My wife and I moved into our house this past Sunday, June 9th. We've been here five full days (plus Sunday night and this morning), and we've already had the following issues:

-Everything is filthy.
-One of the four bedrooms has carpet, and it smells.
-There was a spider the size of a baseball in one of the bathrooms.
-Air conditioning was not working (it was 98 degrees inside the house).
-Sliding glass doors don't close all of the way and all of the windows are single pane, which probably isn't helping the air conditioning issue.
-Found multiple shingles from the roof on the ground outside.
-Screened-in lanai has multiple rips in the screen.
-No hot water.
-Ok we fixed the water heater so now there is hot water... everywhere but the showers.
-Set screw is stripped in the shower handle so we can't remove it to see if the temperature adjustment on the shower is the issue.

Fortunately, I've been able to fix most of these issues myself. Only one I needed to call someone for was the air conditioner. I figured out how to turn the temperature up on the water heater, which gave us hot water (except for the shower). I had to drill out the stripped screw in the shower handle, but after I did that I was able to replace the mixing valve / cartridge thing in the shower (and I removed the anti-scalding temperature control thing completely, so now our shower gets HOT). My wife and I are working on cleaning and painting everything. We started with the walk-in closet in the master bedroom. Removed the dirty shelves, spackled, removed the popcorn ceiling, painting the walls and the ceiling, and installed new shelves. Rented a carpet cleaner, and now the carpet only smells a little bit. (We'll rip it up and put vinyl flooring in eventually.) Going to need to call a professional to replace the roof, windows, and sliding glass door, but other than that I think we got this. It's a slow, frustrating process, but it is satisfying every time we get to cross an item off of our list.

All I’m saying is this. Be grateful for not being in a home owners association neighborhood. If you are in one of those neighborhoods… I feel sorry for you. Don’t know what that is, short definition, private governing bodies who have set rules on a community or neighborhood to keep the value of the area, while keeping things upright. look it up if you want a more specific description.

As for the problems, hopefully the house was undervalued to the average price around the area with these issues and hopefully you make it where you flip the property to your liking. Though air conditioning problems, maybe it’s the unit itself? How old is it? Plus I advise to remove the carpet from the bathroom due to many issues with it installed (especially when showering and soaking up the water… might cause some mold on the lower part of the walls( or wood rot if there’s flooring underneath and not concrete), in the long run if not well kept

becerra95: Oh it is in a homeowner's association. I was very opposed to it, I think the concept is ridiculous and that you should be able to do whatever you want with your own property, but its hard to find a house in central Florida that isn't in an HOA. Fortunately it seems to be one that doesn't care very much, though. Our front lawn looks awful right now and no one has said a thing.

We did get a good price on it, probably $15,000ish less than other homes in the area with similar characteristics (same number of bedrooms, comparable square footage, etc).

The A/C unit was installed in 2020, so it's not old at all. We had a guy come to service it and it seems to be working better now, though it still has a hard time keeping up when it hits 95+ outside.

The carpet is in one of the bedrooms, not the bathrooms. Carpet in the bathroom would be psychotic lol. And we do plan to rip it up and replace with vinyl eventually, but it's lower on our list right now.

Regardless, it sounds you've done a lot of work in the amount of time you've been moved in.

If it's got faults like this, it'd be worth checking all your outlets to ensure they aren't faulty. Don't want a house fire after all. I assume you've done this obviously, but with how hectic you've likely been you never know...

geez if expenses aren't an issue the house itself would be I don't think we have Homeowners Associations in Canada that I know of

Guess who just dropped another $38,000 on this thing?

$13,600 for a new roof, because the current one is falling apart and our homeowner's insurance is going to drop us if we don't replace it. No worries, I knew about this going in. I knew the roof was 20 years old and would need to be replaced. What I didn't know going in was that I would have to spent an additional $6,700 to have someone take the solar panels off the current roof and reinstall them on the new roof. I also wasn't expecting to have to pay $17,800 to replace all of the windows (and the sliding glass door to the lanai) because they are all single pane and falling out of the wall.

All I can say is thank God this is the busy season for work...

Wow you have had to do a lot of work. buying a house can be hit or miss. some of my friends have bought houses and did not have to do much. Others have had to do a lot of work on their homes. Even if you do not have to do work you have to maintain the house. Examples protecting pipes during cold weather making sure faucets are not dripping, cleaning outside the house, picking up branches after storms and finally keeping vegetation trimmed. but at the end of the day its worth it cause its your own home.

That must be pretty annoying, also, didn't you get that house built?

Dauntez: No, we were thinking about getting a house built, but a lot of the new construction communities in Florida have CDD fees (something I had never heard of before), which are essentially extra fees (usually in the range of $150 to $300 per month) they charge you so that they can build other houses and amenities in the neighborhood. These fees last for the first few years of the community's existence, but there is no definite time frame for when you can stop paying them. Pretty absurd, and that's why we chose not to buy a new construction. If we did, though, we wouldn't be paying for a new roof or windows. All of them would be brand new, and if there were any issues it would be the builder's obligation to have them fixed.

tgags123 : Never knew that, pretty dumb that you have to pay that much per month, how old is your new house?

Dauntez: It depends on the community, not all constructions are like that, but most of the ones in the area that we were looking at are. Our house was built in 2004, so its 20 years old.

tgags123: There's a lot of neighborhoods without the HOA here in Central Florida, but they're in places further out from Orlando, like Winter Garden. Your description makes it sound like you live in Orlando or very near there... Well, besides the giant enemy spider.

MrKokoPudgeFudge: I live in Haines City. We wanted to be closer to Orlando, but it seemed like the closer you get the higher the cost was. We were mostly looking at Haines City, Davenport, and Poinciana, and in the end Haines City seemed to be the best in terms of not being too far from Orlando, but still being affordable for our budget. There were a few non-HOA houses that we were looking at in Haines City, Lake Hamilton, and Kissimmee, but they were all older (built in 60s, 70s, and 80s) and sold pretty much immediately after being listed, for more than the listing price.