Where to live?

We have been having a little bit of a struggle deciding where we should live when we return to Albany. We can leave our current house on the market and buy something else when the house sells or take the house off the market and plan on staying in it for several more years. If we stay in the house, we want to buy another, bigger piece of property as soon as possible that we can build something on in a few years. The kids like our neighborhood, so our inclination is to stay there and buy an additional piece of property.

If we do that, we will also want to make some improvements on both the house and the lawn. We do not think we will be able to do everything we want, but the idea is to add French doors out to the lawn from the dining room, add a rap around porch, put in hardwood floors, and rearrange the whole down stairs. Currently we have a fairly small dining/living room on one end of the house and a small family room on the other. The kitchen is not laid out as well as we would like either. We want to find out whether it is possible to combine the dining/living room with the family room and move the kitchen around so that it makes more sense for the way we live.

Update: Here is the list of things we think we might want do to the house in a remodel. It will almost certainly be too expensive to do all of this, but it is a list with which we can start:

• Fence for the back and side yard
• French doors leading out to the side yard from the current living room
• A master bathroom window that opens to let the cool air flow through
• A rap-around porch (possibly with a balcony leading from the upstairs bedroom with French doors and a window from that open out from the master bedroom onto the balcony
• New clothes washer and dryer
• Remodel of the first floor to move the kitchen to one end of the house so we can have the area currently being used as the dining/living room be combined with the area being used as the family room
• Cermic tile floors for the downstairs
• Granite counter tops for the kitchen
• New refrigerator and stove (SubZero and Viking)
• A roof over the parking spot beside the house
• Built-in book shelves for the bonus room
• A bathroom and closet for the bonus room