I thought our interview with Mike Hosking was going to have a bit more about encouraging others to think creatively to get into their first house. Understandably though there was not really much time to fit in everything that was going on. So I thought I'd add a post about how we got into our first house despite it being the hardest time ever to get into a house (which it is every year!)
Josh and I were both students and we shared a house with 2 other flatmates. For a year we both received the student loan payments (of around $140 per week) but we didn't spend any of it because we worked jobs while students.
When I got my first corporate job after graduating, we bought the above house in a suburb of Auckland near my workplace. Even though banks were lending close to 100% at the time, it was at the height of the property boom near the end of 2006 when prices were through the roof. We bought this 3 bedroom house with a musty smelling rumpus and a separate one bedroom minor dwelling, with a small deposit gained from savings from the past year plus a few thousand borrowed from my parents. We could barter the price for it because it was a strange house that nobody else wanted so there was no buyer competition. It was old, smelled of dog, and had an old dirty pool and lots of quirky nooks and home-job built-on annexes.
We got two flatmates for the spare rooms to help pay the mortgage. While we lived in it, we converted the rumpus into 2 further bedrooms and a bathroom. Josh designed the renovations himself and submitted it for resource consent and then did all the building himself (he watched a few you tube clips to work out how). Being a perfectionist, it turned out pretty nice. It took almost a year and we had no social life, no holidays and no spare cash. I even had to sell my prized TU250 motorbike for an extra couple thousand dollars to pay for the bathroom fittings or something. Once finished we moved downstairs and got another flatmate to help with the mortgage.
We'd just moved downstairs, ready for a break, when the upstairs bathroom plumbing burst inside the walls, flooding the downstairs. We had to rip the walls out in the upstairs bathroom to access the broken piping, so with the meagre insurance payout and a tiny mortgage top-up, we then had to renovate that room too. We had more than our share of plumbing issues in that house in the early years.
We soon rented the property to tenants but we held onto this house a number of years. A couple of years ago we did quite major renovations to the rest of upstairs and outside. Josh spent about 60 hours a week there while also working full time, but this time he did get a lot more help from builders and tradies.
The rimu for the projector box that's up for grabs came from the kitchen cupboards in the far right of the above photo. Look at that retro kitchen! It was like this the whole time we lived there, we didn't renovate it until many years later.
Here's the kitchen after the reno:
We always thought this rental would be our retirement income, but with major cost overruns on the current build, we had to sell this last year.
Just like the market now, things were against us in the property market when we bought this. It was at the height of the market just before the 2006-7 property crash. Plus we were a student couple with only one and a half incomes. But we sacrificed living in a nice place, living on our own and having a social life or any gadgets or toys or dinners out. We bought something others shied away from. We got flatmates, we worked night and day and we borrowed from everywhere we could. We're pretty much on repeat with this build too!
I do realise that these days the 20% deposit is one of the biggest hurdles to getting into a first house, however a little creativity with getting the funds, a lot of hard work and some serious compromises on expectations go a long way.
If you are interested in our Hidden Projector and Sound System and think you have something to swap for it please get in touch with us:
Phone Amy on 0276 354 901
or message us on our facebook page
Josh and I were both students and we shared a house with 2 other flatmates. For a year we both received the student loan payments (of around $140 per week) but we didn't spend any of it because we worked jobs while students.
When I got my first corporate job after graduating, we bought the above house in a suburb of Auckland near my workplace. Even though banks were lending close to 100% at the time, it was at the height of the property boom near the end of 2006 when prices were through the roof. We bought this 3 bedroom house with a musty smelling rumpus and a separate one bedroom minor dwelling, with a small deposit gained from savings from the past year plus a few thousand borrowed from my parents. We could barter the price for it because it was a strange house that nobody else wanted so there was no buyer competition. It was old, smelled of dog, and had an old dirty pool and lots of quirky nooks and home-job built-on annexes.
We got two flatmates for the spare rooms to help pay the mortgage. While we lived in it, we converted the rumpus into 2 further bedrooms and a bathroom. Josh designed the renovations himself and submitted it for resource consent and then did all the building himself (he watched a few you tube clips to work out how). Being a perfectionist, it turned out pretty nice. It took almost a year and we had no social life, no holidays and no spare cash. I even had to sell my prized TU250 motorbike for an extra couple thousand dollars to pay for the bathroom fittings or something. Once finished we moved downstairs and got another flatmate to help with the mortgage.
We'd just moved downstairs, ready for a break, when the upstairs bathroom plumbing burst inside the walls, flooding the downstairs. We had to rip the walls out in the upstairs bathroom to access the broken piping, so with the meagre insurance payout and a tiny mortgage top-up, we then had to renovate that room too. We had more than our share of plumbing issues in that house in the early years.
We soon rented the property to tenants but we held onto this house a number of years. A couple of years ago we did quite major renovations to the rest of upstairs and outside. Josh spent about 60 hours a week there while also working full time, but this time he did get a lot more help from builders and tradies.
The rimu for the projector box that's up for grabs came from the kitchen cupboards in the far right of the above photo. Look at that retro kitchen! It was like this the whole time we lived there, we didn't renovate it until many years later.
Here's the kitchen after the reno:
We always thought this rental would be our retirement income, but with major cost overruns on the current build, we had to sell this last year.
Just like the market now, things were against us in the property market when we bought this. It was at the height of the market just before the 2006-7 property crash. Plus we were a student couple with only one and a half incomes. But we sacrificed living in a nice place, living on our own and having a social life or any gadgets or toys or dinners out. We bought something others shied away from. We got flatmates, we worked night and day and we borrowed from everywhere we could. We're pretty much on repeat with this build too!
I do realise that these days the 20% deposit is one of the biggest hurdles to getting into a first house, however a little creativity with getting the funds, a lot of hard work and some serious compromises on expectations go a long way.
If you are interested in our Hidden Projector and Sound System and think you have something to swap for it please get in touch with us:
Phone Amy on 0276 354 901
or message us on our facebook page
Wow, small world, we nearly bought this house nearly 1.5 years ago after selling ours in Onehunga. Such a cool place, so many options and income possibilities which is why we liked it.
ReplyDeleteWow that would have been quite a coincidence! Yeah it was always special to us with many cool memories, but you do what you have to do to make things work :)
ReplyDelete