To buy or not to buy?

My newest favorite photos of Junia.
They happen to be unrelated to my latest thoughts.
S and I are thinking about buying a house. We've been spending Sundays with a realtor and have been venturing into the world of realty. We don't know how long we will be in Seattle but this is a great time to buy and if we get lucky we can find a place that will allow us to spend less money on a house payment and insurance than on rent we are paying. Even if we find a house on the top of our price range we will probably only be paying the same amount the we pay in rent.

It's quite a connundrum though...

We really like parts of renting. Calling someone to fix appliances, not being responsible for property taxes, being able to up and move when we want. Even if these things don't play out regularly (after all our appliances work most of the time and we haven't moved in 2.5 years) it's a nice place to be in terms of mental well being.

We also don't know what will happen to S's job when he moves from being a supervised chaplain supervisor to (hopefully) becoming a indirectly supervised chaplain supervisor. We don't think we could stay in our rental if we just relied on my income so there is a fair amount of concern about making sure we can find a house payment that would allow for that if S couldn't find a job for awhile.

It's complicated for sure, and it's hard to balance out all of the things we want in a house vs what we need. We want a great big bathtub and a fireplace and a yard and 3 bedrooms and a nice kitchen and hardwoods. But I want it to be charming and have parts of it that can be improved for way cheap and bits that are desperate for my touch...

How that translates into a house exactly? I don't know.

The final kicker is the moving sucks.
I bet it REALLY sucks with a toddler.