No Room for Baby

So, Mike & I are in a bit of a pickle.  Our pending baby has no room.  You'd think that after almost 9 years of waiting for baby that we'd have some sort of idea where to put it once it got here, but I suppose that was the least of our worries at the time. We figured that would work it's self out if it ever happened.

Almost as soon as we found out we were expecting, we decided that the best option would be to put our house on the market and buy a bigger one.  Interest is at an all time low right now and after a few calculations with our realtor, we realized we could actually afford a much nicer home now for the same monthly price that we're paying now than we could when we bought this place 4 years ago!  That sounded like a pretty sweet deal, so we signed our house on the market the first of January for the grand price of $99,000, not expecting to make much if any profit, but feeling it was worth a bigger home.  Now we understand that winter is a pretty terrible time to sell any house, but it's now almost mid-April and aside from the one open house we had in February, there have been only TWO people to look at the house so far.  Neither showed a lick of interest, obviously, as we never heard back.  

Our house then...

Our house now

When we bought this house 4 years ago, we were extremely limited in the amount of money we could spend and we were desperate to move out of my grandparent's basement.  Because of the fact that we had pets, no one in this small hick town would allow us to rent without paying out our hindquarters, so buying was our only option.  This little house was the best choice at the time.  It's a 2 bedroom, 1 bath home with only 675 square feet of living space, but with a nice large yard.  We use the "biggest" room for our bedroom (which we barely fit in) and the other tiny one for our office.  It has no garage, no dining room and only 2 puny 2'x2' closets.  When we moved here, it had a small aluminum shed that promptly blew away in a wind storm a couple years later, so my grandpa and dad built a nice sturdy wood shed with an attic and a LOT more room for storage.  The kitchen and bathroom have both been remodeled, we ripped out the carpet and fake tile in the living room & kitchen and refinished the hardwood floors underneath.  We added a pretty new front door with a window, refinished the ugly laundry room and painted everything inside and out.  In addition, we also added lawn and flowers and a vegetable garden in the yard because when we got here it was nothing but dirt and weeds.  My grandpa & dad also added a new wood fence to the backyard and a nice little deck off the back door.  So, there have been many, many upgrades to this place that we've made, and still plenty we could do, but sadly, none of them we did included more square footage!

When we put the house on the market, the real estate lady said that we needed to "de-clutter" and get rid of a lot of our stuff so that the house looks bigger (HA).  So, we did, knowing she was right.  We moved half our furniture and packed tons of boxes of stuff and moved them over to my grandparents basement for storage while the house is on the market.  Even still, I can't imagine how we'd live here with a baby if we had to!  Since it is getting closer, and I have less than 3 months to go before this baby is born, we have been brainstorming other ideas.  If we do stay, it's really not very nice of us to leave our stuff over at my grandparent's house, but there's no room for it here either, and we can't readily afford to pay for a storage unit on top of a baby and everything else.  So, we've been throwing the idea around for months about building an addition to our house.  Like maybe a 3rd bedroom or master bedroom extension.  I know my grandpa would be more than willing to help build it, since he's fantastic at construction, so hiring contractors wouldn't be necessary.  That would help with the cost enormously.  The lot is certainly big enough too, but what would the cost be?  And how would we fund it?  We were approved for another mortgage only on the basis that we sell our house and pay it off first.  Would the bank allow us to take out a home improvement loan?  Could we even afford a home improvement loan?  Or is there a way to consolidate or combine it to our current mortgage payment?  What kinds of problems would we run into with building permits and such, and would that delay the project?  And why is everything so difficult? Why can't we just bang down a wall and go buy a bunch of wood?  Seems easy enough, but everything has to be up to "code" or it's illegal.  I have experience from helping my aunt a few years back turn her garage into a family room.  It was fun, but those permit guys really slowed things down.  I'd be really worried it wouldn't be done in time for the baby and we'd be bringing her home to a room with a huge hole in the wall!  LOL!  

I really had my heart set on moving to a new house though.  After thinking about all that remodel junk, buying a new house just seems so much easier.  Especially when a new baby is involved.  I keep picking out houses I like, showing them to Mike and getting excited about them only to find they've sold a week later.  Why can't someone buy OUR house?  Isn't there anyone out there as desperate as we were 4 years ago when we bought it?  Someone has to be on a tight budget like us and find that our house is in really great shape for it's age and price, right?  All we can do is wait and hope.  Meantime, I'm still planning how on earth we're going to fit our daughter into this house with all her stuff.  I thought for a while she can sleep in our room in the tiny cradle, but even that's going to be one tight squeeze.  Everything else like her dresser/changing table and stuff has to be in the 2nd bedroom with the computer I guess.  Certainly no room for her clothes or anything in the closet because it's already crammed with ours!  I know it can work.  My mom reminds me constantly that I was born in a tiny little trailer house when they already had 2 kids before me and they made it work. People keep telling me it will work because we'll have to make it work, but that doesn't mean it's going to be easy, and it definitely doesn't mean we're going to like it.  It's just sad that after so long of waiting to have children, we finally get to and we have no place to put her.