Pros and Cons

Sweetie and I are still discussing that house down the street. Thanks to Sweetie's war zone deployment, our tax refund will be large enough to fix this house to sell and pay for basic repairs on the other house. We just need to weigh the pros and cons of this situation.

PROS:
-Much larger house
-Master bedroom large enough for furniture plus quilting machine
-Four full bedrooms, instead of three
-Guest bedroom
-Two full bathrooms, half bath downstairs
-Large laundry room with coat closet
-Tons of storage space all over the house
-Huge backyard
-Swimming pool (pain for us, wonderful for the kids)
-Large basement with roughed-in bathroom downstairs for future expansion

CONS:
-Significant damage (toilet leak upstairs ruined portion of ceiling below, cracked foundation)
-Risk of not being able to sell our current house quickly (can't carry two mortgages)
-Massively inconvenient to be constantly on alert for someone to come see the house
-Packing and moving all of our stuff, only to do the same thing two years from now
-Moving the quilting machine, which should only be done when absolutely necessary
-Cost of repairing this house to prepare it for immediate sale
-Trying to sell this house in the middle of a bad winter
-Having to buy brand new kitchen appliances to replace the ones that the foreclosure's owners took with them.

As much as I'd love to have that house, it just isn't worth it right now. Our time and money would be better spent fixing our current home, to make it more marketable (when the time comes) and to make it a better place for our family to live in while we're here.

Thankfully, I'm pretty good at home repairs and "handyman" stuff. It will be fun to see what I can accomplish on my own.