Advice needed, my peeps

Lonnnnng night. We went to see the house tonight (see a few blog entries down for pictures). It was night, so it was hard to see the view and such. But the house was nearly perfect. As in, it had all of the features we've been looking for. ALL. Given all that the house has to offer, it's a steal. A steal that's above our comfort level.

The house has a den to the left when you come in. There is a formal living room with a fireplace, a dining room off to the right, and that goes into the kichen (needs to be updated at some point but tolerable other than the fluorescent light fixture). The family room is large but cozy at the same time with bookcases lining one wall and the fireplace taking up one wall. There is a hallway that leads to a powder room. There's a laundry room that has cabinets and a sink. The room also has enough space to set up an ironing station and a sewing machine. Then there's the 3 car garage (finished). The shelving + freezer in the garage stay with the house. Upstairs there are 3 bedrooms. The master is a horrid shade of sea foam green, but that's just paint. The master bath is okay, I seem to recall carpet, which isn't my favorite thing in a bathroom. The closet is a walk-in, and the interesting thing is that there's an unfinished room off the closet. It could easily be an exercise room or even more closet space. Maybe 200 sq feet - pretty big although it's a tad of an awkward shape (think traditional attic). Then you go down the spiral staircase back to the first floor and continue to spiral down to the basement.

If I haven't mentioned, every room except for the den and bathrooms can see out the back toward the water (didn't see the water since it was night, but I think it is indeed there).

Back to the basement. It has a spacious wet bar. Lots of cabinets, outdated, but still has a nice feel. There's a huge rec room. There's a Y2K pantry down there too. It's a walk-in pantry, so you can store a lot of canned goods, toilet paper, all that kind of stuff. Then there are 2 bedrooms downstairs and a full bathroom.

The backyard has two levels. I saw some sort of trellis thing down below.

Overall condition seemed pretty good. The owner escorted us and our real estate agent around the house. Kinda odd but whatever. We're not going to talk about the wife who was there but we never found.

The house went on the market yesterday. Today they got their first offer. Let's just say it's priced well. We came in with an escalator clause and put in $500 over asking (since we knew there was another offer).

At 11:30pm, we found out that ours was accepted. There's a weird provision they want, but I think it can be sorted out if we want the house.

Sooooooo....I'm at a loss of what to do. It is everything we want, but it's HUGE. 4,500 sq feet for 3 people is insane.

Pros:
- Good deal
- Pretty much everything we want
- Preapproved at the higher price (remember it was $25k more than we were preapproved for, but we called tonight and got it through)

Cons:
- Yikes, that's a huge mortgage! Of course, once we sold our house (which we own outright), we would refinance and bring our payment down quite a bit. Quite a bit.
- Ongoing expenses. The house is huge: utilities. I'm going to call tomorrow and see if I can weasel past heating bills out of the gas company. The property taxes on this house are killer. It is assessed for $150,000 more than our offer.
- Having a mortgage again and then what if our house doesn't sell, what if one of us loses a job, the what-if game. Actually, as long as that doesn't happen while we technically own both houses, it would be tolerable. We could still manage the mortgage if we sold our current house and one of us lost our job.

We're going to see it tomorrow during the day, I'm going to do some more data gathering, and the big decision will be forthcoming. If you have any opinions, please share.

Oh, and they want us to have it on December 21. Yeah, this year will be a Christmas to remember if we're lugging around boxes!