Prompted by another thread, just wanted to ask a "what would you do" question?
We've been house hunting for a year now and getting fed up with it. Just seen 2 houses that are v promising but quite different:
House 1 - 3 bed mid terrace, outskirts of our preferred area, 5 min walk from DD's nursery, ok parking, needs very little work (just cosmetic throughout). Very affordable, with 25% deposit we'd have plenty of our savings leftover, low mortgage payments etc. Good school catchment. We're planning DC2 and I work from home so once I was back at work after that 3 bedrooms would be a squeeze... But we'd probably want to stay put until DC2 was in the same school as DD as all primaries are massively oversubscribed. Will never be our dream home but could afford to keep saving and still have good chunk of savings leftover. Not massive likely to rise in value but over 5-6 years we should get a little profit. But what if we don't save as much as set out to?
House 2 - 4 bed mid terrace, middle of preferred area but 25 min walk to DDs nursery, ok parking, a different but equally good school catchment. No need to move anytime soon as 4 beds. But - needs lots of work - rewiring, replastering, new heating, new windows, new carpets and decoration throughout. Looks like there's a fair bit of damp. So a big project... It's a bit more expensive than house 1 but still doable but would mean all our savings would go into the work... But we could take our time as this house is for the longer term... Whether it would our dream forever home I don't know but as its a better location it's value is more likely to rise over time so could be a better all round investment. But we're FTB and whilst DH is a tradie, we're totally green to doing up houses.
So I guess the short question is should we go for a shorter- term easier buy or stretch ourselves more for a longer-term house even though it will be a lot of work?
WWYD?