The Housechick Blog

I’ve been working with a couple of first-time home buyers recently, and we’ve had lots of discussions about how to pick the right home.

One of the big considerations is the age of the home.  In Tucson, older homes tend to be smaller and sit on bigger lots than a newer home for the same money.  Older homes have a lot of character, newer homes can be bland.  Old homes may need a lot of maintenance and care, newer homes may not need any work and can need less upkeep.

Ultimately, after looking at a wide variety of homes, you’ll have to figure out what is most important to you for yourself.  Your agent is there to help you work through the decision, but it comes down to personal preference.

If you’ve got an inclination to learn about home maintenance and aren’t scared to take on some small projects, an older home may be the perfect fit.  If you want a home where you’ll have to do the minimum of home maintenance, go for the newer home.

Yards are usually bigger on the older homes.  If you want a huge yard and spend a lot of time outside, maybe you want that older house.  If you are happy with an area just large enough to hold a barbeque and a couple friends without a lot of yard work, maybe that newer home is right.

Either way, there are trade-offs to be made.  My first house was a brand new home on a tiny postage stamp of a yard, and I loved that house, but missed having a big yard.  My next home was an old 1950’s adobe home on nearly a third of an acre, and I loved that house too.  I learned a lot in that house.  Then again, when you’re hip deep in a trench during the third day of digging out your old broken clay sewer line, those new construction homes start looking good!  Either that, or you realize it’s okay to learn some jobs from the sidelines while the professionals do the work.

Good question.  An Arizona room can be many things.

Generally, an Arizona room is a room off the back of a house that is either open to the outdoors, or has a lot of windows and light, usually with access to the backyard.  Many times, Arizona rooms are patios that have been enclosed.  Some are screened in and are separated from the main house by a door; some are fully heated and cooled with real windows and lighting and electricity, just like any other room in the house.  Some Arizona rooms are wide open to the rest of the house, some are very closed off and separate. 

Think sun room.  We do a lot of outdoor living in Tucson, and the Arizona room is a big part of that.

This photo has nothing to do with Arizona rooms, but I saw it on Flickr and thought the flowers were beautiful, tiny purple halos atop the cactus.

Photo via Flickr, courtesy of thomwatson

The other day, I ate lunch with my branch manager over at Las Cazuelitas, at 3535 East Ft Lowell Blvd, near Dodge.  I remember going to this building when it was an Italian place called Da Vinci’s, but that restaurant closed quite a while ago, and has been changed into Las Cazuelitas.

I went to a couple online Spanish to English translators: cazuela is either “casserole” or “crock,” so cazuelitas would be “little casseroles” or “little crocks.” 

They seem to have left a good portion of the decor from when it was an Italian restaurant - but tossed a couple serapes and sombreros on the wall to give it a somewhat different feel.  This is the desk at the front entrance of the restaurant.

From here, the building breaks up into several rooms of various sizes.  I like that there are many corners to sit and eat.  Some restaurants have a big open space and you’re kind of stuck out in the middle, but there’s a nice feel to the interior here, with the many rooms and a couple of fountains scattered about provide ambient noise.

We both had the daily special, which was two beef tamales with rice and beans, soup, and dessert.  Forgive me for not remembering the name of the soup, but it was a chicken stock with lots of pasta and scattered vegetables.  With all the pasta, it was a very filling soup!

The chips and salsa were good as well.  The salsa was a little on the tomatoey side for my taste, but had a nice mild spice level.

The main dish came out shortly after the soup.  (Isn’t that a nice festive tablecloth?)  The beans and tamales were good, the rice was unremarkable.  I’d certainly come here again.  The sign outside puts a special emphasis on seafood, I might explore that section of the menu next time.

Our server was friendly, and our food came in a timely manner. 

And then dessert came.  Today, I learned that I do not like flan.  Not that the flavor was bad, there’s just something… grainy… in the texture that doesn’t quite sit right.  I’m told it’s an acquired taste.  Perhaps so! 

Anybody want my flan?

A common home improvement around Tucson is to upgrade the cooling system from an evaporative cooler to an air conditioner, especially on some of the older Tucson homes.  I’ve got a couple good references for A/C guys, if you’re shopping around.

Many times, my preferred A/C people will bring it up and recommend it, but not every person thinks about it - it’s usually a good idea to change out the air registers when you change the cooling system in the house, especially if the registers look like this:

Okay, that’s just gross.  Don’t ask me where I took that photo, but know that I washed my hands after leaving that one.

Back to the air registers.

It’s not just an aesthetic issue.  See those louvers that are horizontal behind the main vertical louvers in that picture?  Most swamp cooler air registers don’t have those.  Those are the louvers that let you control the amount of air that comes out so you can balance the air flow.  With a swamp cooler, you don’t need those.  With an A/C, you do.

If you do want to change out your air registers and you’ve got one of those classic 1950’s Central Tucson homes, I can save you a little trouble right now: the register sizes in those houses are no longer typical, and you will not find them at Home Depot or Lowes.  Don’t even bother trying.  Take your measurements and head straight to where the professionals shop: Airco Products, 748 E 16th St. 

As a side note, I found that place to buy oddly shaped air registers by calling several stores and asking if they sold Registers of Unusual Sizes - R.O.U.Ses.  If you’re a Princess Bride fan, you’ll get that joke.  It still cracks me up.

I found a pretty cool study that was performed on the residential development of Tucson between 1945 and 1973, with some interesting maps.

I like that the maps give a very good overview of Central Tucson.  You can see on page 3 how the city grew over time.  If you look at the map on page 5 and zoom in a bit, you can see the relative size of Central Tucson homes: lots of yellow and blue squares which puts many many homes between 1000 and 1700 sq ft.  There’s also a map that shows exterior wall materials, roof materials, the presence of carports or garages, patios, lots of stuff.

Here’s a snippet from the main report:

At the beginning of World War II, Tucson was home to 40,000 people located within approximately 20 square miles. Attracted by jobs, affordable homes and mild climate, the population grew by 368%, a 57% higher rate
than the growth in Phoenix during this same time period. By 1950 the metropolitan area had 122,764 residents. However, two-thirds of this
population did not actually live within Tucson but settled instead in subdivisions which sprang up around its corporate limits. This pattern
changed during the 1950s as the City began an aggressive campaign of annexation and the city boundaries were extended to include over 70 square miles by 1960. Most of the annexed areas were single family subdivisions developed in the county with limited or no zoning or building requirements.

There’s some interesting reading in there - how unregulated development areas were annexed, how the city dealt with the rapid growth in terms of planning and water resources, who and how created all these subdivisions anyway.

Another excerpt:

An interesting aspect of the rise of the large scale builders and the increased involvement of developers with national operations in Tucson
was the evolution of names for the subdivisions. The name given a subdivision is a branding technique and part of its marketing. In the first
decade after World War II many of the Tucson subdivisions had Spanish names. For example, the name given the 1947 Bonita Vista Addition not only reflected the Hispanic heritage of the community but also conveyed that the subdivision had pretty views. …  In the sixties the practice of using descriptive names related to the history and character of the community essentially disappeared. Names were now generated by corporate offices and were generic monikers the same as those used to identify subdivisions across the nation. For example, a large 228 unit subdivision was recorded
in 1960 by the Arizona Land Title and Trust Company with the name Warwick Village. Other sixties developments included Westwood Village,
Centennial Park, Enchanted Hills, Hidden Hills, Lakeside, and Blue Ridge Estates, the latter two developed by the Lusk Corporation.

Lastly in the detailed report is a section about the styles used during building during this period with examples and descriptions.  I’m going to have to go through those carefully in order to tell the difference between them.  Who knew there were so many kinds of ranches?  There’s the:

Transitional Ranch, Simple Builder Ranch, Simple Custom Ranch, Tucson Ranch, Spanish Colonial Ranch, Character Ranch, Modern Ranch, Contemporary, Postwar Territorial, Postwar Pueblo, and Split Level.

Really a great snapshot of what to expect in Central Tucson homes!

I’ve been showing some first time buyers homes in a neighborhood called Country Club Manor.  It’s a decent sized neighborhood, about 860 properties or so, and is often attractive to first time buyers on a budget.  The homes were built in the early 1950s, and are usually 2-3 bedrooms, with a single bathroom.  Average prices run in the mid $160s. 

Because these are classic “starter homes,” the turnover is a bit high, at 2.97 years on average.  Typical turnover for Tucson is somewhere between 4-6 years, I’m told.

My Buyer is a bit concerned that high turnover means low appreciation.  Instead of guessing, let’s look at some actual numbers.

Here’s a chart of price per square foot for single family homes from 2000 to present.  The black line is a smoothed trendline for Country Club Manor only, the red line is for all of Central Tucson.

To my eye, Country Club Manor appreciates just as well as the average home in Central. You can see it lagged a little in early 2005, but quickly caught back up.  It’s a little cheaper to purchase a Country Club Manor house than the average Central house - but we knew that already!  That’s why we’re shopping in the area. 

An interesting exercise, nonetheless.  Perhaps we’ll compare rates for the other neighborhoods with contending properties.  I looked for a large Central neighborhood in a similar price range with a lower turnover rate, but didn’t have much luck.  In that price range, homes just change owners more frequently.

This is a story that starts with a Buyer using a family friend to originate their FHA loan, and ends with complete chaos, including a potential $900 fine and me rescuing an appraiser with my special water main valve opening tool.  And no close of escrow - yet.

Let’s start with the Seller being a bank - this is a lender-owned home, it has been foreclosed.  This means my Buyer must sign 11 pages of contract amendments, sign away some rights, various things.  The upside is that he’s buying a house for $20k less than the appraisal.

Being a lender-owned home, it also means that any documentation that must be signed by the Seller will take days, if not weeks, to get signed. 

The family friend, whom my Buyer chose to use, hasn’t originated an FHA loan in a very long time.  He neglects sending out the FHA real estate certification form to be signed by all parties until the day after we are scheduled to close.

This form, of course, must be signed by the Seller - so let’s hope to get that form back by the end of next week.

Remember those 11 pages of amendments?  There’s a $100/day penalty for not closing on time.  And we can’t close without the Seller’s signature on that certification form.  Hello, $900 penalty for my Buyer. 

Pleading on my Buyer’s behalf with the Seller, we have a good chance of getting the fee waived, as we are starting to convince them that the delay is not directly my Buyer’s fault.  No guarantee there yet.

Here’s the lesson - don’t use a family friend in such an important thing as buying a house just because they are a family friend. 

Oh, and the appraiser?  The lender/family friend’s choice?  Was told twice he would have to turn the water on at the street in order to perform the appraisal, and didn’t take any tool out there to help him accomplish that.  And so walked away from the appraisal without completing it.  And now the water service has been canceled as inspections are over.  And he still needs to check the water inside the house.

Luckily, there’s one person involved in this mess that knows how to turn on a water main.  I’ll be running out there with my tool Monday to get this thing done with.

I’m sort of a house info geek, so I was excited when I found a site this morning that taught me how to decipher the registration plate on the front of a water heater.

Turns out, it’s usually the first couple digits on the serial number.  Some are the month and year, some are the year and week, and some are in opposite order as others.  There’s examples at the site.

Keep in mind that the date on the plate is a manufacture date; water heaters are most likely installed within a couple years of that date.

Also, because of the hard water that we have in Tucson, you’ll often hear a bubbling noise inside the unit.  Some people call it knocking or gurgling - you’ll know it when you hear it! 

Usually, that’s caused by a build-up of sediment and minerals at the bottom of the water heater.  I’ve been told that if you drain the unit once a year, it can help with that, but I haven’t confirmed that with a professional.  In my experience with water heaters in Tucson, most make some mild bubbling noises after a year or two.  When the knocking gets very loud, it can be a sign the unit is about to die.

Luckily, replacing a water heater is one of the cheaper home repairs for being such a vital appliance, at least relatively speaking.  My last couple replacements ran between $600 and $800 for the new unit, installation, and removal of the old unit.

I think next time, I might try a tankless water heater.  Anyone with experience with those?

Photo via Flickr, courtesy of geekmojo