We’re six days into this month and so far have made some substantial headway toward successfully accomplishing all that has to happen this year, but there is still a long list of things that must fall into order. Quickly. Ever little piece of the puzzle that locks into place feels like a blessing worth a formal celebration. Delays and hiccups, such as ferry traffic (this is the height of tourist season after all) must be taken in stride otherwise this month will surely kill us.
Yesterday I received a phone call from the notary that rather anti-climatically informed us…the sale is complete. It’s done. It’s ours.
Today, this 10.2 acres is ours.
I laughed and asked when the marching band would arrive and who was baking me a cake. Without keys to pick up or a front door to open for the first time…the feeling of ‘home’ hasn’t quite sunk in yet – no matter though, since the rather daunting list of things that need to get done before we can begin our migration just keeps growing. That right there is enough to distract from any disappointment in the lack of land purchase celebrations and party hats.
Can you imagine buying a house unseen? Well maybe not unseen but perhaps you walked around the outside of the property, poked your head in the front door and peeked in the windows?
That’s a bit what it feels like to jump head first into land ownership without having spent more than four hours traversing the property since we first came across the listing.
Thus continues my ongoing series as a lead up to the full story around what we’re buying, the plan we’re hatching and the vision we have for the rest of 2015 and a good portion of 2016.
When we first started to explore the possibilities of purchasing a place to call our own, it was rather daunting. Extremely complex, particularly because we haven’t considered ourselves particularly tied to one city or zone that would at least limit certain variables. In our search, we ran into incredibly cheap parcels that only upon further investigation were revealed to be bound by unbelievably costly building permit requirements. Square footage minimums. Other by-laws and city rules that would quickly curtail our dream of taking our time and trying to minimize how much debt this whole endeavour inevitably puts us in.
I’m sitting here at home on a Saturday night instead of hanging out on a sailboat with friends and while I was really looking forward to a little getaway on the water….RAIN. It rained today. It’s still raining. It looks like it might just rain tomorrow and even Monday and I couldn’t be happier about it. The rain part, not the botched sailing plans the first time this year we even made plans to be on a boat.
Figures.
Three years ago, almost to the day, when we first moved out to the middle of nowhere, we were met with all kinds of reactions. For the most part, folks were supportive (if not a bit skeptical about our long term prospects) – some thought we were crazy and could never picture doing something similar or the same. But two conversations in particular stand out in my mind as lessons for how we’ve calibrated our own expectations over the months and years that have ensued.
Well, we missed March. And by that I mean the farm, the work, the celebrations of Isla turning one, the trip to Toronto, the trip to Salmon Arm, the…oh March was busy.
I don’t desire or miss this level of busy.
Occasionally we receive compensation for posts. We only accept compensation when the products or businesses are something we actually use and would recommend independently – and we are always upfront when sponsorship is involved. This article was sponsored by Fisher-Price, but the opinions (especially the following variation on their much more reliable cake recipe) expressed here are my own.
Back in the hazy, sleepless days of newborn-ness I had this idea that I would bake a cake every single month. I even did it the first month. The idea being that by the end of the year I would have these beautiful images of all the delicious cakes that represented the various seasons as we (presumably) floated through early parenthood with all this time to play in the kitchen.
But then the realities that come with a baby who starts to sleep less and need more…along with a garden, goats and the rest of the menagerie around here…firmly set in. Now we’re just about thirty days out from her first birthday and I’ve started to wonder what that might look like.
I saw this article pop up on Facebook and couldn’t help but chime in with my own thoughts after taking the time to carefully read through the author’s words as well as each and every comment.
Some of the rebuttals and supporting sentiments were funny. Others were scary. Most seemed to be based on “Oh my friend does this…” or “I did that and this is what I felt…”
A different story, still yet to be told is why I happened to be in town in the first place. It all started with my old Ford truck that happened to run away with me a week ago. But I’ll leave that cliffhanger right there and simply say I had been over with the mechanic getting it checked out and in working order again.