COVID and the housing market

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mimico_polak said:
Ugh…the house we really like is going up for sale soon (1-3 months). Last I talked to the bank selling ours and buying that house would be an ADDITIONAL 3300/month atop our current mortgage.

Hopefully things will change for the better with recent rate drops since then, but I’m almost tempted to ask the seller for a vendor take back mortgage instead of going traditional route.

Thoughts on vendor take back?
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We did a vendor take back ages ago and the terms were good, plus no backstabbing bank to jerk us around on renewal. The guy was going into a senior's home and didn't need the cash for an upgrade. Us having a 60% downpayment kept his numbers safe.

A printed payout sheet showing the amount of the monthly amount going to principal and interest was an eye opener and the option of paying down the principal every six months was awesome. Especially at the beginning where throwing in another $100 shortened the mortgage amortization by years.

The curse now is the instability of the market. Do you sell first or buy? How are conditional offers being looked at compared to the skyrocket days?

Then there are the increased operating costs. You just saved a bunch of heating costs on yours.

We could have moved up a half a million to a better joint, but the eventual cost would have been close to double when after we upgraded to all the work we put into our place, commissions, transfer taxes, property taxes. Not at my age.
 
There is also a historic home in downtown Burlington where they would not allow a new build garage to be attached to the home , the nanny flat was going to be over the two car garage , so there is a tunnel from the house to the garage , you come up into the house kitchen. Using a prefab concrete sq tube they dropped into an excavation and bang , connecting tunnel.


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We are doing a project for a very wealthy extended family that are building multiple houses on one large property. They are all linked by tunnels.
 
Historic home was allegedly easy tunnel , prefab concrete tube under the driveway so only about ” down . They dug a ditch while doing the garage footings and the house was getting underpinning anyway . Current owner is a friend of a friend so we’ve had the tour , very cool way to beat the historic remodeling rules . If you have bags of money .


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crankcall said:
We had a designer in since wife has decided we need the kitchen cabinets sprayed whiteish . While she was here she had some other suggestions, we painted the drywall over the fireplace black , broke up the twelve ft walls of grey paint . View attachment 72175


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Looks better than when I got bold and painted both the walls AND the ceiling kawaski green. It was way too much and the ceiling got a repaint shortly after. Bless her heart the Squeeze stuck with the walls for many years.
 
Best decision we have ever made was hiring designers ( not decorators) , the up front cost is way below the efforts of repainting, paints costs at a hundred bucks a pail for premium hurts , and we have made some decisions we would never have thought up on our own, with we feel are good results.


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crankcall said:
Best decision we have ever made was hiring designers ( not decorators) , the up front cost is way below the efforts of repainting, paints costs at a hundred bucks a pail for premium hurts , and we have made some decisions we would never have thought up on our own, with we feel are good results.


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On our last big splash of flooring their designer came out and helped us choose the type, style and colours. This was great help as both the Squeeze and I are rather indecisive. We're very happy with the results.
 
crankcall said:
We had a designer in since wife has decided we need the kitchen cabinets sprayed whiteish . While she was here she had some other suggestions, we painted the drywall over the fireplace black , broke up the twelve ft walls of grey paint . View attachment 72175


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Click to expand...
I asked my wife if we could hire a designer when we built our house and she said she can design it herself. I’ve repainted 4 rooms so far….
When I built our built-ins a couple years ago my wife also requested the fireplace and area behind shelving painted so she is getting pretty good at it. It’s Sherwin Williams Green Black.
 

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crankcall said:
We had a designer in since wife has decided we need the kitchen cabinets sprayed whiteish . While she was here she had some other suggestions, we painted the drywall over the fireplace black , broke up the twelve ft walls of grey paint . View attachment 72175


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I love black accent paint except for 1 thing — drywall needs to be perfect. No shrinker, no pops, no waves.

If it’s not perfectly faired, it looks like a high school auto shop bondo sculpture.
 
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Dirty Frank said:
Had a neighbor that dug a tunnel off the back of his place so he had a 50m indoor shooting range.
Most of the neighbors had no clue about it till he put the place up for sale.
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I am shocked as to how many people on GTAM alone have neighbours, or someone they know, that has built some sort of tunnel or something similar on their property...
 
Dirty Frank said:
Had a neighbor that dug a tunnel off the back of his place so he had a 50m indoor shooting range.
Most of the neighbors had no clue about it till he put the place up for sale.
Click to expand...
Into the late 70's the Port Perry High School had a shooting range in the basement (Anyone know when it was shut down?). As a cadet with our high school army cadet corp I shot old Lee Enfeild rifles converted to 22's there. We got to skip school too be bussed to Camp Borden to fire FNs. Some ranges had us in bunkers down range so we could report hits and patch holes in targets.
Back before kids started shooting up their class mates. Wow how times have changed....
 
timtune said:
Into the late 70's the Port Perry High School had a shooting range in the basement (Anyone know when it was shut down?). As a cadet with our high school army cadet corp I shot old Lee Enfeild rifles converted to 22's there. We got to skip school too be bussed to Camp Borden to fire FNs. Some ranges had us in bunkers down range so we could report hits and patch holes in targets.
Back before kids started shooting up their class mates. Wow how times have changed....
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Legend has it that my old high school (now known as RH King Academy) had a Bomb Shelter and a gun range under the football field. It was eventually blocked off. There was even stories of a ghost in the school.

It's so old that one day while at school, the Air Raid horn went off. All the students were totally thrown off, and we thought we were being attacked for some reason.
 
mimico_polak said:
I am shocked as to how many people on GTAM alone have neighbours, or someone they know, that has built some sort of tunnel or something similar on their property...
Click to expand...
When I was in my late teens a girl I was dating had an aunt that invited us to Palm Beach for March break. The aunt was the social secretary to a woman in the top 400 in the world. She got us a tour of the mansion and a swim in the pool on the beach across the street, accessed by a tunnel. It was about mile from Mar-A-Lago.

I muse about a tunnel from my basement workshop to the shed, about sixty feet. It would be through hard clay so I would guess a foot a day plus disposal time plus shoring. Not going to happen.

I also mused about a secret staircase to the mezzanine at my shop. It would have been a simple hinged bookcase with a ladder on the back.
 
timtune said:
Into the late 70's the Port Perry High School had a shooting range in the basement (Anyone know when it was shut down?). As a cadet with our high school army cadet corp I shot old Lee Enfeild rifles converted to 22's there. We got to skip school too be bussed to Camp Borden to fire FNs. Some ranges had us in bunkers down range so we could report hits and patch holes in targets.
Back before kids started shooting up their class mates. Wow how times have changed....
Click to expand...
I fired the same things at air cadets. Those things were heavy.
 
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