Renting our House

This past week has been a rollercoaster when it comes to our home.

Some background: We bought it in 2009 after MUCH thought. Daniel at first was very hesitant. He saw the condition the home was in when he helped move my Great Aunt Kathryn out...basically, she shared her home with a bunch of 4 legged varmints and 6 legged creatures. On top of that, it hadn't been renovated much in the past several decades. Guys, there was a TREE growing through the window. Green shag carpet. Asbestos. Discolored walls from people smoking in the home for the past 84 years. I always loved it no matter what- it's what I was used to and I had so many special memories growing up in this home. But Daniel, not having the nostalgic connection to the Heights home, wasn't sure if he wanted to take on the work to make our now home livable. After 6 months of every weekend being devoted to sanding, painting, and tearing down...we can now look back on the decision to buy our heights home and can confidently say that it was probably one of the best financial decisions we could have ever made.

Which leads us to the rollercoaster. Our home is our baby. We know it's worth, which makes us so torn right now about what to do with it.

Option A: Sell it. Probably not going to happen unless we get an amazing offer that we cannot pass up.

Option B: I can't get into a lot of details, but it would basically mean us getting back a smidgen more than what we pay for our home each month from a couple and a third party that is paying for their rental, plus we would have to pay for their utilities. We would basically break even with our monthly mortgage payment. Remember guys, not only did we buy this home from my family, but it was on the market for YEARS and probably would have been torn down if anyone else would have bought it. So what we pay each month is not exactly what our house is worth. Oh, and with this option, there is NO deposit.

Option C: Find another renter and get what our home is actually worth. I have a job for the next 7 days, and then my income is no longer coming in. We are moving to one of the most expensive cities on the planet.  We put A LOT of work into our home to make it what it is. It would be nice to actually make money off of our house.

We were planning on going with Option B. It would mean we don't have to show our home, we don't have to move our furniture, don't have to worry about some of the renovations we never got to. However, after thinking about all of the "unknowns" in our life right now (What if I can't find a job when we move back? What if we have babies? What if London ends up being a lot more expensive then we planned on?) we are now leaning heavily towards Option C.  If our goal is to get the most from our home, that means that this weekend we needs to:

A. Repaint any damaged walls
B. Repaint our outside trimming
C. Lay grass in the backyard
D. Refinish our middle bathroom
E. Replace some blinds that Cole decided to eat
F. Clean, clean, CLEAN

On top of next Thursday being my last day of school and moving across the world in a little over a month, we don't know what we are doing with our home and don't have a lot of time to figure it out. I am VERY stressed out!

Just trying to remember that this is out of my hands, and my little glimpse of stress is nothing like the amount of worry that some people go through daily. But, this is my reality right now, so I am sharing it with y'all!