5 mistakes we made when we bought our first house

Our first home was set on an 8,300 square foot property, which was large for the area and massive for a couple moving out of an apartment with a small patio. After getting a $20,000 quote from a professional landscape design company, we committed to doing all our landscape work ourselves.

Over the course of many weeks, my wife and I and a few friends cleared brambles, underbrush, weeds, dead trees and shrubs, and cleared and leveled the long-neglected land. Then we seeded a large area to grow a lawn, planted a few trees, shrubs, and flowers, and had a company install a patio.

Within a few months, the patio was still looking great, but all but one of the trees had died, the grass was down to a few muddy patches that I hadn't overwatered, and the bushes were largely on life support.

In the rush to get the yard completed, I didn't take the time to learn enough about how to grow new grass, which plants would work best given the sunlight and irrigation situation, and so on. Basically every dollar and hour invested into the first iteration of the yard was wasted, save for the education that came with it.

When you move homes, certain pieces of furniture move with you. Whether it's a favorite chair, a comfy couch, or a bedroom set that works well in the new place, there's no reason to toss perfectly good furniture just because you're moving. But when the move is to a larger home, you are going to need some new stuff, too.

We kept our apartment for two months after buying our house, since we were doing so much work on it both outside and in. We were eager to have the home as ready as possible when we finally did settle there. So we bought a new couch, chairs, and coffee table for the living room, accepted some hand-me-down antiques for the guest room, and bought a media center for the den.

Within a year, we had replaced everything but the couch. None of the other furniture suited our functional needs, nor did it work with the items we brought along from our apartment. Had we waited to furnish the place once we lived there, we would have done it right the first time.

When we first bought our home, it was a three bedroom, two-bathroom house measuring about 1,500 square feet, and it was the perfect size for the two of us. Once we were expecting our first kid, we realized the place was about to feel a bit small. So we set out to add an addition, which should have been an expensive but simple proposition, given our large lot.

The problem came from a beautiful towering live oak that hung over our property despite being rooted in our neighbor's yard. I loved that old tree, but what I didn't love was the fact that its protected status required us to apply for a variance that would ultimately require months to approve and involved hours spent on the phone and at city offices.

Had we known the land use limitations placed on our property ahead of time, we could have applied for the variance as we began to first work with our architect and builder and saved untold amounts of time.

Buying a house is expensive, so every dollar you can save during the process is a welcome dollar indeed. And in some ways, we saved wisely.

For example, I picked a certain type of granite for our kitchen countertops, only to find a similar option that cost half as much. I never regretted that choice for a second.

But in other cases, such as buying cheap curtains for the guest room, a low-quality faucet for the second bathroom, and inexpensive lighting fixtures for the kitchen, spending a bit more upfront would have saved us money overall.

The curtains proved to block almost no light whatsoever and had to be replaced almost at once, the faucet started leaking within a year, and the lights flickered intermittently, which is beyond frustrating while one is trying to cook or enjoy a meal. Needless to say, those had to go, and we ended up paying for the same items twice.