To raise or not to raise......

To raise or not to raise.......

Hi,
I am hoping to glean some knowledge from those with experience.
We have purchased a fibro (asbestos) post war. Madness! We have no idea what we are doing! It needs work inside and out, it's badly maintained. Downstairs is bricked in with two door access and a few windows. Concrete slab. Not quite legal height but certainly above our head height. We need living downstairs.
We are in a dilemma as to what to due - limited finds also.
We have experienced drainage issues twice downstairs. Ankle deep water I suspect from the way the house is positioned on the cut in. The water seeps through from the front of the house when we have lengthy steady rain.
The block is hard fill in front with a sloping to the rear driveway on the side.
Ideally, we would like to raise. Gut upstairs in and out and reboard. Refresh the whole house.
We need a new bathroom and kitchen upstairs and a new shower and toilet with laundry down.

We aren't sure what to do.
Reading this extremely informative forum it appears we would barely have enough cash to raise and do the wiring/ plumbing / slab downstairs.I doubt we would have enough to have a deck to enjoy our new view.

Alternatively, perhaps we should just settle for the height we have, gut upstairs and reboard. New kitchen/bathroom with downstairs shower/ toilet/laundry and maybe scrimp through with a deck on the rear.

How important is it to have downstairs legal height?

I am torn as I don't want to spend all of this money raising and not be able to enjoy the benefits for a couple of years until we can afford to further renovate.
Then again, I don't want to spend all this money to renovate, only to find we have to knock it through to resolve the flooding issues downstairs because they aren't resolved properly.

Read the full thread at RenovateForum.com...