One of the age old questions, stay or extend? When we bought our house we were a young couple, about to be married, with family plans in the future. We wanted a house that would work for us but would also become a family home. After we had our second son what had previously felt like a spacious downstairs began to feel a little cramped and we started to wonder how we would all fit in the small lounge at the front of the house once we had two teenage boys living with us.
What started as a late night decision to put a roof on the conservatory turned into a two storey extension that covered the full width of the house. Three years ago we were in the middle of the work and the house was a building site. I think we were questioning our decision to extend rather than move to acquire the open family kitchen/living space we wanted. Despite the build taking several weeks longer than we had hoped it was without a doubt worth the stress and has given us our dream home.
5 reasons why we extended (and didn’t move)
- The house is in our perfect location, in the heart of the village my husband grew up in. A few minutes walk to the boys school, the park, and also the pub.
- Having lived in the house for 8 years before extending we knew what would work for us as a growing family and we had a brilliant designer who drew up some amazing plans that we fell in love with straight away. We were blown away when we saw them.
- We had built up a decent amount of equity in the house and were in a position where we could remortgage and the payments would be affordable. We made sure we did our research and looked into how extending the mortgage would effect us. You can use websites such as Mortgage Calculator to work out how much your monthly payments will be and they also give you a year by year (and also month by month) breakdown of the costs involved.
- The garden was the main reason we initially came to view the house. I had only skim read the estate agents details and was expecting a much smaller house than I came into. The size of the garden had made us think that we could extend at some point but whilst it was just the two of us to start with we didn’t need the extra space. The length of the garden meant that we could eventually extend without feeling that we were taking anything from the garden space.
- We loved the house! We both fell in love with the house at the very first viewing. The original part of the house dates back to the mid 19th-century and we love the large open fire in the lounge and the curved walls upstairs.
All of these reasons meant it made perfect sense to us to stay where we are and extend rather than try to find what we wanted elsewhere, and it was one of the best decisions we have ever made!
