All right. Let's be real for a second. I think we've all been there. It's 11 o

'clock. You're doom scrolling through Zillow and you find the one. It has that

perfect farm sink, the awesome wraparound from porch, and the price tag doesn't

immediately make you cry. But then reality hits. You're wondering,

is that a charming crack in the front porch or is that signs of a catastrophic

foundation issue? And is that roof?

ownership so grab a coffee pull up a chair unless you're driving please don't do

that and let's find out what you actually need to know before you sign those papers

from the first single to the final deckboard your home is your biggest investment

but in a world of rising costs and contractor red flags how do you know who to

trust this is the you ask The Pros Answer Podcast.

Hey, welcome to the You Ask the Pros Answer podcast. Your questions answered by the

pros you trust, presented by Pro Exteriors. Now,

if you're listening closely,

you might notice that the room sounds a little bit quieter today.

And that's because our resident expert, the pro himself, Aaron Rogers. He is out

doing what he does best fixing homes, which leaves the studio to myself.

And as I mentioned just a little bit ago to Kara at Hignut. Kara is our marketing

assistant, but today we are talking to Kara because she and her fiancé Colin are

current renters, but they aspire to be homeowners. Kara, welcome. How are you?

Howdy? Good. Thanks for having me on. Thanks for being here. Okay,

so I'll be honest. We had planned to have a very technical conversation about home

buying and Aaron was going to answer those questions. But since he's not here to

stop us, we're going to have a much different conversation. So Full transparency, I

am not a licensed contractor, but my wife and I have purchased our fair share of

homes over the last decade and a half or so. And I will share some more about our

experiences coming up soon. But first, Kara, I want to get to know you and your

thought process here first. So as I mentioned at the outset, we've all done it.

We've been scrolling Zillow or Redfin or Realtor .com.

You find the house that looks perfect. I want to know what is that one must have

feature that makes you immediately send the link to Colin? That's a tough one.

I, and it's not even about a house, so I feel pretty bad about saying this. I

love big yards with lots of trees. That's similar to where I grew up at.

So anytime I see a nice house with a nice private yard, that's, I'm sending the

link. Yeah. I mean, that's, that is perfectly valid. And I know in our service

area, new construction is all over the place. and those lots are not always,

but they are often very tiny and houses are crammed together. So when you find a

place that has a yard, that's a big draw for people.

Okay, so being an adult is scary enough, and then you start to add all these

different facets of life into it, getting married, buying a house,

buying cars, buying your first refrigerator or first nice vacuum cleaner. I remember

going and buying our first nice vacuum cleaner and being excited about it and

thinking, goodness, this is adulthood. Right now, I would imagine as a renter,

if you have an issue with your AC, it's one call to your landlord and you trust

that they're going to take care of it. So what is that biggest fear that you

currently have about making the jump to where you suddenly become the landlord?

I think it's a big one, but just price having to actually pay a maintenance man to

fix it or a contractor to replace the roof or anything. So I think it would be

actually having to take responsibilities for those repairs or anything that goes

wrong. Because right now we're submitting a request online and it's fixed by the end

of the week. Yeah. And so there's not really any budgeting that goes into like,

well, we need to have this saved up so that if or when this thing goes wrong,

we're not panicked or have to go without.

I think back to building sandcastles as a kid or helping out one of my kids,

like, build a sandcastle.

And at least for me, it was never done. Or like building a fort with my friends

as a kid, the fun of it was the building part. Once the fort was done,

you're like, all right now what do we do and i i mentioned that because in a lot

of ways homeownership is like the grown -up version of that like yes you buy the

house but it's never done like there are always things to be cleaned maintained

repaired fixed uh and it's rewarding and there's a sense of accomplishment and and

pride that goes into that but obviously it it can be scary and challenging at times

but anyway let's move on on a scale of one to 10 so 10 being like you are

influenced heavily by the following one being like no on my own person how much has

hg tv brain or tick to scrolling Pinterest searching how much is that influenced

your wish list versus what you actually think you can afford.

Like, how practical are you when it comes to this topic? I try to be practical,

but, like, as you mentioned earlier, when you're doom scrolling at 11 o 'clock at

night,

budget is out the window. I want the full farmhouse sink. I want the island in the

middle of the kitchen. But then come morning reality hits, like, that's not happening

for us in our early 20s right now, our late 20s. All right.

So this was not in the list of questions I sent you ahead of time. So we'll see

what you have to say about this. If you were building out your ideal home,

whether it be new construction or an old house, it's being fixed up, What are some

of those elements that you would want to have? Like money, no object, just in this

scenario. Definitely a good front wraparound porch.

I also want a pool.

Nobody wants to go to the community pool when I have one in your backyard. What

else could I of actually since working at pro exteriors,

I have a little obsession with looking at roofs when I'm driving down the road.

So yeah, I want a really nice roof too. I told Colin,

I want the bravo tiles and we need metal on these front

All right. So you, I feel like your, your wish list is not like outlandish.

If you watch some of those shows on, well, I actually thought of just one more

thing. Okay, go for it. I don't even know what these are called, but the houses

that have like the circular parts on the outside,

I love those. I don't know what they're called, but I think they're so cute. And

it reminds me of like a princess tower. I know what you're talking about. Audience,

I don't know what they're called either. This is where we need an Aaron to answer

our questions. Yeah, I wonder if future Aaron could answer this for us. So she's

not talking about columns. She's talking about the almost like a bump out or tower

that's built into the house, right? Yeah.

All right. Get a nice spiral staircase in there and live out fairy tale dreams.

All right. I ask that just for fun just because I don't know really what your

tastes are. I know some people might be like I'd love a condominium where I don't

have a yard and somebody takes care of that stuff for me still even though I own

the building. All right. Let's keep things moving. So I'm going to share a little

bit about, I'll call it my home buying resume. So Don and I,

we've been married for 18 years. When we first got married, we rented, it was kind

of like a townhouse. It was technically an apartment, but it was like a townhouse

apartment. Then we rented my grandmother's house, and it was a big fixer upper.

It was awesome. it was on like 10 or 12 acres most of it was wooded it was

awesome until mold took over the basement and dawn was pregnant with Alex and we're

like uh we should probably get out so we purchased a townhouse that was built in

1986 so this would have been 2009 I guess that we bought it.

I'm trying to think, I guess we have townhouses here in southern Delaware. They seem

like they're more common in the Baltimore area where I grew up, but connected to

other townhouses on either side.

And so we didn't have much money. Most of what we did was DIY.

There was one window that we had a friend who is a contractor replaced because

quick, fun story and Dawn's off work today, so enough she'll hear me sharing this

story and hop in or not.

I was working about 45 minutes away from home, and our daughter, Alex, was just a

few weeks old. I mean like tiny tiny And Dawn had Alex in this little bouncy seat

and was sitting on our coffee table. Like she was totally safe the way that the

bouncy seat was. I think Don went to go get the mail. We had one of those

communal mailboxes where you have to walk down the sidewalk to it, came back to the

front door, realized she had locked herself out of the house. Like no cell phone on

her, nothing.

Alex is, I don't know, maybe five, six weeks old at the time. And all we had

inside was our dog, Louie, who was awesome. We miss him dearly. And Dawn,

as the brand new mother was like, well, I got to get back to my kids. So she

walked around the back of the house, took our picnic table umbrella with the long

metal pole and rammed it through our living room window, like shattering the glass

so that she could get in to Alex. I didn't know any of this happened until,

I believe after it was all done, because like I said, she didn't have her cell

phone owner. I was working at a place where it was a call center, so I didn't

have any access to, like I couldn't just step out and answer my phone. Anyway,

So that was one of the things where we actually had a professional come out and

help us take care of it. But everything else, we replaced tile on the floors.

My father -in -law helped me build a shed in the backyard. We did some landscaping.

But for the most part, it was just like we replace stuff as we could.

Then we had the opportunity to purchase my other grandparents' house that had been

built in the 1960s. So this was a house where I think people would call it charm.

Like it had a lot of charm.

But it needed a lot of work. We uncovered, we pulled up the carpet that my

grandparents had put down a couple decades prior to find that the whole house had

wood floors, which was awesome. But there was a lot of pet stains from over the

years. So before we moved in, we had the floors redone,

but a lot of it we did ourselves. We did hire a contractor to do the kitchen. But

then, sorry, I didn't realize this was going to be as cathartic as it is for

myself. So just bear with me, audience i'm loving the stories um the basement always

had an issue with flooding and if you walked out the back door you would see that

the yard sloped towards the house

i will give you this pro tip you don't want your yard sloping towards the house

you want it sloping away from the house so whenever there was heavy rain there

would end up water in the basement water is one thing one day we went down in the

basement and found a couple inches of sewer water and come to find out the old

because this house was built in the 60s the old terracotta pipe that went from our

house to the city's sewage over the years tree roots had grown through the

terracotta because terracotta is just like a natural material like clay that's formed

into a pipe and so we had sewage water all over our basement and all over the

stuff that we stored down there it was not good We had a sump pump that failed,

and so some pumps, are you familiar with what they do? No. Okay.

So groundwater, you know, water in the ground is a good thing. It's what allows

wells to have water to feed to the house. But when groundwater gets to a certain

point, you have this pump that's in your basement floor that actually pumps that

water back out of your house so that you don't end up with flooding in your

basement. They work great until they fail, and then you end up with water in your

basement. So trying to think. So we had to replace that pump. The electrical was

wonky because guidelines years and years and years ago were way different than they

are now. So like if you were running your vacuum cleaner on one floor and your

iron on the second floor the lights would like dim and flicker i felt like plugging

things into outlets sometimes you were more apt to see sparks like just these little

things that if you were just visiting you wouldn't notice it but when you lived in

the house you're like oh good grief but it had a lot of charm like those hardwood

floors were beautiful and it's something that we've not had since. So I'll move on

so that our audience doesn't get super bored. In 2020,

we moved to Delaware, to Southern Delaware, to Lincoln, and we purchased a new

construction home from a small builder. One of the benefits of that was this guy

and his son built a couple houses a year, as opposed to some of the bigger

builders that are building hundreds, if not thousands of homes per year, which meant

if you drive around, the next time you're driving, I know you're going to look at

roofs because you mentioned that, but notice how many houses have shutters on the

front windows, like, you know how people have shutters on either side of their

windows, but if you happen to see around the back of the house, notice how many

don't have shutters on the back.

It's very common that builders were put them on the front because that's what most

people see. And they're just decorative anyway. You know, most shutters aren't

actually able to be flipped in and protect your windows.

But this builder, because he was smaller and took pride in his work, he actually

put shutters all around our house. So it's just like one of those little is that

you're like, oh, that's kind of cool.

There were some other things that, like, he painted our garage. If you look in a

lot of people's garages, you'll see the drywall just has mud on it. So you'll see,

like, the white streaks that run up and down, and then, like, they'll mud the nail

holes. Well, he actually painted the garage, so it looked kind of like the inside

of our house. And then in 2024, my family moved to northern Kentucky,

where we are now, and we bought a house built by a large builder.

So in our neighborhood, there are two builders that are allowed to build, and we

bought a house from one of those. Some of the benefits of that is they have a

huge network of subcontractors and tractors and suppliers that they work with all the

time, which means that, like, our flooring, our cabinets were made and installed by

reputable companies that have good warranties. But the downside of it is they put

these houses up super quick. And I don't think we realized just how quick until we

moved in and got to see house is being built and realized there's no way that they

put as much care and attention into our house here as the small builder did in

Delaware. So we're a year and a half into our new home and we have issues,

we've had issues with our air conditioning where we've had the person come out

somewhere between six and ten times in a year and a half. thankfully because it was

new it was under warranty so we didn't have to pay anything but it does mean

either taking time off of work or well in my case working remotely it means like

working weird hours so that when the person's there i'm able to take off we have

weird gaps in our flooring on our main level we have the luxury vinyl plank

flooring which looks nice from a distance,

but it's like really thin vinyl pieces that just are made to look like hardwood

flooring. And a lot of those planks want to separate and we'll have the company

come out and fix them. And then a month later they separate again. Anyway,

all that to say, we've been in townhouses built in the Older house is built in the

1960s and then brand new construction.

And there's pros and cons to all of that. Do you, have you and Colin talked about,

like, are you guys new build people? Are you old soul kind of looking for older

stuff? Yeah, I think we're a little bit more on the old soul style house.

And like I mentioned earlier with the new construction kind of homes that are

currently taking over Sussex County, the yards are a little small. So I'd like to

have some charm in my yard. So that was, yeah,

and Dawn is very much the old soul when it comes to houses.

I love the look of them.

After living in the house built in the 1960s, I'm not going to lie, I very much

enjoy the brand new house. I will say our friends own an older home.

I'm not sure what year is born, but just from looking inside of older homes,

they do have smaller like bathrooms and stuff and I'm 6 -1 and Colin is 6 -7 so we

do need something larger in that sense. Yeah,

it's definitely so smaller bathrooms, smaller closets,

typically you'll see more closed -off floor plans where like the kitchen is the And

the dining room is the dining room, and the living room is off of both of those

things. Whereas both of the new construction houses we've bought, and now we

specifically sought this out, our living space in the house where I'm recording this

now, our kitchen, dining room and living room is all just one big space,

which is great 90 % of the time. Like if the kids want to watch TV while we're

cooking dinner, that's not always awesome because we're making lots of noise. But in

our house that was built in the 60s, the kitchen was a much smaller, but then also

we were separate from the kids while we were in the kitchen, you know? So that all

just comes down to preference. Okay. So Carrie, you mentioned that part of the

reason you are drawn to older homes, at least part of it, is that oftentimes you

can find properties or lots that are a little bit bigger. Oddly enough,

the house that we purchased in Delaware was on almost a full acre, which was pretty

unique because like where we are now, I could very easily

probably scream and our neighbors would hear us that's a weird thing to say but our

house in Delaware all the lots were about an acre which is pretty big um and so

our neighbors were further away from us and that was a brand new neighborhood so

there are opportunities out there to find that but you're right it is less common

for sure all right so i hear that you're you're more into the older charm here's

what i will say and this is just this is unsolicited advice you didn't ask me this

one of the things that i have enjoyed about our current brand new home like when

we first walked in it was empty and there was no character like anywhere all the

walls were painted white yeah there was just very little character it felt very cold

and stark but that allows us to put our own touch on it and so we've been able

to over time just add little pieces here and there and change out some of the

finishes as we've had the money to do it, to make it feel more like us and more

like our style. Whereas sometimes with the older homes, the character is built in,

and while that is nice, it is harder to change it and make it your own, if that

makes sense. So we found even things like changing out the light fixtures in our

kitchen and dining room allows us to make it feel more like us. Even the hardware

on the cabinets, so changing out the poles or the handles, has just made it feel

less like a new construction and more like us. Plus, if you have pets,

they will very quickly make it not feel like a new home because they will destroy

things very quickly. So there's that.

All

I want to move on to some things that I wish I had known before buying a house.

So this first section I will call the other money. You know, you save up for a

down payment. You go to the bank and where you talk with a realtor and they get

you connected with a mortgage company. You get pre -approved for what you can afford.

This is not a financial podcast by any stretch, but I will say one word of advice

is do not go to the very top of what you're pre -approved for,

try to fall underneath of that just to give yourself some wiggle room. But once you

get all of that out of the way and you buy the house, the first couple of months,

there will likely be things that you didn't expect to need for that house to

So lawnmower, so if you do find a place that has a bigger yard, you'll either need

a push mower if it's a smaller yard or if you or Colin really like walking or a

riding mower if it's a bigger yard. You'll likely want curtains, especially if it's

an older house where the previous owner maybe had older curtains that are just kind

of dingy or you want something that's more your style or if it's a new build there

won't be any window treatments and so you'll walk in there and the first night

you're like I can see everything outside and everything outside can see everything

inside and that's just like it's weird trash cans not just like trash service for

your house but like you want to have a trash can in most of the rooms And so

you've got to get them at some point. I did not realize how randomly expensive

trash cans are. There's no need for it. I don't know why they,

yeah. We, when we moved into our apartment, forgot a trash can, obviously.

And so we ran to Dollar General that night. And from Dollar General, even, was like

$30 for the worst trash can ever. We don't even use it anymore.

And if Collins into technology or something, he'll find the one that automatically

opens when you walk up to it. And that'll be like two, three hundred bucks.

Need. Yeah. If you want to paint some of the rooms, like before you get all your

furniture set up, paint is weirdly expensive. It's one of the cheapest ways to make

your house feel like your home and it's a very easy way to you know every house

kind of has a smell and you become nose blind to it um even if the smell isn't

bad like every house has some kind of a smell paint is i think the easiest way to

fix that it's amazing how much smell is in your walls and in your floors So if

you end up with a house that has water wall to wall carpet, you'll likely want to

get a shampooer, which you'll use a few times a year. And you're like, I can't

believe I'm spending this much money on this thing that I'm going to use two or

three times a year. And then I have to find a place to store it. But you can

rent them, but typically you can buy one for less than you could rent one a couple

times. So there's just these, like, random things, cleaning supplies, snow shovels.

So again, I don't say any of this to scare you or deter you because I think

homeownership is awesome. But there's like these random things that you would never

be like, oh yeah, we should probably budget for that. I want to talk a little bit

about inspections. So you may or may not know, but when you go to buy a house,

unless you're buying the house in cash, like if you've found a few hundred thousand

dollars that you just like, all right, I'm just going to buy this house, you will

have to get an inspected for the bank or the mortgage lender to say, okay, we're

going to give you this money. And so you'll hire a professional home inspector, not

somebody like that works with us, a pro exteriors that can come and do a roof side

of inspection. This is like somebody that is licensed that knows all the different

trades, at least like cursory knowledge of electrical plumbing,

HVAC, all that stuff. They will walk through the house and they will give you a

full written report. Typically with photographs that'll say, okay, your roof is 12

years old. Your heating and air conditioning unit is 25 years old here's the life

expectancy of it it's a hugely valuable asset not just for the bank or the lender

but for you as the buyer because you're like okay well that roof is going to need

to be replaced in two years the heating and air conditioning that's good like we're

good to go for a while um So not just for like a mental checklist,

but then you can use that as a bargaining chip for negotiating the price because

the homeowner may not want to buy that new roof right before they sell their home,

but they might be apt to say, okay, well, we'll lower the price of the house, $15

,000 knowing that you're going to have to replace that roof. And then you end up

with that money that you can then use either for the roof or Colin's really nice

trash can.

But what I was just talking about was the official, the official inspection. But as

you guys walk through the house with the realtor, a user realtor as a resource

because he or she is in homes every day, like all day and they know what to look

out for but if you're in a basement of a place and it smells like a wet dog and

that homeowner doesn't have a wet dog there's something else going on there like

just use your use your judgment it's really easy to become attached to a house

especially when you've looked at the pictures a hundred times on your phone before

you ever step foot in it and then you walk in and you will I think we do this

with people too like you become infatuated with it and you refuse to see any of

the shortcomings you're like oh that window pain that has condensation on it that's

fine only to find fish pond in the back how am i going to know Yeah.

Like you will be very quick to overlook a lot of things if it's the house that

you have like set your mind on. So as hard as it is,

we always would try to just be like, okay, we're going to take each house for what

it is and try not to get super attached to it. Like,

if you've ever been to an animal rescue, it's very hard to, like, not want to take

every cat or dog home.

Cats and dogs are relatively small investments in comparison to a home. So that

brings me to the emotional roller coaster. So searching for a home is a ton of

fun. It's fun to dream dream about the future projects in whatever house you end up

in. It's fun to search on all the different apps. But I can remember when we were

preparing to move to Delaware, it was in the middle of COVID. And so there were

strict guidelines. There was even times where our realtor had to FaceTime us.

So we would drive down to Delaware from Maryland. We would sit outside the house,

he would walk in the house and FaceTime us. Like if somebody else lived in the

house and it wasn't empty because of COVID protocols. So we would have to like, be

like, oh, can you walk to the kitchen? Can you open that cabinet? It was very

strange.

But we found this house. It was a new construction build. It was in a new

neighborhood. There was a pond right next to the house so there wasn't even a house

directly next to us and we're like this is the one it's going to be awesome and

here six years later i can't remember exactly what happened but i do know it didn't

work out and for a couple hours we were like well that's it we're not going to

find a house here in delaware and i want to say it was either the next day or

was within a week We ended up finding the house that we eventually purchased, and

it ended up being the perfect house for us. And we initially thought, well,

it's over. There's no other house out there for us.

So I know you and Colin are both sports fans, and you know what an emotional

roller coaster, like a whole season can be like for your favorite team or like a

tournament game or whatever. So purchasing a house is very much like that. So I'd

say just one of you has to be the chill one. One of you's got to be. Colin,

I think you're listening. And it might go back and forth because he might find one

that he's like totally set on and you might have to be the one. It's like, listen,

I don't know, you might have to be the level -headed one at some point. So, All

right, here's the thing. I've done a lot of talking and some of it's been

meandering and rambly. I want to give you an opportunity to just ask some quick

hitting questions that you might be sitting on or that maybe you've had.

Yeah, well, I guess speaking of Collin, I think everybody has their own tastes and

decor and colors and aesthetics. What do you suggest on if I disagree with Colin

and think he has terrible taste?

So I

kind of wish Colin was here to hear this because you guys are preparing to get

married. So this is a home remodeling podcast,

but I'll share some relational advice.

The woman is always right.

With that said, I think the longer you've been with someone,

the more your interest and your taste start to like, if you're over here and he's

over here, over time, they start to overlap more.

It doesn't mean that you become that person, but there are fewer things that you

completely disagree on. And so I would say, A,

you're not going to find the one perfect house.

You might find a perfect house for you, but it's not the only one in the entire

world. So that's one thing. I would also say it's a give and take. So just like

everything else in relationships,

if there's a must have on your list, allow him to have a must have on his list

too. Like if it's, I don't know, like a workshop space or I don't know,

it could be any number of things. I already know what this would be. Yeah,

what other questions? I guess skipping around a little bit,

is there actual benefits or differences between the 15 and the 30 -year mortgages?

Well, again, for legal purposes, I'll say this is not a financial podcast and so

nothing we're saying here today is to provide our audience with official financial

advice but what I will say is if Don and I would have been able to afford a 15

year mortgage we would have done it because you will pay just like if you've ever

had any student loans You will pay so much more in finance fees and interest over

the span of the loan than the actual, like, principal amount.

I'm really bad at math, but what I will say is our mortgage every month, a

significant percentage of the amount that we're paying is just going to the interest

that is on that loan. So if we could have afforded a 15 -year mortgage,

yeah, we totally would have done it, and I would recommend you do the same. The

reality for a lot of Americans is that the 30 -year is what you have to do.

And it is daunting when you're like, okay,

How old am I going to be in 30 years?

But it's what we had to do. I'll equate it again to student loans.

It's what I had to do when I went to college. It was like, okay, if I'm going to

go to school, I'm going to have to take out a loan. And my options were what they

were at the time. And I couldn't make money appear out of thin air. So, Yeah,

I'd say go for it if you've got the ability to do a 15, but the reality is a

lot of us 30 is the norm.

I had one last one is,

does Colin really have to clean the gutters every year?

So, One benefit to new construction, and this is not all new construction falls into

this category, but both of the new houses that we've purchased, because they were in

brand new neighborhoods, had very few mature trees, which means I have not had to

clean the gutters every year. However, when we lived at that house That was built

in the 1960s. We actually did have gutter guards on it, which helped tremendously.

I probably shouldn't say this, but I did not clean the gutters every year there

either. However, that might have contributed to some of the flooding issues we had

in the basement. Because of Aaron and I have talked about on other episodes of this

very show, when your gutters do fill up with pine needles,

leaves, debris,

whatever, and your gutters start spilling out, so you get a heavy rain or like we

just had like you get a huge snowfall and then that starts to melt. If your

gutters fill up and the water starts to overflow over the front of them, all of

that water is going straight down towards your foundation and will eventually erode

the foundation, which causes huge issues. So my company answer would be,

yes. Colin most definitely needs to clean the gutters every year. Or between now and

March 31st, with any full roofing or siding project through pro exteriors,

you guys would qualify for free Leaf Blaster Pro stainless steel micro mesh gutter

guards so there's that too all right what i will say is that at least looking at

the gutters every year is wise even getting up on a ladder and looking at the roof

or standing out far enough in your front yard where you can look up and just

visually check and make sure you're not missing shingles um is a good idea and even

just taking a walk around the house to make sure that everything looks like it

should. We've had a lot of wind here recently, and we recently, I noticed a piece

of siding laying in our front yard, and it was not ours, thankfully, but that means

that somebody in our neighborhood is missing a piece of siding, and these are all

brand new houses.

So, Colin, if you're listening, you don't have to clean your gutters every year, but

I would recommend that at least someone inspects them. And shameless plug,

pro exteriors will come out and look at your gutters for free. So there's that.

It sounds like a solid plan. I want one takeaway from you. What is one thing that

you feel better about? You got to pick one.

It's got to be a good one, so I've got to think about it. Well, I want to ask

what's one thing you feel worse about, too, so you can give me either one. Geez,

I think the one thing I feel better about is knowing that no matter what we pick

a new construction and older, more charmful houses, that Either way,

we're going to have to take things one step at a time to truly make it ours.

Yeah.

Is there anything that you are feeling more anxious about than when we started this

conversation? Basements.

Just basements.

So, yeah, obviously there in southern delaware i guess basements are less of a

factor right because that's less common did you grow up with one uh no i mean like

the crawl space underneath the house but yeah no i know like colin grew up in

elicate city and they had the finished basement and everything so we had a crawl

space in delaware and we had zero issues with it Yeah. So if you don't have a

basement, then that takes away that worry. Add that to the list. Yeah. Here's my

last piece of unsolicited advice. Buy the worst house on the best street,

not the other way around. I mean, you don't have to, like, seek out the worst

house. But I mean, find the best neighborhood. Find the best piece a property,

everything in the house can be replaced or fixed over time. If you end up with the

nicest house on the worst street, you're not going to enjoy living there. And you

can decide what makes it the best street. You know, that's totally up to your

preferences. I like that quote. Yeah. Well,

Kara, thanks for joining me today and good luck to you guys.

Thanks. Thanks for all the advice unsolicited or not. Sure thing. All right,

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