FTB - Advice on house options

Hey! We are first time buyers and really would love to hear your views on any of the below, especially as we've not done this before and see value in others knowledge & experiences 😊.

Anything we are missing / not considering?

--

1. One of the houses we like is a link detached, the neighbour is currently building an extension over the garage (which is part of the link). Would you be concerned by this and if we did the same, does that make the house semi detached and does that matter? 😂😂

2. Is it better to go for a house that requires less work, even if it works out £200 more a month for your mortgage? There's one we like that's top end of our budget, there's nothing really we'd want to do other than redecorate. Another we like in our optimum area that's less overall but requires a lot more work to get it to where we want - maybe 2 years of saving to get there but still liveable for now.

(P.s £200 extra still puts us under our budget)

3. Would you sacrifice the area you were set on, if the next village over (which is also nice) had better value houses? It would add roughly 10 mins onto any journeys, is harder for taxis, and the ideal area has friends in walking distance which we obvs love the idea of) 😆

(Think we know the right answer to the 2nd one but it's always good to see if we've missed anything!)

Appreciate any advice / guidance, thank you!