A foundation issue might seem totally beyond reach for someone who has never owned a home before, but it's still a lot less painful than living in a bad location. Once you spend some time learning how the foundation systems work, it gets a lot less scary. There is a solution for everything.

Pier and beam foundation issues are essentially a non-event in my view. If you can literally crawl underneath your house and touch everything, it's basically like cheating.

With slab-on-grade things get more challenging, but installing piers on the perimeter and fixing internal slabs is not really a crisis situation. Concrete work has a huge advantage at repair time in that it can be polyjacked. This is easily the least intrusive form of concrete repair that is available. You can raise a slab of arbitrary weight in 15 minutes with a half inch hole. This repair technique will last ~indefinitely if you also have a tough talk with your landscapers about getting water away from the house.

> If you can literally crawl underneath your house and touch everything, it's basically like cheating.

Maybe this is part of it. Where I live, the crawlspace under my home is a fully finished basement with my office and such.

But the more these comments get me thinking, the more I recognize that it’s more subjective than not. I weighted for problems I could tackle slowly over five years, many of them myself, because I worked from home and had two kids under 2. So the home is on a hill with a sump pump that’s dryer than the desert, a solid foundation and new roof, and a few dozen smaller issues like flooring, new carpet, replace lower deck with patio, etc.