To sell or refinance

[Samuel Dedla]

My wife and I bought our house 2 years ago this month, we've been slowly renovating our house but initially never purchased with the intent to invest in real estate. We've completely changed our mindset and have dived into learning and adjusting our lives to enter into the world of real estate investing. We're now on the fence on what to do with our house, its not in one of the most desirable areas to rent and if we were to rent it out we would likely be unable to qualify for another mortgage and coming up with the down payment this year just isn't in our cards. We've considered refinancing but don't believe we'd actually receive enough from refinancing to allow the purchase of another property due to penalties for breaking our current 5 year agreement. We've come to the conclusion that selling may be our only option to allow us to re-enter the market in a much more productive position as we have around 150k in equity based on average selling prices in our area and based on the size of our house.

So my question to anyone out there that may have been in this situation or a similar one is what would you do in our position. Are we right to believe selling is our best option or would we be better off trying to refi for possibly only around 20k payout? We're quite frustrated as we do love our house and what we've done to it, but don't believe our house is the asset that another house could be in the area thats been suited for less than we purchased our home for and with the cash we could gain from the sale of our house we believe we would be capable of purchasing 2 properties utilizing a mortgage+ reno loan to obtain 2 houses with possibly 4 doors? Any input would be greatly appreciated thanks for the read and for any advice! Cheers.