposite side of the house to replace old car port. Yikes!

The contractor is bringing in the guy who draws up his plans, elevations, and such. We’ll have that done first, and go from there (the HOA needs to approve the redesign in any case). And then there’s figuring out the money. My only piece of advice at this point is that if your assets are largely illiquid (home equity, IRA’s and the like), develop a plan to develop liquidity before you start (maybe even a couple of years before)…