Move, Extend or Share?

We have recently given birth to our third child, however only have a 3 bedroom house, so we had to make the decision while I was pregnant to either extend our current house, move to a bigger house or to have the children share rooms.

With a boy and a girl I wasn’t too keen on the idea of sharing- perhaps if we had two children of the same sex I would feel more at ease with it…. Hubby just about had a heart attack when I suggested moving, as he had spent the day pouring the footings for the bigger deck he was going to build and that night I said “I think we should move”. So I started looking at the whole selling and moving process.

We have an older style house at the moment that is fine; not big, not fancy, but there is nothing wrong with it, other than the fact that it is getting too small. What we do have is a wonderful large garden and entertaining area as well as a fantastic long, level driveway for the children to ride their bikes on. We also have good friendly neighbours that we get along with, whose children are close friends to my children. So the new house would need to be just as good or better…

With the baby due in December 2012 and Miss E starting school in 2013, I wanted to get this sorted well before then, so that we would start her in the school where we would be living and not have to move her in a years’ time or so.

I signed up to receive email alerts for properties in the areas we would like, created a wish list in my mind of what would be nice to have on the house and what are must have’s. I had three real estate agents come and value our property so that I understood the budget we had to play with and then the looking started. What a pain…. After many months of searching and viewing (online) many properties, I decided that we could not get the property that we wanted within an area that I was prepared to move to. I was being a bit picky because where we are is a good area with great schools etc. so I didn’t want to “settle” for something just because it was big enough. Believe me the temptation was there, however in the end I decided that the location of the house was more important than the actual house itself and that if we were going to move, we would be in the next house for a long time so I wanted it to be the right one.

With that decided I turned my focus to the possibility of extending our house. I got a few builders to come and tell us what they thought and give us some ideas of what they would recommend. Then I got my brother who is an architect to draw up the plans in order for us to be able to get a more accurate quote. Then I sent the plans off to the builders and waited for the response…. and waited….and waited….in fact I am still waiting for most of them to come back with their quotes. What the? So I found a couple more builders and asked them for quotes…..one came back with a quote and I’m still waiting to hear back from the other – again???? Whatever happened to customer service? If you don’t want the job, simply say so – really I don’t mind, but I don’t like waiting for something that is not coming.

With the delay in getting the quotes we were now in November and any construction wouldn’t start until February by the time the builders came back from holidays, fit us into their schedule, we got compliant approval etc. This would mean that my daughter would have no room in February when she started school as the new rooms would mean that the hallway would have to go through her current room. The building process would take approximately 8-12 weeks (weather permitting), meaning that it would be May/June before they moved into the new rooms….mmmm. What would we do in terms of sleeping and living arrangements until then?

Enter the idea of sharing again…..okay so they are going to have to share even if we do an extension. Now we need to sort out how they would share. With smallish rooms we wouldn’t be able to put two beds into the same room and keep any of the cupboards which would mean that all the clothes would be in the baby’s room. Not ideal in my mind as then undoubtedly the baby will be asleep when they need their clothes. For those of you like my hubby who says you just need to be more prepared and get the clothes ready the night before I can guarantee you that it won’t happen. Life is so busy that I will forget and it will just add more stress to me at a time that is going to be stressful enough.

Enter the bunk bed the only alternative we have. Hmmm…with a son who hates sleeping I can just see this going downhill fast!

We bought the bunk bed and told the children they would be sharing a room. I wanted them to start sharing ASAP so that they would be used to it by the time Mss E started school, to minimise any negative impact on her. We also decided to hold off on the extension for now as it was too close to baby’s due date, all the children’s birthdays, Christmas, start of school etc. perhaps when everything calms down in 6 months or so we will look at the whole extension process again….

Have you been through something similar? Do your children share? What tips do you have for other mums looking at selling, moving, extending or getting their children to share a room?

Lorraine