Showing posts with label buying a new house. Show all posts
Showing posts with label buying a new house. Show all posts

Wednesday, July 23, 2014

Should we stay or should we go?

We built our house 9 years ago. It's a modest house in our neighborhood at just over 2600 sq ft, but it's nice (in my humble opinion). We chose the lot, the options and did all the landscaping ourselves so the attachment here is real.

We have just under half an acre for our yard, which has allowed us to put in a nice play set for our children, a covered patio, a chicken coop, fire pit area, an enormous garden and we still have room to grow.

When we moved here, settled in and got to know our neighbors, I decided I could live the rest of my life here, I love it that much. What's the problem? We have a four bedroom house and we're eight people. Could we make it work? Sure we could, but it's crowded sometimes, and even more so when we have houseguests--which we do from time to time.

Right now we have our four girls paired up in two rooms and our oldest son has his own room (the smallest room of them all), and that leaves the baby in our room with us. It's working for now, but ideally, I'd like our little guy to move out of our room....I'm sure you can imagine multiple reasons why!

Right now, there's no space to move the baby to though and this has us contemplating selling our house and buying a bigger one. The very mention of this has differing reactions from our children--one being excited at the prospect of her own room, two freaking out at the idea of not having their best friends just a few doors down, some refusing to change schools no matter what enticement we may find.....They have only agreed to look into the idea with us if we stay close by. Honestly though, we'd like to stay in the area since the schools here are top-notch.
A view of the last half of our back yard. We have nothing behind us but the nature conservancy.
One problem is that our mortgage here is over $100,000 less than the houses in our area with our size requirements for house and yard (hoping for 6 bedrooms, 2+ bathrooms, a basement--which we do not have here--and at least 1/3 acre). We really don't want to go from having an enormous yard with plenty of playroom and a bountiful garden, to having a tiny space with a few little garden boxes!


We have a few garden boxes for our sage, onions, potatoes, garlic and we also moved some of our raspberries this year.

These pictures are from shortly after we planted our garden at the end of May.
This shows the plastic mulch we use to keep the weeds under control. The plants do very well with it.



We've had conflicting opinions from realtors about the value of our home, two of them telling us to list it for significantly less than some competing properties. Funny enough, several of the ones they email me to pique my interest are comparable to what we have now and they cost quite a bit more! Ugh!

We have some debt (yuck, I know) that we want to pay off, and so we don't want to sell with a realtor if it means we can't pay off those debts and have a down payment for another home. But I'm hearing conflicting opinions about how hard it is to sell a house on your own. But if we do this, we can ask for a lower price, pay off what we want, do it on our own timeline......It's all just so overwhelming!

I wish I knew some expert that we could trust in helping us in the right direction, but those seem to be in short supply just now. Pretty much we've just about decided to spend the next year de-cluttering, re-painting, cleaning carpets, etc. and then possibly listing around May of next year. We're not sure if that's the right decision, but we aren't going to rush into something that doesn't feel good.

We shall see, I suppose. Any ideas or experiences here would really be greatly appreciated. :)