We've been house hunting in the Illinois suburbs for a few weeks now. We know the town we want. It has really good schools, great shopping & restaurants, and is a perfect family friendly town. We found a development we love - it has a pool & clubhouse. It's perfect. The houses we can afford are very nice - built in the 90's, decent sized (approx. 2300-2500 square feet). We found a house we really really like there. It needs a tiny bit of updating. I shouldn't say "needs" but I'd like to re-do the master bath. Now, our dilemma: I found another pool community that is newer. The house we can afford there is built in around 2003, huge (over 3000 square feet) and has EVERYTHING we want: more bathrooms (our guest room would have their own bathroom which is important since all of out family is OOS and we want them to visit.) It's in the same town as house #1, BUT different school district. The district has brand new schools, so there aren't really any ratings yet. DD is only 19 months, so who knows what the schools will be like then? But we have to think about it for resale value as well. So, I'll break it down and please tell me what you'd do:

House #1 (Ashbury development): approx. 2300 square feet, built in '95 nice kitchen, great yard, beautiful sunroom, 4 bedrooms, 2.5 baths, awesome finished basement, 2 car garage, excellent school district, really nice pool community, master bath could stand to be updated (the shower stall is pretty small), bedrooms are on the smaller side, guest room would share a bath with DD

House #2 (South Pointe development): approx. 3000 square feet, built in 2005, everything is gorgeous (kitchen has SS appliances, double wall oven, etc) yard is ok - needs a fence & landscaping, 4 bedrooms, guest room has it's own bath - other 2 bedrooms have a jack & jill bath, master bath is huge & gorgeous, nice sized bedrooms, no finished basement, 3 car garage, brand new, unknown high school (the realtor/former school teacher & owner say the schools are excellent - hard to find any official reports).

Thanks for reading/giving me your opinion. We really like them both, but could see ourselves outgrowing #1, although we planned on staying approx. 5 years and hoping we could afford bigger in the same school district then. Oh, and we need to go back during the week in the daytime because House #2 is near a quarry where it can be very noisy so we have to see how it affects that area (our realtor wasn't sure.)