Aibu for buying a house I don't love

[Helpimill]

When we bought our current rural house we absolutely loved it from the minute we entered the property.
We are thinking about moving into our local village to be closer to a better high school for our son.
The village is small and there isn't a great deal to choose from. However there is a large home in a beautiful location with all the outdoor space we would like but the inside would need changing. Not imininently but it's very dated which poor finishings. Our current home is 150m3 and beautiful. The one for sale is 217m3, and feels massive. I didn't love it but it has so much potential. I am so unsure. Would I grow to love it as we make it ours or should I have had that "I love it" feeling from the very start?

YANBU to buy a house with potential and do it up OP - however the timeline with this doesn't quite make sense.
You're moving to a bigger house when your son (other kids?) are teenagers .
Very soon they'll grow up and move out.
If you're planning to downsize in the near the term you won't make back any money you spent on decorating etc.
Doesn't seem a sensible financial decision to me.

Unless you plan to stay there for a long time yet?

I think the answer to this depends on whether you have the money to get it to a state you’re happy with.

I didn’t love our house when we bought it, though it’s objectively nice and has worked really well on a practical level. But we haven’t had the money to do what I wanted to do to it and I’ll always regret that.

It sounds great to me ! You’d get space and location at a price you can afford, and the opportunity to make it your own. Presumably if there were more modern houses they’d be more expensive? I’m not sure I’ve ever completely fallen for a house the first time I viewed it.

Will you be forever taxi of mum and dad?

Actually money is a very good point! Can you afford to do what you’d like, maybe over a period of time ?

We’ve always bought do-up houses with ‘potential’ - you never love them straight away. It’s the potential you love.

We do have 3 years until high-school and a younger son so definitely won't be thinking of downsizing any time soon.

There is a house next door that was the same as our but has been renovated and is stunning!

My husbands thought was buy it, do it up, live in it until the kids have gone then sell it at a profit as we will have put alot of work into it.

We don't have lots of money to do it all straight away but we could plod away at it, it would just take time.

It depends on how invested you are in the move and doing the work - also if you have time/budget available.

My first home with DH was a do-er upper in a nice place but we vastly overestimated our appetite to do the work needed. Four years later we moved to a place which needed nothing doing, and we are so much happier for it - but that is us and we are lazy tired with young kids!

I moved from a smaller house that I absolutely loved, we had renovated and extended to my exact specification, at the point of completely finishing the reno another bigger better house came up for renovation, my husband loved it, I hated it but went along with it, in all honesty it took me about 15 years to really like it (not love) as the extensions and renovations were done as and when we could afford them, and I hankered after my smaller house for years. Personally I would only do it again if the work could be done straight away living in a house you don’t like is miserable.

We bought our house purely for practical reasons and still here 20 years later. I can't say I love it, but it's very convenient and was a great location for the dc to grow up. They could walk to school and town. It might be that I'm the type of person who sees a house as a place to live rather than a place to love, who knows?

Location location location.

Go for it if it has the potential to be something great.