All Of the Reasons We Shouldn’t Buy The Merc- According To Court

In an earlier post about The Merc, I mentioned living with rose colored eyeballs. Court coined the term because it is impossible for my rosy outlook on life to leave. These aren’t just glasses folks, these suckers are permanent. I can’t help but look at the bright side of things in every situation. Probably to my detriment, but its just who I am!! I knew instantly that I loved The Merc, and that it was meant for me. Court is a normal person with a normal way of approaching things. He likes to talk about the negatives, I think its because he thinks that I don’t recognize them. I do, I can see them, but they just don’t matter to me as much as the pro’s do. 😉

So as you can imagine, considering buying an almost 100 yr old building has quite a few cons. Cons that even my rose colored eyeballs couldn’t overlook. If we were going to buy this building we were going in with our eyes WIDE open, which is why we spent 5 months doing due diligence before we put it under contract.

Can I just say how nerve-wracking that was?

We spent almost $9k on reports and plans BEFORE we put it under contract. Anyone could have swooped in, bought it, and we would have been out the money. The only thing that gave me hope was that if anyone else wanted it they would have to go through the same process that we were and at least we had a head start.

These were the issues that we were dealing with right off the bat:

• The cost of renovations. The first contractor that we worked with basically told us (best case scenario) to take what our budget was and double it. That might get us close to the very minimum of what we are going to be into it.
• The age of the building. The Merc was built in 1924 and has had multiple additions. Which presented a whole slew of quirks and hurdles just in and of itself. We needed structural reports to make sure that it was in good enough condition to renovate and be safe for our family to live in.
• The Easement….DUN DUN DUUUUUUN. (I’ve got a whole post about it coming up because it deserves its very own.) This was the hardest thing that we had to work through.
• Living on a busy road (which we talked about here)
• Living in a commercial property is more expensive because everything has to be up to commercial standards. For example, we have to have a contractor for the renovations. The bank won’t even consider doing it without one, its not like a house where you can be your own general.
• Going through the city approval process.
• Finding financing
• Environmentals
• No real yard (at least right now, you can see more info on this here)
• Distance from family. Right now all of Court’s family (his parents and sister) live within a 2 block radius, leaving the area and moving across town is a pretty big deal to us. The Merc is a 18 minute drive from our house now (I’ve got it timed to the second!)
• Changing schools for the kids.

Buying a home, regardless of the situation is a huge deal, buying home that needs months of renovations before you can move in is a whole new level of excitement (there’s those rose colored eyeballs again).

We had to work through so many of these issues, most worked themselves out as we went through the process, getting to know the space better and having so much time to really figure out if this is what we really really wanted to do. I think that was a huge blessing, because the building wasn’t in crazy high demand, we had time to really assess the situation and choose to take it on. Instead of feeling like we had to make a quick decision and not really know what we were getting ourselves into.

See you guys tomorrow, we’re diving into the fun legal world of easements!!