Buying A House With Small Children

I had been wanting to buy a new house for a long time. We had outgrown our first house, especially now that we had two small children. I had always dreamed of something a bit bigger, and finally we saved up enough money that we could start looking.



Buying a house with small children is an interesting experience, because you have to think about a lot more. Before kids, when buying my first house, I thought about the neighborhood, the view, whether I'd be able to get to the mall....and now I think about other things. I still cared about whether the neighborhood was safe, but this time I started to think about how close to the schools we were, whether there were other children on the street, and things like that.



We started looking for houses in the usual way, by calling up a real estate agent. We used the same one that we used the first time, so that saved us a bit of a headache. She did a great job for us when we bought our first house, so we wanted to use her again. This time we were selling a house as well, so we needed her expertise on that end as well.



It's a big challenging to sell your house at the same time you're buying a house, I can tell you that. It was especially a challenge because the children didn't understand that they had to keep their rooms neat so that new people could come and look at the house. We had a number of funny conversations about whether the new people would keep their things, and whether the new people would have a sleepover with us to see if they liked the house!



I was really concerned about schools, no matter where we went, so I did a bit of extra research on the different neighborhoods. I wanted to make sure that my children were near the school, and that turned out to be more difficult than I thought. There weren't many places for sale near the schools I wanted the kids to go to, and I had to start thinking about whether they would be in the proper school district at all. That was a bit of a concern.



Meanwhile, we started to get buyers looking at our home, and a few offers we didn't accept. Of course, that made me wonder what would happen if we sold the house too soon, without a place to live. How would the kids feel about that? My husband assured me that we would be fine, and I had no choice to believe him.



Finally we found a house that we all really liked. We had left the kids with relatives when we went looking at houses, but when my husband and I agreed on one, we brought the kids over to see it. The excitement on their faces was adorable. We were able to move in, which made our house look more sellable (or at least I thought so), and the house sold within a few weeks. Everything worked out!