Lessons of a first time home buyer

This is not the tutorial type post it probably should be. I am stressed and annoyed. Irritated and mad. I'm really at my wits end. I'll start by saying, it was the only house in our budget that fit our needs at the time, so we had to take it because of our confined time.

If we had more time, this wouldn't have been our house. We would have kept looking.

That is lesson number one.
Take your time.

If you've read some previous house posts, you know about our plumbing issues- faucets, dishwasher, toilet. Not to mention the whole house filter doesn't work and the main shut off is shady. Then there's the water heater. At least that was paid for. Then the driveway meeds mud jacked. That's next week.

The basement bathroom needs help. There're several cracks and nails popping.

There's countless little things my sweet husband has fixed and continues to improve on. Painting, switches, caulking, ect...

But now we are facing a lot of wood rot damage that needs fixing. Our home inspection didn't not tell us how bad it was. It briefly mentioned a few places and said it wasn't bad. LIES. All of it.
The sad thing is the inspector offered to give us our money back after the plumbing issues and I took HER up on it. Sadly, there's not much we can go after her now...

Lesson number two. Get a good inspection. We "trusted" our agent when he told us his inspector was great. Ya I bet great for helping him sell houses. She screwed us over so bad. If we had know half this stuff was bad, we would have requested it be fixed or requested more money off the purchase price.

Lesson three. Don't be afraid to ask for money to cover repairs or for them to be done.

I think that's what I'm most mad about. We were advised by our realtor not to ask for much....lame! Should have trusted my gut. I wanted to request more, but didn't stand up for myself when other people told me to skate by on little requests.

Lesson four. Being a homeowner is nice and all but it sucks not having the five grand necessary to fix your house...for now. Who knows how much it'll be next time.

To recap; we bought a lemon.