Morning reflections

It is 8 in the morning the babies are fed and smiling and Victoria is still asleep. I am sitting here with my head swimming with thoughts of real estate. James and I found two houses that could work for us in Pekin. One that I LOVE and one that is really pretty but I am not sure that it is laid out very well for our situation. The house that I love is about 3 miles from my parents. It is a completely remodeled 4 bedroom 2bath home with a full unfinished basement. It comes with two acres that is backed up against Peek-a-boo lake. Peek-a-boo lake is very pretty and all of the houses on it are really neat, mostly owned by doctors in the area. All of the bedrooms are on the ground floor and the yard is flat and on the corner of a dead end road, so there wouldn't be alot of traffic so the kids to play in the yard safely. The kitchen is a lil small but the back entrance to the house is through the kitchen and it would be easy to expand down the road. We could expand it into a mud room/pantry. All of the bedrooms are of a nice size and are on the ground floor. All kids could have their own bedroom if we chose to separate the twins now, or we could turn one bedroom into an office and put the pull out couch in there for Makenzie and Brooklyn to have their own space when they come over. The house is completely remodeled, like I said, and the carpet is new along with all of the oak trim, new light fixtures, and new cabinets in the kitchen and the bathroom. I already have it decorated in my minds eye and have been mentally living there since we saw the home. I immediately felt like I was at home when I walked in the door. The basement is a clean slate and we could do whatever we wanted with it, office, entertainment room, craft room, etc. There was some water in the basement that we believe is from the basement windows that we would need to fix.

The other home is a log cabin about a mile, if that, behind my parents house. The home is really pretty and is more secluded in woods. I believe it comes with 3 acres. The house has more of an open floor plan and a pretty open banister to the loft. It has 3-4 bedrooms (depending if you are wanting to turn the loft into bedroom or not) and I believe has 3 bath. This house has been foreclosed on and they are already asking for 50,000 less than the original asking price. I like the wood but EVERYTHING in the house is wood, almost too much wood. The carpet needs to be replaced and the basement has one room stuck in the center that is very small and everything around it is unfinished (the basement bedroom is just "odd" I can't explain it. The grounds isn't landscaped and the yard is basically a mud pit. When we looked at the home the family had already moved out obviously. They had left behind alot of personal belongings and trash EVERYWHERE (the home had basically been trashed with stuff). The air in the home had a very unsettling feel. Almost like they left the sadness of losing their home behind when they left. I can't explain it. On the good side there is a full porch across the front and back of the home and the back yard flows downhill to a creek that you can hear from the house. I can totally see myself outside on the porch drinking coffee in the morning to the sound of the creek. The yard has potential but alot of money and work is going to have to go into it to keeping the yard from flowing down the retaining wall right into the basement as mud. It comes with 3 sheds, that my HGTV mind says need a coat of paint, so there is plenty of storage that we could use. The house is priced where we need it financially but I am not sure that it is the house for us. I am worried about the openness of the stairway with two growing babies that are going to be learning how to climb and explore. The bedrooms are not on the same level and for all of us to have a bedroom when we move in Victoria would have to take the basement bedroom, which I don't believe would fly with her. Basements are not her favorite thing.

I don't know. Thank you for listening to me ramble about decisions. I am not really good at them. Especially thinking about decisions that are long term. We are desperately needing more room to live in and it us just a huge decision to find a home. I just needed to get these thoughts off of my chest to see if anything would make sense and a clear option would present itself. But guess what it is not. My favorite home isn't priced to do what we need to do but the cabin is. Any suggestions would be appreciated.