Buying a house you don’t love but ticks the boxes

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Would you buy a house you don’t love, but ticks many of the boxes? Most importantly currently is school catchment, bigger than our current property, would be walking distance to school, and is in a nice area, is actually pretty well priced for our local area for the size of house.

However, the garden is quite small and the layout of the living spaces isn’t what we’d do ourselves. Buying the property would stretch us so we couldn’t renovate for a few years to sort the living spaces either.

It would be a very practical house and is exactly what we need in terms of space. We LOVE our current house though, especially the garden, and will be gutted to leave it. The new house is another £100,000 on top of our current house because of catchment area and it just seems daft to consider it for the sake of that. I’m very torn, DH is far more practical than me and is all for it. I also got massively cold feet about buying our current house so it may just be what I do I realise!

Ideally we want our next house to see us through high school for the kids, which is 10 years away by the time our youngest finishes. Part of me thinks we should wait and look for longer but family homes in the area go within days, and are few and far between on the market and this house is quite unusual in the size v price debate.

Have you moved somewhere you didn’t love? Do you regret it?

Hi OP, yes I have moved somewhere and regretted it. Our last house we thought was right for us, well DH did more than I. But I just went along with it.

It was in a nice area etc; this was before kids so unfortunately I can't comment in catchment areas etc, but it was all okay. Problem is it was only okay.
I spent so much time in it working from home that I walked around it at times and thought I don't love it here and started dreaming of where to go next, how to broach the subject with DH and how to get our finances in order. We took the plunge in 2021 and made the most of the stamp duty holiday.
The home were in now I knew straight away was the one I loved! It ticked all the boxes but it also gave me that feeling of inner peace. It's so important you feel that in your home.
Don't settle OP - bite the bullet and speak to your DH honestly over a bottle of wine.

Don't do it or you will spend all your time there wanting to move like me. Bought head over heart and now stuck and can't move

We did last year .

We were VERY fussy on area, saw our perfect house but then lost out as other buyer had no chain.

We really needed extra space and ended up moving to a house which was practically excellent and great location -
tbh because we had a good buyer for our old house and we didn’t want to lose them waiting for another house that would never materialise. There was hardly anything else coming up in the are at the time that was the right size.

That was 18 months ago. We will stay here until the kids leave home at least - 10 years plus - and possibly for ever.

I definitely don’t love it (yet). But it works practically extremely well. Plenty of room for everyone. And we’re making each room one by one exactly how we want it.

I loved our old house more but we’d outgrown it. I don’t love this house but am very happy with it and that’s ok.

Food for thought, thank you all. Practical makes so much sense but when you have to live there, it’s a different consideration.

We did it. Needed to move for catchment, nothing else available and it ticked every box on paper. We had to wait to do the work we wanted and it was an unsatisfying shell with a weird layout, too small garden and nothing to love.

We've been in 7yrs and have some still to do but we've ripped out bathrooms and kitchens to brickwork, knocked down an extension and replaced it, new roof, uncovered original floors and replaced features. We do a job a year roughly to give us time to save.

I love it now. I am attached to it quite remarkably. It is my home in every way. I think the key was that we could improve it and it doesn't even feel like the same house. It just needed time and love.

I don't love our current house. However, we have now been here nearly 25 years and have no plans to move until it becomes unmanageable (we're both retired).

The main priority for us was the location. It's less than a 10 minutes walk to the station, which we both used for commuting to work, and the children used when commuting to secondary school. It's also 5 minutes walk to the local shops and 15 minutes walk to the town centre. Funnily enough I was very naive and didn't think at all about school catchment areas. I just thought it was a nice area and the schools would be fine. That was largely true at primary but not secondary.

Ours is a 1980s house with a small garden on a small friendly cul-de-sac of similar houses. It provided a safe place for the children to play outside when they were younger and there were other children of a similar age to play with.

I'd have preferred an older property with a big garden, but the only older houses we could afford were much smaller. Our house was comparatively cheap for the amount of space we have.

No way would I do it.