Smaller house, better location?

[Movinghousedilemma]

Soooo we made the big mistake of moving from our beloved adopted city to a rural town in 2020 because covid did funny things to my decision making. We lived in a flat, no garden, had a small baby, I suddenly felt very claustrophobic and insisted we move to the town where his parents live for more space and help with our now-toddler.

It’s been 18 months and I’m desperate to move back. I miss my friends, miss the facilities, just miss the life we had there.

I’m now pregnant with our second child due in spring, and we just cannot afford our ideal house back in that city. We could get a 2.5 bedroom type house with a large courtyard style garden. But the smaller room would have to be used as a home office. It would be a bit of a squeeze. Would this be fair or sustainable? For 2 same sex small children? I envisage we wouldn’t move again for some years, so they would probably need to share a bedroom through primary school.

Otherwise we could move to a cheaper but larger and better house with big garden a 30 minute train journey from our city. But… we wouldn’t be there would we? And I would risk still not ‘feeling’ like I was and making yet another moving mistake. This place 30 mins away is a slightly soulless town.

Any wisdom, anecdotes or general life experience very welcome. Many thanks.

What do you miss about your life in the city and how much of that would you be doing with two very young children?

Home is somewhere you spend a lot of time, so I'd probably not choose a space that would be cramped with young children as it's only going to get more cramped as they get older.

Maybe you could try a slightly different area of your chosen city, or something commutable for the things you like?

The 2.5 bedroom house in the right location that you love is a great choice actually. I don't know if the main bedroom has an ensuite - could the children share the largest bedroom? Could you still get your large bed into the second room? As they are same sex and close in age they are ideal sharers, and having a large courtyard style garden will be ideal too.

I have picked a house over the location I wanted and it was never right for us and I regretted it.

Could you but the 2.5 bed and build a home office in the garden instead?

We picked location over house and have a flat in the city centre. A visit to relatives further out is all I need to realise I love having everything right on the doorstep even if the trade off is no outside space.

We had our kids in a similar size maisonette until they were 6 and 4. I think we could have got away with it maybe one more year although it was feeling cramped.
However, there's every reason to think that the housing market will stall or even fall over the next 3-4 years, so the next step up after that might not be out of reach. You'd just need to make sure you didn't get stuck with negative equity.

My personal view is people are too obsessed with number of bedrooms to the detriment of their whole lives. Sleeping is just not the most important bit of your life. We had kids who shared bedrooms and it was fine. They got on well and remember it fondly.

We picked a smaller house in a much better area and it worked for us. I would choose location and life in general over an extra bedroom any day of the week.

This is what we did. It's great for separation and my son (who has the box bedroom) does his gaming there in the evening and weekends. Fully insulated, 3m x 3m double skin installed for around 10k is achievable.

House with scope for a Loft conversion down the line too but that's more expensive at 40k to 50k plus in my area.

I'm in this dilemma too. I suspect we'll have to get the bigger house in the soulless town as we've a boy and a girl.

Not necessarily. My sister has her DD14 and DS13 happily sharing a much-coveted loft room - in fact letting him move in was last year's birthday gift to DS from the oldest DD who'd been there until then! Not in the UK though. As far as I can see nobody's batting an eyelid.

As a small apartment dweller in a big city, a lot of it is about finding ways to make use of space outside the home by going to parks, cafes, playgrounds, museums, libraries, etc. And everyone developing relationships with local shopkeepers, etc.

Not sure how that would work with primary school aged kids but works with my toddler. I would rather a smaller apartment in an ideal place than a bigger place in a less ideal location.