They say that when you buy a home a purchaser spends only about 30 minutes total in the house. We can’t take it for a test drive and seem to purchase on instinct more that anything.
You either love it, or hate it.
Last winter we had visited countless homes on the island that were for sale, but the right thing just wasn’t there. We had both seen this house on MLS, and hubby refused to look at it, stating “I “hate” houses like that”
By “like that” he meant old.
Our little gem was built in 1920 and move to Salt Spring Island from Victoria in the 70’s. She was placed on new foundations, and given a nice tall basement, much different from our first “heritage” house in Vancouver that hubs and I owned before the kids came along.
I knew he was thinking back to the countless hours we spent replacing knob and spool wiring, and breakout out plaster and lathe walls. We didn’t want a huge reno home again, we wanted to enjoy living in our home, not working on it.
But, I had a good instinct about this one and secretly set up a showing.
As we pulled into the driveway my hubby tossed me the evil glare and told me “I’m not going to like it” I asked him to humour me and check it out.
Check it out he did. We fell hard pretty quickly. It could have been the old wooden beams running through the home, or the ocean view, or perhaps it was just the fact that the lot was bathed in sunshine (which funnily enough, is a challenging thing to find on Salt Spring Island) We were hooked.
No home is perfect, and we knew we were going to need to make sacrifices to live here, but it had enough potential and space for us to manage.
And a home office. For me.
Finally.
Our purchase was a challenge (seeing as we hadn’t worked in 6 months) but our mortgage broker saw us through the dark and confusing moments. There were other challenges came up, and more than once we considered moving on, but for some reason, this house called to us.
We both believe that things happen for a reason, and so we trusted that it would work out. The house became “ours” on July 1st (i.e.” we started paying for it) but we won’t move in until April 1st.
We have taken this opportunity of time to prepare the lot for our arrival.
And over the months we have both been frustrated and stressed attempting to balance rent, a mortgage, land improvements, jobs, kids and a little bit of “living”, and continued to remind each other that “things happen for a reason”
As usual, I am impatient to find out the reason (and perhaps forcing me to be patient is one of those reasons) but am grateful for the time we have had to do the building we needed to do.
Like fencing 2.5 acres.
And building a chicken coop. And duck pond, and bunny hut.
Clearing, and clearing and clearing years of dead brush, and old trees.
And two months today, we will be in there, and starting the next stage.
That is, if it all goes according to plan.