The total cost of being a new homeowner - 2 years' worth of expenses

My husband and I bought our first home in August of 2020. We moved from southern California, where we had been renting a 2 bedroom 2 bathroom apartment. Our total ~monthly bills (read: average) at that apartment were:

• Rent: $1645
• Internet (we had no options, we had to use the one carrier they provided): $85
• Utilities: $80
• Gas: $20
• Electric: $150
• Total: $1980
• Edit: At someone's suggestion, I went back and my old apartment is renting for $2,550 right now**.**

In September of 2019, we moved to Utah. We moved into my husband’s parents basement, where we paid them a minimal amount of rent and then aggressively padded our savings (32K at the time) to save for a 20% down payment while we house hunted. We started looking at homes in February of 2020, and we toured over 30 homes before putting an offer on ours (we had had an offer accepted on a home prior to this, but that one fell through when the sellers promised to replace the roof before closing and then didn’t). We bought our house (5 bedroom/2ba, split level) in August of 2020, with a move-in date at the end of August. The house was priced at $310,000. We offered 315K. The appraisal came in at 313K, so the price was dropped to that. We paid $63,000 as our down payment on the home (20%), leaving us with $5000 to do some renovations and $10,000 of an e-fund.

Just to cut to the short of it and for the sake of comparison, here are the current ~monthly (read: average) bills:

• Mortgage payment (including insurance and stuff): $1266
• Internet: $50
• Utilities: $100
• Gas: $50
• Electric: $150
• Total: $1616

I will say that we now also put $300 into a “home improvement” savings, to cover things like roof/AC/furnace/etc. type of stuff. With that factored in, the total would be $1916.

We spent a solid week before moving in going in a doing some renovations – we repainted the whole house, we knocked out a wall separating the living room and the kitchen, and we removed a closet in one of the downstairs bedrooms. Then we moved in in September of 2020! So it’s now been about two years of us living here. Here are all of the expenses we’ve had, since I often see posts/comments/questions about what kind of expenses come up when you’re a homeowner.

A disclaimer* that when we moved here 3 years ago, my husband started learning how to do handy work. 18 or so months ago, he got a job as a warranty specialist, so now he does a lot of handy work for a living. That also means that he tends to have a lot of tools that not everyone would have lying around. This is all relatively new, though – within the last 3 years. I’ve also learned how to do a lot of handy stuff as well! Unless noted otherwise below, all labor was done by us.

*I added this disclaimer, so if you want to be like "well not EVERYONE can do XYZ," you can rest easy. I know. That's why I put it in here.

I’m pretty frugal by nature, and I track every penny that we spend on a budgeting spreadsheet. So I happen to have all of our expenses saved in a handy dandy excel dating back for the last like 8 years. Here are all the ones related to our home since we have bought it. I have bolded ones I believe to be necessities, as most of these are just things we really wanted to do.

August 2020:

• $1,132: Repainted the house. This includes all of the paint and rollers. We painted the house ourselves, going over every night after our kids went to bed and painting for like 5+ hours for a solid week. The house when we purchased it had seafoam green, blood red, baby pink, baby blue, and checkerboard walls. They had let the kids pick out colors and let the kids paint. Sooo this was necessary for us. I bolded it because I truly believe anyone would have found it to be necessary.
• $289: removed a wall between the kitchen and the living room, opening up the upstairs, and removed a closet from a downstairs bedroom. We demo’d everything ourselves and then patched with drywall and mud and repainted. We left spots in the flooring that we covered with patches of carpet we found in the shed, because we were planning to redo all the floors eventually. So we had some random carpeted spots in the floor for a while where those walls used to be lol
• $507: Fridge. Moved all our stuff in and realized our fridge didn’t fit through the front door. So I sold our fridge for $800, and we went to a used appliance store (where we got the fridge we just sold) and spent $507 on a different fridge. Technically, this was actually a positive $$ for us, but I’m including it anyway.
• $416: new router. There already was one, but I wanted a really good one. The internet we have is fiber utopia, which is apparently super good. With me working from home a lot, I wanted a good router. So we invested in this super nice hawk something or other. It’s been really great.
• $424: new bed frame, we had been wanting a new one for a long time but decided to wait until we bought a house to make the plunge.
• $52: our house came with a hot tub that had no water in it, so my husband researched how to balance the whatever and got some product to refill the hot tub
• $0: lawnmower. We got one from a buy nothing group.
• $300: got a used washer and dryer off FB marketplace. They’re super nice.
• $30: Got a free new BBQ off fb buy nothing group, and got a propane tank to put in it.

November 2020:

• $1016: we have a big backyard, and we also have two little kids and two dogs. I wanted a dog run type deal, so my husband got poles and fencing stuff and cement and, with the help of youtube, put up a fence with a gate to block off the dogs from going into the larger area of the yard when we’re not back there. We also got a bunch of wood to block off under the deck, so that we can store bikes and things under the deck with less weather damage.
• $50: dryer stopped working. I YouTube’d it and took the whole thing apart and spent $50 on a reader that let me know if the heating element wasn’t working, only to find out that a small piece had come unplugged inside the dryer behind the barrel lol so I didn’t even need to spend the $50 but here we are.

January 2021:

• $126: we needed specific clasps for the fence gate, so we finally got them and completed the fence in January.

February 2021:

• $682: new dishwasher. One Sunday morning, our dishwasher randomly stopped working. It was suuuuuper old. Normally, I’d be of the mind to get one at a used appliance store, but I was not in the mood this day and we had the budget so my husband went to buy a new one.

March 2021:

• $75: our backyard slider didn’t have a screen door and it was annoying. So we got one and installed it.

April 2021: Some BIG renovations incoming!

• $285: we got a fake fireplace entertainment unit for our TV
• $367: we got a murphy bar to hang in our kitchen
• $225: we replaced the blinds in the kitchen window and also got a new blind for our slider since it didn’t have one
• $0: we replaced all the blinds in the house with cordless ones, there was a blind company running a promo for households with kids under the age of 6 to get one free cordless blind. All our local friends with kids didn’t want only one blind so I asked if I could have theirs, and with that we were able to replace the blinds in all 6 of the windows in our house that had old ones
• $5207: we recarpeted 4/5 bedrooms in the house. We removed all of the flooring ourselves and took it to the dump ourselves, they charged $2/sq ft for removal so we just figured we would do that. This covered materials and installation for all the carpet, the laminate, and the damn stairs. The stairs cost almost as much as all the carpet combined. We did laminate throughout the house outside of the bedrooms. We went to flooring liquidator for all the flooring, and picked a laminate that had been discontinued.
• $4080: we redid our kitchen. We completely gutted it (again, demoing ourselves to save on $$) and restructured the room. Because we had removed the wall when we moved in, we had more room to work with and got to put an island in! This was the cost + installation of the cabinetry. We got a 5% discount for being a referral.
• $2085: the cost + installation of the marble countertops
• $152: the sink
• $234: above-range microwave, which we had to install ourselves and was quite a bitch to do. (I am marking this as a necessity because the microwave that came with the house NEEDED to be replaced).
• $170: kitchen faucet
• $474: the other odds & ends that came with demo-ing the whole kitchen and all of the flooring in the house, as well as dumping all the materials
• $300: after the flooring was installed, we redid all the baseboard and casing (having ripped it off during demo). We got the baseboard from the flooring liquidator and then painted and installed it ourselves

May 2021:

• $300: we had to get an extra case of flooring to finish the landing where our split stairs meet.
• $382: we replaced our front door
• $101: we replaced the casing on all of our doors when we did baseboards, but some doors needed specifically small casing.
• $538: an accumulation of other hardware store costs, including paint and brushes for the casing, caulk, film for the front door window, etc.

September 2021:

• $500: we removed all of the shrubbery from in front of our house, leveled the dirt, and then covered it with white marble rock.
• $616: we removed the ugly brown stair banister in our house and then replaced it with a half-wall.

October 2021:

• $4448: we replaced our furnace, since it was super old. It was due.

November 2021:

• $216: we started a subscription with a company who comes out annually to do routine maintenance on the furnace, water cooler, AC unit, and the air ducts. This is the annual cost.
• $65: we got a trampoline off FB marketplace for the backyard

April 2022:

• $1447: we replaced 11 internal doors inside the house. We purchased the doors and then painted them, cut doorknob holes and hung them ourselves. This cost includes the doors and the paint and the new knobs.

September 2022:

• $3500: new roof. Our roof was 22 years old, so it was time. There was an interesting loophole that allowed us to get the room on the cheap – the base cost of the roof ($7100) was given to our homeowners insurance. We paid for the upgrades – which was choosing the better shingles and adding a ridge vent. Because we had a windstorm knock off some shingles, we were able to process a claim to our insurance. Insurance was going to cover replacement of the shingles, but the shingles were discontinued, so they had to replace the whole roof. The roofing company duked it out with the insurance company, so we didn’t really manage any of that.
• $450: we removed all the red tanbark that lined the edge of our property, leveled the dirt, and covered it with the same white marble chips we did the front of the house with

October 2022-November 2022:

• $5042: we are currently in the process of redoing both bathrooms. This is the cost so far of the downstairs bathroom. This cost includes demo (we removed a small wall with built-in shelving to expand the room), vanity, toilet, tiling, bathtub+walls, paint, baseboard and casing, faucet, and electrical reworking. The bathroom is 90% done, only thing left to do is get a mirror and hang it up! Then we will work on the upstairs bathroom. So, more to come!

Total of all of the above: $35,601

Total of necessary costs: $9,937 (Dividing this up over the 25 months we have lived here comes out to $397/month, so a little more than we are currently saving for the big necessary purchases)

That (necessities) comes out to about $4,769/year: 1.5% of the house's original purchase price.

Upcoming:

• $600: Water heater replacement: we plan to replace this once the downstairs bathroom is done. This is the cost of the heater itself, we will be replacing it.
• ~$5000: redoing the upstairs bathroom. We will be hiring someone to rough-install the walk-in shower because of the marbling around the window - my husband wants nothing to do with it lol
• ~$??? we have a messed up chunk of driveway we ultimately want to fix

As of today, the house is worth $439K on Redfin (a $126K increase), not accounting for any of the renovations we have done. We did get a blind offer of about 430K several months ago from someone who I think was just trying to buy a home in the area.

I think it is worth noting that I absolutely fucking love living in a house and being a homeowner. We have a big backyard and live on a nice street where our kids can ride bikes up and down while we chill in the driveway, we don't have to worry about noisy neighbors or landlords or anything. When something breaks we can just fix it without waiting for maintenance. We can change what the house looks like, paint, decorate, etc. I really really enjoy it. I moved like 22 times before we bought this house. I hope we can be here a long time!

So there you have it! Those have been our home-related expenses for the last two years.

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EDIT: I tried to edit this yesterday, but the post got removed and then put back.

So a lot of people seem to be like...upset? about our kitchen renovation? Lol. We got quotes from several places and ended up going with the one we got recommended from a friend and picked cabinets that were on sale. We demo'd the kitchen and took down all the cabinets/counters/flooring/etc. ourselves and disposed of it before they came to install the other stuff, which saved $$. Our kitchen also isn't huge, and flooring for the kitchen is under the flooring cost because we did those things at the same thing. I have the invoice for the cabinets + install (and also the counters, the floors, etc) but hopefully this will be enough to get people off my back about it haha. The second page has the taxes added and the $200 delivery fee, which got it to that 4K number.

https://i.imgur.com/F7qJwR2.jpg

Also, the roof was 10K total. Insurance covered 7,100, which is the cost of just the regular roof replacement. We paid the 3K for upgrades. If insurance hadn't covered the roof, we wouldn't have gotten the upgrades, we just did that because insurance paid for the replacement. And yes, wind damage is common in utah - this is the second claim we have had to file for wind damage.