In Which We Have A Dilemma

Boy howdy, am I tired.

I looked at houses for nearly five hours straight today. That's a lot of houses. And we think that maybe, just maybe we've found one that would work.

The house is in a very nice neighborhood extremely close to Connor's school. It's across the street from a wooded park. It's about 2200 square feet-- about 1000 square feet more space than we have right now, and it's on a respectable quarter-acre lot with established landscaping.

We'd have to do more than just put in a ramp on this house, though. The whole house is carpeted, and so we'd eventually want to replace the carpet with something more wheelchair friendly. We'd want to remodel a bathroom to have a roll-in shower (the master bath, which is already a decent size, backs up to a walk-in closet so we should be okay as far as renovations go) and the kitchen is outdated. It's also not that much less expensive than the first house we'd looked at-- their asking price is only about eight thousand dollars less than the other house. So basically this means that unless we can get them to come down a bit on the price we'd end up paying more for the house once we renovated than the house with the acre of land.

However, since the money for renovation would be coming out of Jeremy's traumatic injury insurance payment and not added onto a mortgage, the house might end up being cheaper in the long term since we wouldn't be paying interest on the extra cost of the renovations. It also means that we'd get the chance to make the decision about what goes into the house based on our needs and aesthetics. While the first house already had renovations, they were in a style that was very different from what we probably would have chosen (like those bright white tile floors, for example). We would probably do the renovations in stages-- the ramps first and the bathroom next, and then later either the kitchen followed by the floor or vice versa, depending on our needs. Once the ramp is put in the house would already be way, way more livable than the apartment we're in right now. I mean, I wouldn't have to sleep on the floor, for starters. And we wouldn't have half our worldly possessions in a storage unit so that Jer has room to maneuver-- right now he has full access only to our living room and bedroom, whereas the rooms in that house are big enough that he could get into all of them with no trouble, even with all of our furniture in them.

This house is overall more in tune with our style: huge exposed hardwood beams overhead, really open floor plan, oak door casings, tile roof, cathedral ceilings. . . it's a house that I can see us happily living in long-term. And heck, I can plant a dang cherry tree.

At this point I've seen pretty much every rambler in the Puyallup area within our price range, so we're really down to just two choices. Which one should we go for-- the slightly more expensive, already renovated house farther from town with acreage that's not quite our style, or the slightly cheaper, larger (by 500 square feet) house near Connor's school that's more in line with our style but will require renovation at added cost?

We'll see what we end up deciding to do.

~Jess