What to do?

Many of our friends know that we searched ALL of last year for a piece of land in which to build a house. We FINALLY found .7 of an acre last fall and by the end of the year, it was ALL ours.

We are still very excited about building our own house (one day), but we are faced with a horrible dilemma right now and being too emotionally involved, we are finding it hard to make a clear-cut decision. Which is where YOU come in. I'll lay out the conundrum and you can give us your opinion as to what we should do.

We LOVE our current location. It does not get any better (for us) where are house is situated and what is around us. We are in a cul-de-sac and in the cul-de-sac is a park that our son LOVES! There also is a creek that separates our neighborhood from another neighborhood and our son has taken a recent fascination with the creek. He LOVES throwing rocks, leaves, sticks etc into it. We also have THE best neighbors that anyone could ask for and they love our little Espresso as if he were their own grandchild. After having HORRIBLE neighbors in Virginia, these neighbors are priceless, and we have learned, you cannot put a price on GOOD neighbors.

That's what we LOVE about where our house is situated - RIGHT NOW.

What we don't like is how my husband and I have to walk on egg shells after we put our Espresso down because any LOUD noise COULD wake him up. We love to have people over, but we have no place where we and our company can go and feel free to use normal inside voices. If my husband and I have ever have to discuss something, we head to our bedroom and close the door, simply so we do not have to whisper and as it is, I have difficulty understanding whispers due to my ear issues. Our house is also not heated and cooled efficiently. We've really noticed that the past two winters that have been FREEZING cold! My personal dislike with the house is the kitchen. It's not very functional for me and how I like work in the kitchen.

We have come up with two solutions to fix the two main issues above. We have a covered patio on the back of the house which could easily be turned into a non heated & cooled "gathering room." It would mainly be walls and windows and we could tie into the gas line to put a gas fire place to heat it during the winter. We also could change the downstairs unit and tie into the natural gas line and put in a duel fuel system. Both of these fixes would cost money, but it could keep us in an area that our entire family loves. This would make living in this house more livable for us (in how we want to live) but it certainly would not fix ALL of issues with this house, JUST the main ones.

To be fair, these are our goals for building a new house.
- lower ALL of our expenses which would enable us to be completely debt free sooner
- have a house that is designed around how we want to live
- we also would own more land than we currently do

We are mainly torn about taking our little Espresso away from the three things he loves about living in this house: the park, the creek, the neighbors. Should we? Or shouldn't we? If it is was just my husband and I, the decision would be easy. It's been hard for us to keep a clear perspective on what is the most important. Writing out a pros/cons list really wouldn't do it because there are certain pros/cons that DO NOT cancel each other out. They stand on their own with great importance.

We could always build later, but then should we put money into this house to live how we want to live until we build? Should we just build and make our son deal with all the changes and make him wonder where his park & creek went? (I sometimes thinks he owns both of those since we are over there ALL THE TIME).

What to do? What to do? HELP!