Many people gave me very helpful advice on a previous thread where we'd made several offers on a house but sellers were not prepared to settle for anything less than the asking price. Feeling grateful for that help, I'm back with a new dilemma...
Background - we have sold our house and want to move to a nearby city, which is very small and much more desirable than the town in which we live now. Our DDs (14 and 16) go to school in this city and one of the reasons we want to move is that we spend a great deal of time and money driving them back and forth. We would like them to live nearer to their friends and to have some independence. For our part, it would be good to have access to many more facilities and the city is a nice place to live - the kind of place we would be happy to live always.
So, we saw two houses yesterday, very different, and we like both very much.
House One is a Georgian semi-detached house on 4 floors on one of the main roads out of the city. It's about 200m from the city walls so is very central. It's in a reasonable state of repair - we'd want to do a lot to it but it's inhabitable now, just not decorated to our taste or really in keeping with its age. Advantages - it's very large, with good-sized rooms and plenty of space. It could certainly be a 'forever' house. We could enjoy decorating and restoring it over a long time period. DDs could walk/cycle to wherever they wanted to go and would be much more independent. We could sell a car. Disadvantages - the main road is a bit off-putting. We probably wouldn't get to know neighbours (but that quite suits me because I am very much an introvert). There is on-street permit parking, but no garage or parking space, which could be quite challenging. Also, I'm not quite sure how living in the house would work, which sounds silly I know, but the dining room and kitchen are on the ground floor, with a large drawing room on the first floor.
House Two is a newish house about a mile from the city centre, but still within the outer ring road. It has good-sized rooms and is in a lovely place with only a couple of other houses and separated from the rest of the area by a river. It has the feel of living in the country. You can walk along the river right into the city centre. Again, it needs decorating and new carpets etc, but it's easy to see how it would all work. Advantages - it's in a lovely place, peaceful and yet not too far from civilisation. Everything we have would work in this house - it's a similar size and style to our existing house. Disadvantages - we'd need to keep 2 cars, the DDs could not really be independent as they would be quite far from friends etc as the house is not near school (but school has no sixth form so they need to move anyway over the next couple of years), the plot is small and feels quite 'tight', although we don't need a large garden or anything.
Sorry for the mammoth post. I'd be grateful for any thoughts from anyone. TBH just writing it all out has been more helpful than I'd expected!
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Can't decide between 2 houses...
41 replies
janeyjampot · 26/10/2013 17:54
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