Reply to Which project will improve quality of life more for young family, backyard or finished basement?

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Reply to "Which project will improve quality of life more for young family, backyard or finished basement?"

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[quote=Anonymous]We gutted a fixer upper and are really over budget.. I think we are going to have to pick between one of the following two projects for this year and wait a year or two for the other one.

For background, we are a young family with a preschool aged (only) child. We will not be having any more children. Our house is 2800 sf above ground, but we do not really have a defined rec room on the main level which bothers me a lot for several different reasons. We have plenty of bedrooms and space otherwise. We have a .5 acre lot with an enormous backyard, but the side of the backyard borders a relatively busy road. I feel that the backyard is unusable for a young child until we put in a fence. However, we live directly across the street from a small park with a play area.

We can:

Pull out a bunch of trees in the backyard that sort of break up the lot, put in a fence so there is no safety issue with the busy street, and buy an awesome swingset. This would make the backyard fantastic. We love to grill in the summer and would probably be outside almost every day with grilling and play time.. I have no doubt that we would get a ton of use out of this between May - September.

Finish the basement - put in a full bath, bedroom and rec room. This would give us a great play space that would probably be used a good amount on weekends throughout the year, but hardly ever during the week. We do not have many overnight guests, but when we do, this would make it so much easier with them (and us) having some privacy, and they would not need to share the hall bath upstairs. On a very secondary note, this would also let us remove the toys from the makeshift upstairs playroom so we would each have our own home office again. Not a huge deal, as we are doing just fine sharing a home office, but I suppose it is worth some consideration. The big draw for me is that this would let us host a lot of play dates which we love doing, since we would have so much space for the kids.  We have a trusted contractor who can do this at a low enough cost that we would probably be getting a dollar for dollar return on our money if we had to sell immediately, which we do not intend to do - but you never know, crazier things have happened with unexpected layoffs, etc. Backyard would have a substantially lower return on investment.

I am really torn. I think deep down I would rather do the basement and my husband would rather do the backyard. What would you do?[/quote]

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