When you start to outlive your current home you have 4 options:
- Just put up with it
- Kick somebody out
- Move house
- Extend your home
We are not the sort of people to put up with things, and the children are still far too young to be kicked out. So the options really broke down to move house or extend.
Moving House Is Expensive
Moving house is very expensive. Here is an example;
Before deciding on the extension we had our home valued by two estate agents. They gave a price of between £290,000 and £310,000 – depending on whether we could entice a wealthy London buyer.
On the assumption that to get a better home we would need to pay at least £320,000, we could spend approximately £17,000 in moving costs, so total additional cost for us would be £47,000 (an extra £30k on the mortgage and £17k in fees).
Stamp Duty comes to around £9000 alone! To quickly calculate how much it will cost to move I used this calculator: http://www.reallymoving.com/moving-cost-calculator.
Benefits of Extending
As well as it being cheaper to extend, by extending your home you can get exactly what you want. For us, a front kitchen that is accessed from the front door and side (back) door is perfect.
This makes the kitchen central to the home and gives more privacy to the living room. Many people find this concept a little odd, so it would be difficult for us to find a perfect house – we would have to make more compromises.
Also, when doing an extension you get professional traders in the home who can take on all the little tasks that you never did over the years. Plus it is an incentive to decorate and replace worn carpets. At the end, you have a new home at a fraction of the cost of moving into a brand new house!
Also we live in a nice area, near two good schools, there really is no need to move other than to have a better home and the costs of moving are just too high.
If we could afford to add £100,000 to the value of our house then it would be worthwhile, but currently the cost of moving is almost equal to the value of the improvement.
The only logical conclusion was to extend. We initially set a budget of about £35k for our entire extension project. We will go over a little, but it should be worth it.