What type of housing to you live in? Duplex anyone?

[babyapplejack]

DH and I are selling our house and moving to another town which will be nice and close to work, sitter and school for DS1. But right now there is not many homes that we like that are in our price range.
We have been looking but not much has caught our eyes for what we can afford. But there is a very nice duplex home that is right in the school boundaries for our DS1's school, but I don't know how I would feel having our home attatched to a total stranger's home.
So I was wondering if anyone lives in a duplex home and what are your thoughts on it.

Thanks =)

[Iconoclast]

We have a vacation place at a beach that is a duplex. Not side by side, but top/bottom. We have the ground level, but the people upstairs are constantly going through our patio to get to the beach. It is really disconcerting. It feels like an invasion just to see wet footprints, knowing they have been traipsing through my space. If you are as set on privacy as I am, you would not like it. If I had to do it all over again, I'd buy something else, even if it meant it wasn't beach front.

[Peeka2]

Be very clear on what is allowed...even in duplexes smoke can go from one end to another...

My parents had that problem living in a duplex on base....the neighbors smoked and they didn't.

[BeachMama]

We have lived in a duplex (side by side) before and it was great! We shared a yard w/ our neighbors, who also had children. We ended up becoming pretty good friends with them, and remained friends even after we both moved out.

We live in a house now, but there are a lot of nice duplexes near my kids' school. Really nice. And the rent is like half of our mortgage (and the duplexes are nicer than our house).

[Becca75]

It all depends on who is your neighbor. We've rented duplexes three times and I as a renter I liked them alot more than apartments, but I'm not sure I'd own one. It wouldn't be so much about sharing our space, but about being responsible for taking care of someone else's home. KWIM?
I didn't mind living downstairs from our former landlady, but she was terrible at keeping the house up. When our water heater died she didn't have the money to replace it so we ended up buying and installing a new one (we'd just gotten our tax refund so we had the money to spare) and taking it off of our rent four months later. Dh did virtually all of the repairs to the house in the six years we lived there. That did prepare us well for when we bought our own house though!

[alejorge]

we are in a townhouse/apartment

It is 3 bedrooms and 2.5 bathrooms

[Michele]

We live in a condo. We have units above us and we share a wall with a unit as well. I have always lived in single-family homes until we moved into the condo so I was concerned about sharing a wall as well. Honestly, we have had no problems at all. Our neighbors are quiet and we have never smelled smoke or anything like that. We have access to a pool and jacuzzi, we do not have to deal with yard work, and we have a nice, spacious patio. Our kids go to outstanding schools (which was a huge selling point) and we work about a mile away from home. The neighborhood is great--clean and safe. There is no way we could have afforded to buy a single-family home in this area at all.

Plus, I like that if we go out of town, our neighbors are happy to keep an eye on things for us. Our kids know the people above us and our neighbor across from us as well. A couple of times a year we have a communal BBQ at the pool and there are several families with kids that are in my DD's grade in the complex as well. Over the years we have come to like living in our condo more and more.

[JudyJudyJudy]

Be very clear on what is allowed...even in duplexes smoke can go from one end to another...

My parents had that problem living in a duplex on base....the neighbors smoked and they didn't.
This would be my biggest concern. Years ago I lived in an apartment in which I could smell cigarette smoke quite strongly in the bathroom. If it had been throughout the apartment, I would have had no choice but to move. I've even more sensitive now, so I can't imagine living anywhere like that.

[jessiehannan]

I have lived in an apartment townhouse. My main problem was that I had to be very QUIET, and that was hard for me. We always have people over, and even if 10 people are being quiet, it gets noisy. I didn't know any of my neighbors, so I don't know if I got along with them or not.

[SueDid]

Would you own the whole thing or just half?

My aunt has had a side by side duplex for years and it has worked out great for her. She owns the whole thing and rents out half of it, as far as I know the problems have been minimal. It had a fence through the backyard for a long time, I think that it was taken down to put in an above ground pool. You can do split or shared backyards pretty easily depending on how you want to handle it.

It sounds in the OP as if you'd own only half of it. It would be harder for me to do a duplex if I had no control at all over what happened in/with the other unit.

[Babyhellfire]

It all depends on who is your neighbor. We've rented duplexes three times and I as a renter I liked them alot more than apartments, but I'm not sure I'd own one. It wouldn't be so much about sharing our space, but about being responsible for taking care of someone else's home. KWIM?
THIS.
We rented a duplex for awhile prekid.
It was a really cute place in a great location, we made freinds with the poeple in the neighboorhood across from us, but bad neighbors sharing a wall made it horrible,the walls weren't exactly paper thin, but you could hear a lot more than you wanted.. our 1st neighbors there worked night shift when we worked days, they parked their tv and radio on our shared wall and it just made life pretty horrible.- when they moved out it was a nice older couple, you would have thought a brick wall had been built between us in that time, we never heard a peep from them.

[babyapplejack]

Thanks for all your input on this. The place is side by side and we would only own the one side. I will add the link to the place.

http://www.realtor.ca/propertyDetails.aspx?propertyId=7963735