Home sweet home

We are about 4.5 months away from being a family of 4 in a tiny 2 bedroom, 1050 square foot house. We love our house, we love that a family friend basically gave it to us for a steal as she wanted it to be kept in "the family". We love the backyard, so big and green. We love our hardwood floors, the fireplace, and the coziness of it as a home.

We do however not really enjoy the neighbors and their enormous, rusty camper, ca. 1984. I had to call the cops on them this winter as they left their dog out one un-ending evening after another and I had had enough of the non-stop barking. It was freezing and the dog had been barking for 3+ hours. Then this spring after the snow melted they so lovely raked up all the limbs and clippings of our big oak tree that had fallen in their yard and walked it around to our backyard to dump it. Nice, eh. Great confrontation skills they have. We are also busting at the seams with toys and all things baby. We have no play area save for the living room floor, which renders our house never picked up, and a seemingly unorganized mess. We barely have enough cupboard space for Luke's bottles, how will we store the new baby's bottles and Luke's sippy cups? Yet we do feel a bit of guilt even looking to move on. A nun gave us this house. A nun! We didn't sign a binding contract that we would never sell the house, but there was this unspoken "take good care of it for me" conversation. The guilt. The Catholic guilt. Oh what to do.

Anyway, I found a house. On a street that I love, love, love. A little cul-de-sac, on an out of the way street yet still in our school district. It's lined with the cutest cottagey homes and this particular one has been on the market for some time. We have a call in to the realtor to see it hopefully sometime next week. If we can low-ball and sell ours for relatively reasonable (pipe-dream?) it's do-able. It has that side playroom room, 2 floors, 3 bedrooms and that extra half-bath that we currently are without. The floors are all hardwood too and the paint colors are very similar to ours. The best is there are no campers on the street! It's been updated throughout, so far it seems like we would just have to move in and maybe in the next few years upgrade the kitchen, but that's it.

Our other option is to add another bedroom and bath to our current house. Remodel the kitchen, add a deck/patio, and somehow add a mudroom. Oh, and line our yard with tall hedges to fence us in and block our unsightly views. Let's not forget that we also need to upgrade our drafty windows, replace the ugly doors, get new siding, and do some serious landscaping.

I know I'm jumping the gun a bit here, planning our future before we have all the facts. John's being very cautious, which I think is boring! It's time to take a bit of a risk, it might pay off, but I know I should let my feet touch the ground a tad before my dreams are shattered and our views of the snotty dogs and rusty camper live on far longer than I anticipated.

*sigh* The life of a dreamer.