Who is he trying to convince: me or himself?

Really, moving to the new house is a good plan even without the financial concerns.

The new house is bigger. By how much I'm not sure.

There's a basement. See: bigger. It's unfinished and the ceiling is low enough I probably won't finish it. But I'll have a place for my tools and a shop.

Gandolf likes it more. This house is more open and she gets to travel more. There's more activity, but we hope that won't last as walls are put back together.

The heating system works better. The DC house's ducts are rubbish. Heated and cooled air barely seeps out the vents. The new house has radiator heat, but no air conditioning.

The yard is out back. In DC there's a postage stamp yard out front and a rain barrel out back. Here they can be in the same place. Alas, the yard is big enough I'll have to mow.

Large front porch. There is still a large front porch to chill on. It'll fit a couple of pieces of patio furniture and a BBQ grill so long as it's all chained down.

We also get to rethink the renovation. Before we were thinking in terms of renters. Now we're thinking like residents.

We still want the lead paint gone, but the urgency has passed.

The old doors in the basement can be rehung instead of buying new ones. Same with the old door knobs.

I don't have to remove/replace the claw foot tub so renters don't ruin it.

Kitchen renovation can be put off. The fridge is a bit worn, but good. The oven is pretty good, but the metal is rusted through in a few places. And the cabinets are acceptable if they had to be. Yummy had a kitchen design that would cost $2000, but that was for renters. The new plans involve removing a wall, an induction range top, and reworking the bathroom upstairs while the plumbing is exposed.

We can expose the wood floors instead of putting in new carpet.

We're sticking with my original insulation plan. I'd love to do the whole house, but some things don't work. One room will already get the wall built out and insulation put in. And we'll do the roof as much as we can. But that leaves a lot of space with only brick and plaster keeping out the cold.

I can put off getting conduit on the basement wires.

I can install good lights instead of cheap lights.

I can improve the neighborhood as residents instead of as land owners. We'd wanted to encourage a better class of people (folks with jobs) to move in, but weren't going to move here ourselves. Now I will.

I'll miss the subway and having places I can walk to, but with time we should have new places to walk to. And there's light rail here if we just can figure it out.