I've sat here today, feeling frustrated about the house I live in. It's a nice house, we've made it our own and renovated it inside a lot over the last year (mostly before Squidge was born). We have a sunny south facing conservatory, and live in a quiet sleepy neighbourhood. Sounds good right?
While I'm ever grateful that we have a roof over our head, running water, electricity and that we're all healthy (seriously, these are things many people don't have), this house is also holding us back... we're effectively trapped here. For the first few years of owning this house, we were in negative equity and have only just recovered into profit.
We've always said we'd like 2 children. After having Squidge, I could even stretch that to 3, but for us to grow our family further, we'd have to move, there's no two ways about it. There's physically nowhere a cot could fit in the house, it's a tiny 2 bedroom terraced starter home. Our bedroom just has enough space to walk around the bed, and the nursery is a box room. My biological clock is ticking (I'm 36) so I don't have many baby-making years left, not safe ones at least. The way our house is situated, there's no room to add an extension either.
But in reality, today I've come to realise we may never have a second child, a realisation that has caused many tears today. For us to get a new mortgage, we'd need to pay off the massive unsecured loan that came with buying this house (yep, we had a sub-prime mortgage). And, according to the mortgage calculators I've tried today, we'd get a good 20k less as we're now a family of 3 (why?). Then take into consideration I'm having to go back to work part-time, so on a reduced wage, that leaves us with less than 100k in a mortgage, not enough to buy anything bigger than what we already have, even going right out of Cardiff...
That means the only hope we have of leaving this house, and growing our family, is something along the lines of a lottery win... I'd never even really considered not being able to have a baby #2, but now I just don't see any way we can possibly do that :(
