House News - Out In The Sticks Y'All

Wow, Fall has completely gotten away from me. It was early September one minute and then suddenly - boom! - it's mid-November.

Sooooo, all of the repairs and updates we were doing to the house at the end of August/beginning of September were because.....we're moving! We've bought a house out in the sticks - about 20 minutes from where we are now.

Here's the story - every week or so we would casually look around on Realtor.ca, just seeing what was out there. We've been wanting to move out of town for a long time, where we could have an acre or two for the dogs to run around on, and where Tom could have some space to play with his cars. The only thing holding us back was the price tag. Real estate prices are just out of control here. We could never find anything we liked that wasn't either far out of our budget or needed an enormous amount of work to be liveable.

We talked about it and decided that if we really wanted to move this year we would have to raise our upper spending limit. So we picked out 4 houses to look at that ranged from an acre to 27 acres and went on a tour one Sunday with our agent. We fell in love with the second house we looked at - a 3-bedroom raised bungalow on 15 acres. And the crazy thing was that it was within our budget - our original budget. I think it was meant to be.

My favourite feature is the deck - it runs the entire width of the house, so we'll be able to have multiple seating areas - covered and uncovered. We plan to install French doors off of the master bedroom (far right) and change up the sliders on the left to French doors as well. Eventually we may have a walk-out from the basement to the backyard.

Tom's excited because the property already has a concrete pad poured, ready for a shop to be built. We're going to extend the backyard lawn further out - closer to the shop - and plant a row of trees (cedar?) along the back edge to soften the view of the shop a bit. It will be part auto shop, with two bays and a hoist, and part woodworking shop, with room to get our DIY on. We're going to build it tall enough that we'll be able to have a loft above part of it for storage.

The property goes back another 3000 feet from the shop - there is a trail through the woods and several clearings.  I can't wait to take the dogs for walks back there. They love tromping through the forest, smelling the new smells and chasing each other. We even found a tree fort!

The house itself is in great shape - nothing needs to be done right away so we'll be able to take our time and plan our projects. I have so many ideas though. The basement is unfinished - I'm looking forward to having a blank slate to work with. I'll post photos of the inside once the current owner's belongings are no longer there.

It's on a nice, quiet road, just a few minutes from the highway. I'll have about a 30 minute drive to work, and we're only 20 minutes from the grocery store. It's going to be strange being back out in the country again, but it only took us a year or two of living in town to realize that we aren't urban people.

Once we finalized the offer on the new house, it was a mad scramble to get our house ready for market. Not that there was a lot that had to be done, we just wanted to present the best package we could. We have an awesome real estate agent - I can't believe the photos and the brochure she produced. It made our place look like a show home. We held off offers for a week, had over 50 showings (!), and ended up with eight offers. Madness. This was so different than our last selling experience where we listed for two months and only had two offers.

As soon as I take a break from packing (3 weeks to go!) I'll post a current house tour - it's amazing to look back on all of the changes we've made over the past six years.