Comment by chezball | Hacker News Reader

Comment by chezball | Hacker News Reader

So, i sold a house i had in north Seattle after a divorce in 2018. We had bought it in 04, i was working at Microsoft at the time. We raised our son there. I even built a 8’x8’x8’ brick oven for baking pizza and bread (plans from Ovencrafters). I rented an excavator for a week and dug around the entire house and put in 12’ deep footing drains, with clean-out pipes every 20’ down the 100’ to the road. A new 2” pex water main. 1” pvc sprinkler lines buried 3’ deep. I completely gutted and remodeled the basement. I kept a 3” binder with everything in it. Every sprinkler line, footing drain, how my gravity fed recirc system worked, electrical wire, even the pictures of every stage of the six month long brick oven project, including how to move it if needed (10k lbs, but doable with a forklift) When i sold the house, i flew back there just to hand it to the new owner, some nuevo amazon guy. I went through everything with him, and although he listened, there was no interest or appreciation in what i had handed him. Fine. Whatever.

I moved back to Seattle a few months ago, and my 17 yo son, who was literally born in that house (on a Murphy Bed i built, also included in the manual (the plans, not that my son was born on it, how weird do you think i am?) went and knocked on the door, and he asked if he could look around (outside). They apparently looked at him as if he was deranged, but said sure.

He reported back that they had razed the brick oven, the one thing i thought would out last me in my life. I hoped that one day, maybe some kids would be eating pizza from this oven 100 years from now and no one would know where the oven came from.

Yeah, I haven’t had a house since then, but i will do it again, document everything. I will just be pickier about who i sell it to.

>I will just be pickier about who i sell it to.

Honestly this kind of mindset is a huge problem in the US. You built the oven, you enjoyed the oven, and you decided to sell the house. Why do you feel the need to dictate what the owner does with the house after? If you wanted to keep the pizza oven as some kind of monument to yourself you could have kept the home.

This kind of mindset leads to stale neighborhoods, where some locals feel the need to dictate neighborhood look and feel. You end up with regulations that don't allow new construction and can even dictate dumb things like paint color. All to preserve a memory of something that is only important to the people that got to enjoy it when it was new.

This is not say nothing should ever be preserved if there is actually something of historical importance that happened there, but it seems like there's a mindset to preserve things that are trivial to the many and important to the few. Then there are places with actual historical significance [1] people are willing to just rot.

1: https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2018/mar/30/rosa-parks-h...

What's wrong with minding? A person does something they're proud of, they obviously care about its future. Just because you completed some financial transaction doesn't mean any of that emotional attachment goes away.

Honestly it is kinda depressing that anyone thinks otherwise! like somehow we should respect capitalism and $business$ more than, like, feelings.

The person that put time and effort into building it obviously cares, but the new homeowner most likely doesn't give a shit. Why would they? They bought the house without the emotional attachments. It's like inheriting a house from a relative. You dump most of it in a huge container but when they were alive they probably had a lot of emotional attachment to some of the stuff you just dumped in there. It doesn't have to do with capital or business.

Whoah, that interpretation seems pretty wild to me. They put a lot of effort into building a pizza oven and someone else tore it down, and they should feel nothing about this?! If an artist sells their painting they shouldn't care if the new owner paints over a section?

Beyond the sentimental attachment to the pizza oven, I'd be bothered by the sheer inefficiency of it.

> I'd be bothered by the sheer inefficiency of it.

This is the part that hurts me the most. I don't like when good things go to waste.

Been renovating an old house with a large garden for almost ten years now. I tell myself this is better than building something from scratch, but it definitely doesn't always feel more efficient. It helps that I didn't have the option back then, but now maybe I do? Sometimes it's also hard to tell, in the moment, which things to keep and what to rip out.

You're assuming they like pizza and want an 8x8' pizza oven taking up space in the back yard....

Reminds me of the tale of the guy who was told by his realtor that he could put $20k in new windows and sell the house for $50k more. He did and it sold, and was immediately torn down.

You are allowed to be inefficient with things you own. Again, shouldn't have sold the house if they wanted to keep control of it.

Or be a rat bastard and tie a covenant to the land forever muahahahaha

It's totally reasonable to be sad someone tore it down, but you also have to accept that you lose any say over a house when you sell it.

But why buy a house if younger going to tear everything down or change it? Why not buy something that you already like? Why not accept that tearing down and rebuilding is expensive, for you and for the planet? Why not just accept “good enough”?

Because the land under the house is worth so much more than the "improvements" on top of it that the improvements might as well not exist.

You're buying the land and location. There's always someone willing to make you a new house for the right price, and you can get it done exactly the way you want it. There's nobody that can make new land, particularly not in the place you want it. You can change anything about a house except its location.

The house I want isn't available, so I'm going to buy the closest thing and make the changes I want... building a pizza oven is a lot of time and effort, but tearing it out isn't. I'm not sure how much a pizza oven adds to the price of a home, but I'm guessing, not that much because most people aren't going to understand its value ... anyway, as a buyer it's not like I'm getting a list of features I can refuse some of, the house is being sold with the pizza oven and I'll deal with it when it's mine.

Exactly. One person bought a house and added a pizza over because he wanted it, another bought it and removed it because he didn’t want it.

It’s nice to think we might do something that lasts a long time but the more nonstandard it is, the more likely it will be changed someday.

A similar effort on a fancy “outdoor kitchen/barbecue” in a more outdoorsy state than WA may have lasted a long time.

It's too cheap to pollute the planet, the solution is to price in the externalities, tax everything the amount it costs to clean up the pollution it causes, then spend that money cleaning up the pollution

Things can have sentimental value. We need more of this sentiment in the world, not less. Certainly for architecture. It’s that detached mindset that is also partially responsible for all the horrible empty architecture nowadays. Just a box to live in.

I actually agree with this statement, but people should be allowed to build the sentimental value. They shouldn't have the sentimental value of someone else's past ideas dictate the new.

An awful local law may have dictated that the OP should not have been allowed to build a pizza oven in the first place, because people want to preserve the look and feel of the neighborhood when they moved in. But I also view it as equally bad if the new owner couldn't tear it down because of some HOA regulation saying that structures built before some arbitrary date, conveniently a time after they moved in and did their renovations, can't be torn down. The only real reason being the sentimental value they have to that past.

The latter can happen with historic designated buildings, and can often be applied widely in unexpected ways. Some will basically say you can’t modify the exterior look, others will say everything up to and including bulb changes must be approved by the historical society.

> Honestly this kind of mindset is a huge problem in the US.

It sounds like less of a problem than its opposite: "Nothing matters but how much money I can make."

Whatabout something else that is a problem in the world? Your post history seems like you exist to be an example in a Wikipedia article

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whataboutism

You extrapolated "I will just be pickier about who i sell it to" into an argument about regulations. If your contention is that sentiment obstructs progress, it seems totally fair to argue that the opposite is also true. Accusing someone of "whataboutism" isn't doing much to move the conversation forward.

They made a snarky single sentence comment. There is no argument about any thing else.

I have a quote from the OP, but address matters from the entire comment.

You are arguing about two sentences.

> Whataboutism

"The polar-opposite behavior is a bigger problem" is not "whataboutism", the relation is direct and practical.

> Your post history seems like you exist to be an example in a Wikipedia article.

Thinly-veiled personal insult, check.

Why keep a complex thing in your garden if you know you'll never use it? All of the infrastructure around it sounds like it needs a lot of maintenance. It's arguably more efficient to remove it rather than risk any of it going wrong.

If OP loved it so much then he should have moved it. Once he's sold the house then it's not his business anymore.

This kind of mindset is why many parks and landmark exist, in the US and Europe. Someone owned a land or a castle, etc and then donated or sold it with strings attached to keep its purpose. Muir Woods is one example, private purchase with the intent to preserve it.

Thank you for sharing that story. Don’t be too upset about the pizza oven. You built it for you and your son and hopefully you got to enjoy it for a while.

There is no expectation for the new owners to share the prior owners interests. Maybe they are gluten free. Maybe they are the kinds of people who have zero inters in baking, whatever. You can’t expect them to use the 64 sq ft of their yard as a monument to something you did if it’s not relevant to them.

I do get the idea of being attached to your home and hoping it goes to good hands. We have that kind of relationship with the folks we bought our house from and that’s great. But there is no expectation that we won’t change it to suit our family.

A corollary of this isn’t you don’t mind things like random pizza ovens, you can ask the realtors to bring houses with “odd features” to your attention, because they often have no or negative value.

It's just odd from the perspective of a non American, because in much of the rest of the world houses are usually kept in families multi generationally. So your dream of passing on the oven would have worked most other places. It's just your desires are incompatible with the American treatment of houses as commodities to be frequently traded in bidding auctions.

That’s not been the case for a while in developed economies. The vagaries of modern life and work means most people can’t live where they grew up, make their life elsewhere, possibly multiple elsewhere, and only go back to visit. Unless there’s a real business to inherit e.g. a farm or hotel or some such.

That was already the case in my grandparents generation. On my father’s side is a large farm, but my grandparents moved into it. The eldest lives there, and a few of the aunts and uncles have shares from inheritance so they might move into it eventually. Most of them made their lives elsewhere, and their kids went even further afield.

On the other side, the grandparents came down from the mountain, built a house, the kids made their own lives throughout the country. The house was sold when my grandmother died a few years back. And she died in that home, for most of my friends the houses were sold when the elder had to move to assisted living (or worse when the house was lost for lack of income).

Generational homes were a thing when people didn’t need to move around, but my own parents moved 4 times just in my lifetime. So far.

I think it's not even the case in developing economies, with substantial economic and population growth. It simply can't work like that.

Even with significant growth it can happen - existing houses stay in the family, but the majority of people live in new housing.

That probably worked when life expectancies were lower, where are people supposed to live the other 25+ years of housing?

> I will just be pickier about who i sell it to.

You may sell the house, but you keep the memories. It sucks your grandkids won't be able to eat from your pizza oven, but you did, and you can talk about how you made it, and how much you enjoyed it, and that lives on. My parents sold their home a few years ago, and while my dad will regularly talk about how he misses it and what terrible changes the new owners make, it doesn't change that I was raised in that house, and we had great times and memories there, and he will now have a chance to make them with his granddaughter in his new house. It stings, but try not to let it.

Less sentimental, but just as infuriating (to me): My last house we bought had an old hot tub out back from the early 90s. My agent said don't price that POS into your estimate of the home's worth--it's probably never worked. We bought the house and lo and behold it did not work, but I carefully rehabbed it, replaced the pumps and sensors and cleaned everything up, made a custom topper for it, and went on to enjoy 8 years of fun in it.

Came time to sell the house, and I told the buyer, the hot tub is great--we'd love to keep it--if you don't want it, we can negotiate that, and we'll arrange to actually move it to our new home! They didn't respond and bought the house anyway. I find out from my next door neighbor that the first thing they did when they moved in was demolish it and haul it to the dump.

Hey, it's their house, but some people are just wasteful.

When I bought a house, the prior owners requested I return the front door to them within N days, the contract had a section keeping $500 in escrow to be returned to me upon receipt of the door (by the shipping company, I believe).

My realtor was like, "this basically means the house costs $500 more", but I went ahead and returned the door.

If you're faced with that situation in the future, you could try including a clause like that in the contract; the $500 wasn't really the motivation for me to immediately replace the door and pack up the old for shipping, but putting a little money on the line might motivate the buyer to at least value the feature you'd like returned if they don't care for it.

It’s fine but I’m just laughing at “the front door doesn’t convey”.

Honestly, the singularly wonderful thing about purchasing a home is that you can do whatever you want with it. The sky is the limit, you can make the yard into a garden, build a pizza oven into your wall, turn the basement into a gaming pad. You did all of those cool things with it!

Now, don't begrudge the people coming after you for doing the same. It's their house, not yours, and they have the chance to make it how they like it. If you want control over a thing, don't sell it. Similarly, if you want to dictate what your employees do during non work hours, you have to pay them for it. You treat something as a commodity, and it becomes a commodity.

When I had much more energy (read younger), I finished my basement. 800sqft or so, put in a guest bedroom, a little library for the missus, a full bath and most importantly a home theater. I was talking with my neighbor who is a realtor and he said that if anything the home theater was a negative during resale. The only things that added value were the other rooms. Luckily, I built the theater so it could be converted into a game room etc, and most importantly, I built it for myself.

Yeah sounds like the people who bought it suck. Why would you destroy a pizza oven? It would add a ton of value to the house for the right buyer. If you had sold it to me I would have absolutely kept the oven :) Also inspires me to follow a similar path for my house. I think the key is to price the house so only someone who values the work you've done would bother buying it, if you have the time to wait around. And I guess that doesn't guarantee anything.

One of those things that adds a ton of value for the right person, but for the wrong person is equally negative value (it takes up 64 square feet of yard space!). While most people won't really care. And so while it can add a lot of value to the right person, overall it is zero value. Even to the right person it won't be as much value as you would expect - unless they are putting a more than normal down on the house the bank will then value that at zero and thus not give them a loan for what that feature is worth.

Pools are the same thing - should be valuable to the right buyer, but in practice worth zero. Even the most valuable remodels - kitchens - often are worth less than not doing it at all because while it adds a lot of value to the house it doesn't add as much as they cost.

thats why you should remodel while you live there so you're actually getting value out of your expenditures, not just upgrading everything right before you move out.

Renovating before moving is the worst (excluding clean up (fresh paint, etc) - I feel like most people have horrible taste and use cheapo contractor grade materials, last time I was buying a house I couldn’t believe how many newly renovated homes I saw where I thought “wow this needs a ton of work”

Unfortunately, it’s kind of crazy to use anything better, since — as you pointed out — most people won’t even care.

Pools are worse - they are usually worth negative money when it comes time to sell, because you cannot just let it sit, unlike the pizza oven (at least in theory).

> it takes up 64 square feet of yard space!

Not saying what should or shouldn’t be done, but the implication here seems to be that that’s a lot of yard space. Depending on yard size, that could be a crippling amount of space to lose, or just a drop in the bucket.

I don’t know anything about Seattle yards. I’d kind of expect them to be on the small side, but maybe his wasn’t? He obviously had some amount of land, but from his post I really can’t tell how much.

Because it takes up space and is mostly pointless vs a portable propane or electric one.

Unless you're selling to a family member, you just can't expect these things to last.

I share the feeling though.

What a wonderful story! We need to start a community of guys who documents their Jose’ houses. I am in the process of documenting mine, it is so very helpful for everything I ever do around it! Before this very post I never thought someone else could do that.

Sad to hear about that. It's one of my dreams, after finally purchasing a home, to add a nice wood fire oven in the backyard. I'm guessing you don't have the pictures anymore? Would love to see them.

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