Case study: ‘We’re going to have to move out of the capital’

ORIANA Pavitt, 35, moved into her current two-bedroom home in Gilmerton, Edinburgh, four years ago with her husband, Stewart. The couple have two sons, Roddy, three, and Lawson, six months.

“I was pregnant with my first son, Roddy, when we bought our current place and it was a totally different house-hunting experience. We knew we’d have enough space for all of us and we weren’t thinking as much about storage space for toys and so on. Now, although it is still a lovely house, we have just outgrown it.

“We’ve had our house up for sale since Lawson was born, but the property market is so slow at the moment.

“Ideally, we’d like a four-bedroom house – we considered going for three as it was cheaper, but in the long term, we’d like a third child and we don’t really want to have to move again. When we started looking around, though, we found a three to four-bedroom property was so much more expensive than we had expected.

“We have considered looking at a part-exchange on a new-build estate, but the figures just don’t make sense – we’d get so much less and we wouldn’t have any money left for anything else.

“We’re looking at going a bit further out of Edinburgh, towards Dalkeith. We have friends near there, which is great for looking after each other’s children and doing the school runs and so on and it’s a really nice, family-friendly area, which is important to us these days.”