Help! House sale / purchase dilemma

[MrsD28]

In a quandary - hoping that the lovely people of Mumsnet can help.

DH and I (and 2 year old DS) want to move somewhere bigger because we would like to have another DC, hopefully next year. We currently live in a small one bed flat - one double and one small single - and have been trying to sell it since May. We have just had an offer - a bit lower than we wanted but still workable.

We have found a flat that we like - right size and right area, plus it is a project, which we both like. But the price is a bit higher than we had hoped so we would not have as much money to renovate as we probably need. The sums do still add up though.

But now we are in a quandary. We don't actually need more space yet, thought toddler DS is getting a bit stir crazy in our small flat. So we could potentially hold out for another year, save the extra mortgage payments, be in a better financial position and try to sell / buy again next year.

The downside is another year in a very tight flat, plus possible trying to sell / buy when heavily pregnant (if all goes to plan), plus it starts getting a bit close to having to do DS's school applications (London = tiny carchments). Argh! What do I do?

should say two* bed flat above.

Move now if you can! A small space will only feel smaller with another child if things don't go to plan (speaking from the voice of experience). We put our house on the market a year ago, I was 3 months pregnant and we hoped we'd be moved by Christmas with plenty of time to sort stuff before the baby came. Our house didn't sell, DS arrived 7 weeks early just before Christmas and we are still here now with not much room for his stuff because DD has all her toys too. We finally accepted an offer on our house back in May and were hoping to move this week but the chain collapsed two weeks ago. Luckily we've had another offer and are hoping to move early September now, but it's been such a long drawn out process that I wish we'd thought about moving sooner as the lack of space gets me down.

Thank you zebra - good food for thought. We had the flat on the market last year for a brief period but decided to take it off when nothing much was happening (plus the only flat we wanted to buy was sold to someone else because we hadn't sold yet). I guess because we have done it before we feel as if we could hold for for another year.... but you are probably right that the lack of space will become more and more frustrating.