Home of Their Dreams
The baseball diamond of my youth is being turned into a new housing development. It makes me shake my head, not because another relic from my childhood will soon be gone. I don’t think I ever even hit one of my very rare home runs there. But now that it’s going to be home to just another cluster of houses that will pop up fast and fill up with young families even faster, I wonder where all of these people are coming from. It’s not exactly centrally located; whomever lives on the Binbrook site will have a half hour commute to Hamilton. But many, apparently, believe it’s worth it.
New home developments are going up everywhere there used to be fields, baseball and farm. Seems to me there should either be a glut of abandoned resale homes or the coming of age of the results of a decades old population explosion. Neither is the case. And yet these slapped up slums of the future are selling out before they’re even built.
A friend of mine works as a PreDelivery Inspector for one of the major, respected new home building companies. His day consists of going through new houses with their buyers and making lists of things that have gone wrong; everything from electrical wiring issues, to rooms out of square, to paint colour mistakes to upgrades like granite countertops not being installed. He has dealt with crying, wailing, swearing and threats from buyers because every new home the company puts up has problems of some sort and sometimes the teeny, tiny wording of the contract negates the company’s responsibility. Buyers are understandably upset at this. The company continues to win major industry awards because all of this is part of the process and it’s not the worst one out there. The bottom line is, people are willing to put up with it.
Personally, I like a house that’s been a bit lived in. Under my fresh ownership, a new home has nowhere to go but down. It can only get worse! I don’t want to be the one to put the first dent in a door and the first stain on a carpet. Still, I understand the allure of choosing one’s own colour schemes and accessories. I just don’t know where all of these people are coming from.
