Welcome to English as a Second Language Podcast, number 851, Finding a House to Buy.
This is English as a Second Language Podcast, episode 851.
I'm your host, Dr Jeff McQuillan, coming to you from the Center for Educational Development right here in beautiful Los Angeles, California.
Our website is eslpod.com.
Go there and download a learning guide for this episode.
You can also take a look at some of our special courses in business and daily English that we have available right there on the website.
This episode is a story about someone who's trying to find a house to buy.
Let's get started.
I'm looking to buy a house and I want a single family home.
I have been living in a townhouse for two years and I am tired of having common walls and very small yards.
My new house will have to have a lot more square footage, a large lot size, an open floor plan, great curb appeal and lots of upgrades.
My agent has been showing me fixer-uppers while I want a home that's in move-in condition.
The problem is I can't afford a high mortgage.
My real estate agent tells me that I have to adjust my expectations.
I asked him, Do you mean I can't have the house I want?
And he said, of course you can.
All you have to do is move to Alaska.
Our story begins when I say that I'm looking to buy a house and I want a single family home.
When someone says they are trying to buy a house, it isn't always necessarily a physical house versus a condominium or a townhouse.
We'll talk about what they are in a minute.
A single family home is a home designed for just one family to live in in a single building.
It's the traditional house.
When someone says i have a house, we think of a building being on its own.
The only people in that little building, that house, are the people who live there.
This is different from a condominium.
A condominium is when you have, Basically what are apartments that people buy and own.
You could also have a townhouse.
A townhouse one word is a tall, narrow home, usually with two or three levels two or three floors but it's built right next to another townhouse.
So it's not like a single family home where the building is separate from anything around it.
In a townhouse, usually they're all in one building, so that, even though you have your own space, your own area,
There's someone right next to you who has typically what are called common walls.
Common walls are when two different apartments or two different townhouses or two different condominiums have one person on one side of the wall and the other person on the other side of the wall.
That's a common wall.
Well, I say in my story that I have been living in a townhouse for two years and I'm tired of having common walls.
I'm tired of this means I don't want to live this way anymore.
I don't like the situation.
I'm tired of having common walls, walls that I share with other people.
Of course, when you have a townhouse or a condominium or an apartment building, it's usually a little noisier because you can hear the people next to you more easily, because you have a common wall.
I also say that I don't like the very small yards that come with the townhouse.
A yard, Y-A-R-D, is an outside area next to a home.
Many homes have a yard in front of the house, the front yard, and then they have a yard in the back of the house, the backyard.
Typical American homes have grass somewhere on the yard or in the yard.
My house has grass in the front yard and grass in the backyard.
That's my real house, not the house in the story here necessarily.
Let's go back to the story.
I say that my new house will have to have a lot more square footage.
Square footage, F-O-O-T-A-G-E, is the number of square feet in an area.
It's how we measure the size of houses or the size of apartment buildings or apartments within the building, more likely.
The same is true for townhouses and condominiums.
You might buy a house that has 1,000 square feet.
That means that there are 1,000 square feet inside of the house.
Most American homes used to be built with, say, 1,500 to 1,700 square feet.
That would be a typical three-bedroom, two-bath home.
That is a home with three bedrooms and two bathrooms.
Nowadays, in the last I don't know 25, 30 years, houses are being built to be much bigger, so that you have 2000 or 2500 or 3000 square feet.
In the story, I say I want a lot more square footage, meaning a bigger house, a large lot size.
An open floor plan, great curb appeal, and lots of upgrades.
A lot, L-O-T, is the land that the house sits on.
Lot size would be the size of that piece of land.
Typically here in my neighborhood in Los Angeles, lot sizes are between 5,000 and 7,000 square feet.
And then on those lots, on those pieces of land, are houses that have between 1000 and 3000 square feet inside of the house.
An open floor plan is a design of a home.
It could be an office also that has a lot of open space.
There aren't that many walls.
The floor plan is technically like a drawing of where things are in your house, almost like a map.
When we use the expression open floor plan, we're referring to a place that doesn't have a lot of walls, where there's a lot of light passing through one room to the next.
I also want in the story a house with great curb appeal.
Curb appeal, C-U-R-B-A-P-P-E-A-L, two words, refers to how attractive, how good-looking the house looks when you're driving by it or when you're walking down the street.
A curb is where the street meets your property.
Usually the street is a little bit lower, maybe a half a foot lower than the land where the houses are.
Appeal refers to how attractive something is.
We have also the adjective appealing.
Curb appeal refers to the attractiveness of your house.
Does it look good from the outside?
Upgrades, U-P-G-R-A-D-E-S
Refer to when a house has new things done to it, when an old house has a new bathroom or a new kitchen.
Those would be upgrades.
Upgrades could also refer to some things you wouldn't normally expect in an average house, a typical house.
Maybe there's a very big tub somewhere.
A big tub might be considered an upgrade.
It's nicer, it's more expensive, and so forth.
I say in the story that my agent meaning the person who's helping me buy the house, my real estate agent has been showing me fixer-uppers.
A fixer-upper...
F-I-X-E-R hyphen U-P-P-E-R is a house that needs work.
It's a house that has problems that you're going to have to come in and fix.
I say that my agent has been showing me fixer uppers, while I want a home that's in move-in condition.
Move-in condition is when you can come in and you can just live in the house.
You don't have to fix anything.
Everything is working.
That's move-in condition.
Usually having to paint the walls is not considered something that would make a house a fixer-upper.
Wall painting or changing the carpet...
Those things are to be expected, and you could still call a house in move-in condition, even though you had to paint the walls.
In the story, I say that my problem is I can't afford a high mortgage.
A mortgage, M-O-R-T-G-A-G-E, the T is silent, is a loan that you use to buy a house.
I say I'm not holding out for a mansion, but I want this new house to be a step up from my townhouse.
To hold out for something means to wait for something that you really want.
I'm not holding out.
I'm not waiting to get a mansion, I say.
A mansion, M-A-N-S-I-O-N, is a huge house, a very large, expensive house.
People in Beverly Hills, rich people live in mansions.
I want this house to be a step up from my townhouse, I say.
A step up from simply means an improvement over something that is better than what you used to have.
If you own a Honda Civic, which is a very nice car I used to own one and then you buy a Porsche or a Lexus, Those would be a step up from your Honda Civic more expensive cars.
I end the story by saying that my real estate agent tells me that I have to adjust or change my expectations.
Expectations are the things that you believe will happen, that you want to happen, about a situation, what you anticipate to happen.
Here it really just means how good of a house I can get for the money that I have.
I asked him do you mean I can't have the house I want and he said of course you can.
All you have to do is move to Alaska.
My real estate agent is saying that with the money that I have, if I want the kind of house that I want a big house I'm going to have to go to somewhere where houses are very cheap.
In the story here my real estate agent says to Alaska, not because Alaska is the cheapest place to live in the United States, but because it's far, far away.
It's a long distance from where most of us live here in what we call the continental United States, the part of the United States between Canada and Mexico.
Now let's listen to the dialogue, or rather the story, this time at a normal speed.
I'm looking to buy a house and I want a single family home.
I have been living in a townhouse for two years and I'm tired of having common walls and very small yards.
My new house will have to have a lot more square footage, a large lot size, an open floor plan, great curb appeal and lots of upgrades.
My agent has been showing me fixer uppers while I want a home that's in move-in condition.
The problem is I can't afford a high mortgage.
I'm not holding out for a mansion, but I want this house to be a step up from my townhouse.
My real estate agent tells me that I have to adjust my expectations.
I asked him, do you mean that I can't have the house I want?
He said, of course you can.
All you have to do is move to Alaska.
You don't have to adjust your expectations when it comes to our scripts here on ESL Podcast.
You can have very high expectations, because they'll always be met by our own wonderful script writer, Dr Lucy Say.
From Los Angeles, California, I'm Jeff McQuillan.
Thank you for listening.
Come back and listen to us again here on ESL Podcast.
English as a Second Language podcast is written and produced by Dr Lucy Say, hosted by Dr Jeff McQuillan.
Copyright 2012 by the Center for Educational Development.
