Buying a House Before Baby in Seattle: 4 Things I’m Paying Attention More To

My wife and I are about to have our first kid. And without meaning to, I’ve started walking through Seattle homes completely differently than I did six months ago.

Things I used to glance past are now the first things I notice. Things I used to flag for buyers turn out to matter less than I thought. If you’re house-hunting anywhere from Ballard to Mount Baker and a kid is somewhere on the horizon (next year, next three years, whenever), here are four things worth thinking about now, while you still have the option to choose.

Seattle’s housing stock makes this a particularly interesting question. Most of what’s for sale was built before 1950, on small lots, often on a hill. That creates some specific tradeoffs.

1. Storage. So much more storage than you think.

Kids come with stuff. A lot of stuff. Strollers, car seats, pack-n-plays, bouncers, bottle sterilizers, bins of clothes you’re saving for the next size up, bins of clothes you’re saving in case there’s a next kid, holiday decorations now multiplied by “we should make this magical for them.”

The houses I’m most drawn to now are the ones with a real garage, a usable daylight basement, deep hallway closets, or a mudroom you can actually drop things in without tripping (and in Seattle, you WILL need a mudroom). The cute 1920s Wallingford Craftsman with charming-but-tiny closets and no garage? Still cute. Just harder.

Storage is one of those things that’s almost impossible to add later without spending real money. In our market, where a lot of the inventory is pre-war housing built before two-car families and Costco runs were a thing, this is worth weighting more than you’d think.

2. Stairs. Specifically: where they are and how many.

I never used to think about stairs. Now I think about them constantly. This matters more here than almost anywhere else in the country, because Seattle is a city built on hills. Queen Anne, Magnolia, West Seattle, Mount Baker, Capitol Hill, even big chunks of Ballard and Phinney Ridge. The lots themselves slope.

A few things I’m watching for:

Is there a way to get from the street to a main living area without a long staircase? Plenty of Seattle homes have 12 to 20 steps just to get from the sidewalk to the front door. You will be carrying a sleeping child, an armful of Trader Joe’s bags, and a diaper bag at the same time. Probably in the rain. That exterior staircase at that moment is not your friend.

Are the interior stairs gateable at the top and bottom? Open-tread floating stairs in those slick modern new-builds look incredible. They are also a nightmare to baby-proof

Is the laundry on the same floor as the bedrooms, or are you hauling baskets up and down? In a classic Seattle box with bedrooms upstairs and laundry in the basement, this is real. Sounds minor. It is not minor.

Single-level living (think a Wedgwood or View Ridge rambler), or at least single-level-with-a-bonus-basement, hits very differently when you’re imagining the toddler years.

3. A play space you don’t mind being messy.

This is the one nobody talks about, and it might be the most important. Especially here. We get roughly nine months of “it’s drizzling, we’re inside today” weather. Your kid is going to need indoor space, and you’re going to need it to not be your living room.

You need a room (or a generously-sized corner of a room) that can absorb mess. Toys exploded across the floor, a fort built out of couch cushions, finger paint situations, Cheerios that didn’t quite make it into the mouth. You don’t want that room to be where guests sit. You don’t want it to be the dining room you spent real money on.

What you want is a finished daylight basement (Seattle has TONS of these and they’re underrated), a bonus room off the kitchen, a den, a converted garage, anything with a door you can close when in-laws come over from Bellevue. Sight lines from the kitchen are a bonus so you can cook while they play.

If a house has a great kitchen and a great primary suite but nowhere obvious for a play zone, ask yourself where it’s going to go. Because it’s going somewhere. And on the rainy February afternoons when you can’t make it to Green Lake or Discovery Park, you’ll be very glad it exists.

4. REAL TALK: bedroom proximity is overrated.

Here’s the hot take.

Almost every future-parent buyer I work with wants the primary bedroom right next to the nursery. I get the instinct. It feels safe. It feels right.

But two things to consider:

One, your baby is sleeping in your room for roughly the first year anyway. The room layout matters less than you think during the part of parenting where you’re most exhausted.

Two, baby monitors are very good now. Video, audio, room temperature, breathing sensors. The technology has solved this problem in a way it hadn’t a decade ago.

Three, and this is the part nobody says out loud: at some point, you’re going to want some privacy. You’re going to want to watch a movie, have a conversation, do anything else without a kid hearing it through a shared wall. A primary suite that’s a little separated from the kid bedrooms (different floor, opposite end of the hall, over the garage) starts looking pretty appealing once you actually live it.

I’d rather have a great primary suite that’s a little removed than a cramped one sharing a wall with the nursery.

The bigger point

Buying a house before kids is a weird timing problem. You’re shopping for a life you don’t fully have yet. Most buyers solve this by buying for who they are right now and hoping it works out. Sometimes it does. Sometimes you end up trying to sell a two-bedroom Capitol Hill condo in three years with a toddler underfoot.

The Seattle buyers who tend to be happiest five years in are the ones who thought carefully about the boring stuff (storage, stairs, mess-friendly square footage) and were willing to question the conventional wisdom (like bedroom proximity) instead of defaulting to it.

If you’re in this stage and want to walk through what to prioritize for your actual situation and your actual neighborhoods, that’s a conversation we have all the time at Get Happy at Home. Reach out. We’ll grab coffee somewhere in your target area and talk through it.