When you can't agree on a house, what do you do?

[Astrid]

I also imagine that maintaining an existing house, even repairs and creating an extra bedroom or something for the Boy would be cheaper han building a new house.

Tough call that one.

We are in the old farmhouse. 4 years ago we looked at adding on a extra room and extending our bedroom to add an ensuite. We just want the extension to lock-up, as DH is quite capable of the rest. Back then it came in at $60,000. We then looked at everything else that need to be done to the house. Pretty much every room stripped back and one again. We looked at those figures and the figures of building another 3 bedroom house on the site and they pretty much are the same. The added bonus of building for us, is that we can build a layout that is more suited to us and in materials that we love (strawbale). Add to that all the energy efficient, sustainable features that can go into a new build, we would be saving money with ongoing expenses.
Thankfully the fire over lay stuff wont affect us too much, we can deal with extra tank and straw bale properly done is super fire resistant (so no change needed there), we just have to think about how to do the decking. It is a pain though, as when we bought the fire overlay stopped short of our place, but now it includes us, Ash Wednesday did go through our property though and took out many farm houses around here.