Housing dilemma. Read before voting please!

My husband and I rent the upstairs unit of a duplex from his mom who inherited it when her mother passed.

We’ve been talking about getting a house in the next couple years as we now have a baby and it’s getting a little crammed.

His mom told us today that she’s going to be evicting the downstairs tenant by Christmas as he’s 6 months behind rent.

So we’ve been given a very difficult choice. Here are the options.

1. Keep saving for our own place. May take up to 2 years for a decent down payment but it would be private and our own.

2. Take over renting both up and downstairs units of the duplex and rent to own and we would eventually own.

Upsides to where we live, rent is cheap, it’s on a quiet road where the backyard is a private beach.

Downsides to where we live, windows are drafty and need to be replaced, only one bathroom, kitchen is downstairs and everything else is upstairs, poor insulation, no central air or heat, not enough space to grow a family. Someone living below us and we’ve had horrible downstairs neighbours in the past!

So if we stay, there’s about $20,000 in repairs that need to be done, plus rent would be double what it is now. But we would eventually own it and it’s a fantastic location and a wonderful place to raise a family! Also very close to both sides of the family!

If we save to move, there’s the potential of bad new neighbours downstairs as we’d still be here for at least another year.