First Home – jpalm.ee

The case for buying the worst apartment you can find.

March 17, 2026

Most people wait. They wait for a bigger salary, a better market, the right apartment at the right price with the right finish. I understand the instinct — it feels like patience, like responsibility. But in practice it’s just paying someone else’s mortgage every month while hoping the math eventually works in your favor. For us, it never would have. The finished apartments in areas we actually wanted to live were out of reach, and waiting for that to change meant continuing to rent indefinitely. So we stopped waiting.

What we bought was the cheapest option we could find in a location we loved — a quiet, green street within walking distance of the city center. The apartment itself was in the kind of shape that makes viewings short. But we weren’t paying for the apartment. We were paying for the address, the square meters, and the fact that someone was willing to sell it slightly under market value.

There is a cost to this, and it’s not mainly financial. It’s time and energy and a long stretch of not knowing what you’re doing. A bathroom got ripped out and rebuilt by professionals. An electrician rewired the place. Everything else — the plastering, the tiling, the floors, the moulding — I figured out as I went, with help from family and friends when the job needed more hands. I was working full time while doing this, living in a rental until the apartment was livable. It took roughly 8 months.

But here’s what came out the other side. A mortgage payment smaller than rent. An apartment whose value, because of the work put into it, can absorb a market drop of twenty or thirty percent before I’m underwater. That’s not a small thing — it means the home that was supposed to be the risky move is actually the most financially secure position I’ve been in.

And then there’s the part that doesn’t show up on a balance sheet. When you renovate from zero, every decision is yours. The bathroom is smaller than standard because we wanted the living room to have breathing space.

There’s an extra wall that hides the fridge from the kitchen sightline. The window frames are old wooden ones. There’s ceiling skirting and a double front door so hallway noise stays in the hallway. None of these are things a developer would have chosen, because developers optimize for broadest appeal, not for how two specific people actually live. This place is ours in a way a finished apartment never could have been — not because we own it, but because we shaped it.

I think people overestimate what they need to begin something. A complete understanding, the right conditions, enough experience to feel confident. I had none of that. What I had was a situation where the alternative — waiting — was more expensive than starting. That’s a low bar, but it turns out a low bar is enough if you’re willing to figure out the rest as you go.