i@m.fm

In the rush in the Mattamy sales office many people were lining up to
‘bid’ on the same house (it was first come, first serve, basically -
actually one of our now-neighbours even slept in the parking lot,
hoping that the lot she wanted would be up for grabs, but the home she
wanted was only released a week later), you feel forced to rush your
decision. In any case, as a first time buyer there are a few things you
miss, so for the purpose of documentation, here are some things that we
wish we had thought about in advance.

One thing that I did not pay a lot of attention to is the elevation. We
ended up getting something with wood siding in the front. After the
first year, I see some of the nail pops we expected, but also the
wood/paint seems to be broken on the surface in some spots. This
definitely seems higher maintenance versus full brick (which we knew we
preferred, but didn’t care about enough to change our mind).

We have a pie shaped lot – our house is an end unit on a row of
townhouses in an inside corner of the street. I don’t have a sketch
handy, but basically means that the front corner of the two houses are
close together while the back is rather far apart. We thought that this
was a nice layout because it gives us a bigger backyard.

This also means we have about five neighbours to talk to if we want to
work on the fencing together. In our case another result of this
location also is that our driveway is not quite straight, it curves a
little. This is something we got used to by now, but visitors tend to
have some difficulty with it.

One thing to keep in mind with regards to the garden is the grading. If
you are buying a home, you might want to try to get grading information
from the builder. We never received any of this, and so far don’t see a
big problem with the grading either. However I am pretty sure the
people in the back don’t really like that their already small backyards
are missing even more space, because the lowest point of the area is in
their backyard. Which means that all the water will collect there when
it rains a little harder.

Our house has the entrance on the side. Two factors are annoying about
this: There’s more walkway to shovel in the winter and there is a wind
tunnel between the two homes. This is mostly bothersome in the winter,
but since there is no fencing up yet, there’s also some recycling
garbage flying all over the place. Quite a bit of it ends up in our
garden, but this should change when we put up fencing.

All of this being said we are still relatively happy with our house,
and of course there is no perfect situation without any problems. This
topic will probably be continued later