Moving is so Stressful!!!

We put our house on the market 3 weeks ago. We've had 6 showings so far, one of which was a 2nd showing. They came in this afternoon for the 2nd time. Actually it was the husband's second time through and his wife's first time. He was here a couple weeks ago and found a few houses that he wanted to revisit when his wife could come. Apparently today was that day! I know that they sat and talked as the dining room chairs were pulled out. I take that as a very promising sign!

But the whole process is going to give me gray hairs, and I already have way too many of them! Our biggest problem now, besides selling this house (which has to happen before we'll move), is WHERE we're going to move. We've got the general location down to the Lake Wylie/Clover area. Just what house or neighborhood we move to is the issue. The hang-up here is that we're not going to get exactly what we want. We'd probably need a good $500K for that, and that is just a wee bit (said very sarcastically) over our budget. LOL So, it's deciding what to "settle" on.

What we want is all the rooms we have now, plus a bonus room. That doesn't sound too difficult. We'd also like the rooms to be the same basic size or larger. Again, doesn't sound like too much. We'd like at least the same size (1/3 acre) yard or larger. This is somewhat a problem as most neighborhoods these days give you 1/4-1/3. We also don't want neighbors on both sides and behind. We just don't want to feel crowded in. This is also a bit of a problem as most neighborhoods these days pack houses in like sardines.

We found a Ryan neighborhood called Somerset that meets our land needs. We could easily get almost a half acre lot and not have neighbors on all sides. We found a houseplan that we think would work for us space-wise (it's all the rooms we have now plus a bonus and another bedroom). But there's still some problems where we would definitely be settling. The master bath isn't anything great. Sure, it would work and has all we'd need, but it's not even as big as what we have now. Not a huge deal though, no one ever sees it but us anyway, and like I said, it has everything we need in it, but... the bathtub pretty much sucks. Not that I take a bath very often, but the tubs there are so tiny! They call it a "garden tub" but it's certainly the smallest one I've ever seen! And even though the house would be over 3300sq ft it only has one a/c system. They use a "dual zone" system meaning you have an upstairs thermostat and a downstairs one, but it's one system running it all. I've never met anyone that finds that to work well at keeping an entire 2-story house well-cooled. Another issue of "settling" is in the kitchen. They just don't have a whole lot of cabinets to choose from and none of them are what we really want. Sure, we could pick one that would work, but still. Also, they don't offer quartz countertops which I highly prefer over granite. They also don't offer the flooring options we want. None of this is a huge deal. We'd just get what they offer as standard and upgrade on our own later. But if we're spending this much money on a house, I'm not sure I want to have to rip it apart after the fact to make it what we want.

Anyway, the point I'm getting at is... all this train of thought has us wondering if we should look at existing homes in the area. We found one that is on a full acre that has the rooms we are looking for (bonus room in the form of a basement). It also has a pool! It's just a round above ground pool, but it has a deck built around it. It was built in 1993 and needs cosmetic upgrades, but really, we're looking at building a home which still would need cosmetic upgrades, know what I mean?

Blech, who knows. I'm so stressed about it all! We are going to go look at it later this week with our realtor. We'll have to evaluate then if it's only cosmetic upgrades it needs or if there are bigger issues (roof, a/c, etc).

Right about now I'd like to win the lottery. I wouldn't do anything crazy with the money. I'd just buy a chunk of land and get a custom builder to build a house just how we want it. No settling and no having to upgrade later.

My mind is really all over the place about this all. A couple days ago I was in a "screw it" mode and just wanted to stay in this house. I was even trying to figure out how we could add a "bonus" room. That doesn't solve the schools issue though. :/ Then I'll be in a new home mode where I want the shiny new house that is all mine, where I made all the decisions even if we do have to upgrade some things later and I have a shitty bathtub. And then I have moments where I want this other house, in an established neighborhood. Ahhh! I could just scream and pull all my gray hairs out! (that would leave me about bald)

Maybe, just maybe, we'll get an offer out of this guy and his wife that came back to the house today. That will get us thinking for sure. But who knows, being the pessimist that I am I'm thinking they'll choose a different house. LOL This all just sucks. I'm ready to be through this and on to the next chapter!