zargof

It shouldn't be a problem so long as the chimney is cleaned regularly. You only get chimney fires if the chimney is dirty.

civilservant

ddsrph

Steerpike

Based on the number of issues I found with my 'almost new' home, I wouldn't want to rely too heavily on design specifications and codes! My house was built ... shall we say ... 'not very well'. Builder ran out of money before completion and he took an awful lot of short-cuts that, over time, caused problems. No re-bar in the concrete driveway, no waterproof membrane under the shower pans, no 'green' sheetrock in the bathroom walls, no structural layer between finish tiles and plywood in bathroom floors ... it went on and on. I often wonder just how much 'inspection' goes on with modern construction. Our house was built by a 'boutique' builder who declared bankruptcy before the problems were seen. Of course, he just started up again under a new name ... .

ddsrph

johnwoo

I have a brick fireplace the I never use. Too much of a pain in the ass. Buying or chopping wood. Plus we have spare the air days and the room always seems smokey.
Fires aren't climate friendly, no fires do your bit to save the planet.

scrubbedexpat091

There are some developers here like that, they vanish before the issues of their shoddy work is shown, or they declare bankruptcy, reorganize and continue on. Our building leaks when it rains, as do a lot of condo buildings, you would think they could manage to build buildings that don't leak.

Rete

Ours is a brick fireplace, as well. Not used as hubby has lost one house to fire, i.e. candle burning, and refused to have candles or the fireplace in the house used.

civilservant

Well the walk through went well yesterday - I didn't realize we would have another one prior to closing to check the corrections that were blue tagged, and it's the morning of the closing.

We're really going to have to hot foot it to our closing an hour away after meeting the superintendent at the house only 90 minutes before it's scheduled.

sid nv

Do you have a provisional date yet for your virtual house warming party?

In considering my virtual house warming party gift for your new house, I propose a toilet plunger. In my experience, US waste pipe diameter is a bit lacking compared to the good old British Standard 4-inch Soil Pipe.

civilservant

I hand't considered that I think some of you might leave too much virtual mess for my wife to clean up, and the cat doesn't really like company anyway

Harveyspecter

Yep I'm on a 30yr, but intend to pay it off in 20. The reason being we are a single income family atm so when my wife is working we will get back to overpaying. But for now it suits me to make the minimum payment.

Pulaski

Sorry I'm late to the party, but here's my 2¢.

Of the houses I have owned, ranging from the house built in 1906 in London, to one that was a near-new house when I bought it (two years after construction), there isn't a single one that didn't have at least one problem that was dumb and/or dangerous. Some of the issues could be attributed to inept DIY, and others to shoddy workmanship, but some are just "WTF???" issues - like the house built in 1998 that we bought when we first moved to NC in 2003, and found that the shower and both baths were plumbed in with the hot and cold lines swapped! When I went into the crawlspace to investigate the plumbing for the downstairs master suite, I found that the hot supply pipe ran under the hot top and the cold supply pipe ran under the cold tap, .... and then the connections from the main supply pipes formed a perfect X as the cold pipe fed the hot tap and vice versa!!!! I am not sure how the upstairs bathroom had been plumbed. The same house had no storm drain under the driveway, so storm water would come down the ditch until it reached my house, then overflow and run down the driveway - a small 4" pipe running from near the drive and into the woods solved the problem for all but the heaviest storms.

The house that we bought two years after construction had the clothes dryer vent disconnected in the crawl space - there was a vent in the perimeter wall, but the vent pipe didn't reach it! That house also had a botched heating/ AC system, where the part inside the house was manufactured two years before the condenser coils outside, and then the compressor proceeded to eat itself from the inside, blocking the coolant line with brass shavings.

The house I owned in London had the immersion heater wired to the lighting circuit, .... and connected in using a 13A socket on the skirting board at the top of the stairs as the junction box!!! .... I noticed when using the immersion heater one day to get hot water sooner (there was a gas boiler I usually used), that the surface-mount socket was warm - warm enough for me to feel the heat when I had put my hand on the floor near the socket!!!!!!

Another US house I bought was just plain poorly built, and had, I discovered several years after moving in, no insulation in the walls that surround the depth of the floor - so the lower 8ft of the walls were insulated, and so, apparently were the walls upstairs, but there was a ring around the middle of the house roughly 12" high between the downstairs ceiling and the upstairs floor which was uninsulated, and short of tearing down the ceiling there was nothing I could do about it! FWIW there was also a gap, somewhere that a starling found (I never found the gap, though I suspect it was somewhere connected to the porch near where it met the garage), then couldn't find its way out and died, and then a few days later the house was infested with large black flies. I don't know where the files were getting through from the ceiling either and apparently the files couldn't find the hole where the starling got in, but IIRC I swept up over 200 files. I know it was a starling because I rescued the d@mn thing twice, getting it out through the attic, but I assume it got in again one weekend when we were away, and died. The same house also had a weird and particularly stupid plumbing issue, a leak from the upstairs master suite shower, which the previous owners had never fixed, or even really identified - the U-bend in the shower drain hung down below the ceiling joists by about 1/8", so the ceiling was pushing up against the drain, and causing a small leak from the shower. Fixing the leaking seal was easy enough, but removing and replacing the U-bend was a PITA. The result was perfect though. And FWIW a neighbor reported having found the same issue.

My in-laws' house in Virginia that we lived in after leaving NY, had one bedroom that only had sockets on three of the four walls ..... until we removed the paneling to replace it with plasterboard and found that the house, built in 1966, had a socket on the fourth wall that had been covered over with the cheap plywood paneling! That house also had a basement, and the house has been built partway down a hiilside, but without a proper drain on the up-hill side, so when there was very heavy rain water soaked into the ground behind the house and would proceed to leak upward through the concrete basement floor. I dug a drain from behind the house and around the end, and that solved the basement flooding issue - that was a particularly dumb issue as the house sat high above the road, so just digging a drain towards the road when the original foundation was dug would have solved the problem - the basement floor was significantly about the road level, so gravity would have drained the water away.

Another home of my in-laws' homes had three apparently-linked switches (in a large triangle in different corners of the living room that separated the kitchen from the bedrooms at the other end of the house) that had no discernible purpose. The original owner didn't know what they were for either (I phoned her to ask), but they were all live with 37V, and when I removed one of the "unnecessary" switches the well pump stopped working .... well pumps operate on 240V. I asked a licensed electrician I know and he had no explanation either, and I ended up pulling the wire up into the attic and reattaching the "unnecessary" switch where it remains. Not only was the 37V odd, even more bizarrely it didn't matter whether the switch was on or off, up or down, the well pumped worked either way, just as long as the switch was connected!

Another home we bought developed an issue with the wire to the kitchen island - it had a GFCI breaker that kept tripping whenever you used the socket installed in the island, and despite replacing the breaker and both sockets, I could never stop the breaker tripping if anything needing more power than a phone charger was plugged in.

Owning your own home is a lot of fun, especially a US home, as there is so much to go wrong, and my experience is that there can easily be as many issues in a newer home as an older one, so owning any US home can be an absorbing hobby!