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Should I remodel or buy a bigger house?
I am quite sure you can set up an office in your basement for a lot less than $15,000. Don't build any walls, install any flooring, or upgrade the ceiling. Just install more lights and plugs. Set up your desks, bookshelves and what not in whatever corner is furthest from noises like the laundry room or the furnace. The kids and the nanny get the main floor - just let the whole living room be a giant playroom, for example. This gives you the separation you need to work at home, but you can hear if something really needs your attention.  When the kids go off to school, you can refinish the basement into a playroom for kids who don't always need supervision, using the money you are no longer spending on the nanny to install carpeting, real walls, a drop ceiling and so on. Your office stuff can move up to the main floor or to a spare room upstairs if you had one but it wasn't usable during the baby years when upstairs generally has to be quiet. As the kids get older the basement can get tailored to what preteens and teens like. This is essentially what we did, and our square footages and child counts match yours almost precisely. We did eventually convert our garage to carpeted and finished space, and it spent time as an office with staff coming in each day, then some time as a teen playroom (think video games and loud music) after the business rented office space outside the house, but if you don't intend to hire staff for your business you don't need to do this part. We did the majority of the basement wiring ourselves and got an electrician to hook it into the panel and check our work. The budget would probably be less than 10% of the guess from your real estate agent.