More Decisions to Make

More housing decisions to make, or at the very least, we need to come up with some back up plans...

We have our house on the market as we believe it's adversely affecting our health and we can't really do the renovations we had planned whilst we are living here due to our chemical sensitivity. However, after almost 6 weeks there has been not a single enquiry and some contacts in the Real Estate business here tell us that an almost instanteous stop happened here around a month ago - not a thing is selling anywhere after still having quite a good turnover of properties despite other areas declining markets and rising interest rates.

So, we need to come up with some back up plans in case our house doesn't sell. We realistically can't sit around for too long waiting as we need to consider our health. We have decided we need to set a time limit and then have some back up plans in place to follow.

The two options that we seem to be considering the most at this stage are to rent our house out and rent somewhere else ourselves (as we can't afford to purchase another property if we still own this one), or to stay here and do the renovations - taking as many cautions as we possibly can to reduce their impact on our haelth.

Both plans will cost us money - we certainly wouldn't cover the repayments from any rent received here, so would need to make up the shortfall as well as covering our own rent elsewhere. And doing the renovations VERY slowly and with products designed to cause less reactions, will also add considerably to the project budget. These are short term costs of course... Once the renovations are done, they won't need to be repeated, and if we keep this property we would hope to have some capital growth in the long term. I'm just not very good at looking at these types of long term benefits though - I'm more focussed on what we need to do NOW.

But, an even more important consideration (to me at least!) than money is our health... I don't think you can put a price on it and I want nothing more than to have happy, healthy children. Obviously we don't have a crystal ball to help us know if our sensitivities are going to reduce rapidly or if we are going to have them for the longer term, so we can't really put off making a decision until we know.

We also need to decide if we would ever move back here... If so, then perhaps we could renovate whilst others are living here helping to cover the costs, and then move back once complete and fully offgassed. If not, then I think we need to think about what we really want... Is there any point having this property as an investment if it means we can not buy our own home again in the near future? Do we actually want to buy our own home again? We have often discussed the financial benefits of not living in and owning our own home, as in our financial situation, cash flow is greatly improved if we don't own.. but then that has to be offset against the stability and ability to do whatever we want to our house that comes with owning.

I think a lot more soul searching and talking about this is needed, but I guess in my heart I know we need to move soon, I doubt our house is going to sell quickly, so I think I'm leaning towards moving out, renting the house out and renting something for ourselves. I just don't think I can put us through the renovations wondering if even low VOC products may still cause a reaction - we just don't know and I wouldn't want to get half way through the reno's and realise that we simply HAVE to go...