billeyler | The "first house" bit (Reply)

allanh's very prolonged adventures in buying-a-house sent my mind back today to the first house I co-bought in 1981 here in Albuquerque.

I was a very naive and extremely poor 26 year old at the time. Jim B and I had come into Albuquerque from the Grand Canyon only ONCE to find some kind of affordable house, and that was in late January.

I have no idea how we found the realtor. It might have been a friend of a friend that lived here...I just can't remember. I do remember driving all over the remote reaches of an earlier Albuquerque looking for something we could afford.

We did find something we liked pretty easily. It was a 3 bedroom, 1 bath house on 1/2 acre more or less out of town...dirt road, septic and well. It was one of maybe 40 houses in this development on what we found out later was the Southwest Mesa. We liked the potential immediate, along with the stunning view of the Sandia and Manzano mountains from anywhere in the yard.

I think we had to come up with a $4,000 down payment.

Ah, but we were young and stupid.

Jim moved into the house in late March during a spell of very wet weather. The roof leaked. A lot. It was bad.

I moved in a week later (April Fool's Day).

Over the course of the 2 years we owned that house, we found:

- between the time we saw the house and we bought the house the previous owner had pulled the freestanding stove out of the garage-turned-den and left a gaping hole for water to pour in during rains
- it was a 22 mile drive to get to work. Not pretty, with me on a Honda Passport 50.
- there was a dairy farm just over the rise, rather fragrant when the wind blew from the south or west.
- we were on the very edge of civilization and the dust storms were fierce, not helped by the gravel quarry a bit west and slightly north of the development.
- the water pump went out early on and it was a few hundred to repair (in 1981 dollars).
- the house wasn't really insulated well for the harsh winters and the winds. The new wood stove in the den helped, but the built-in electric wall heaters were weak to say the least.
- the previous owners sold the house under false pretenses. It was more or less Section 8 housing, and Fannie Mae (or something like that) sued the previous owner for selling it to us. I can't believe that wasn't found out during title search and all that. Most of that was invisible to us, but the previous owners had to go to court and pay some fines.
- the 1/2 acre was completely barren of anything except for sand and toxic, thorny weeds
- the dirt roads turned to rock roads after the winds blew, jarring us with every drive down the road.
- the neighbors were...odd and even poorer than we were

Okay, we bought the house for $31,500, what should we have expected? The mortgage was $144 a month.

We sold it in October 1983 for $37,000 and were happy to move into the greater metropolis.

Lesson learned!

I've driven by a few times since then. The roads are paved now, but I doubt they are on city services. The development had extended further south. A lot of the 1/2 acre benefited from the drip system we installed and the yard was lush with trees. The next owner installed a large workshop garage. The road into the area was straightened out and rerouted.