Feeling sentimental knowing we won’t have Christmas here this year, I was looking through my oldest photos for a picture of one of our first Christmases at our current house.
Unfortunately, since we bought our house in 2004 and our first digital camera in 2006 (and all our old-school photo albums are in boxes somewhere), I couldn’t find anything.
I did find this photo from 2007 though – in between 2004 when we bought our first house and today when we bought our new house, my cousin (pictured below with baby Pace), came out, married the love of his life and just recently announced that he and his husband are expecting their first baby in the spring!
His news reminded me of this great story of a local playwright who went through a similar surrogate pregnancy (who I have as a FB Friend and his regular posts about “Bette” are one of the only things that make Facebook bearable!) It also shows just how quickly our world is becoming more progressive in so many ways.
Attached Garage
Yesterday, I wrote about how we stupidly wanted to make sure we had a garage when we bought this house but ended up buying a house with a detached garage we rarely parked in. We made sure that our new house has an *attached* garage!
Extended “Backyard” One of the things we’ll miss about our current house is that it had a large backyard with lots of green space. Our new house has a smaller backyard and I was sad about that until I realised we *back onto a green space* so our “backyard” technically extends for a huge distance including to a nearby playground and basketball court! Plus the green space behind us is zoned in a way that it will never be developed so we’ll have extended green space behind us forever! We’ll also be able to go out for walks or cross-country skiing (er, once we acquire skis – hello, Santa? – right out our back door!)
Our Sanctuary Probably one of the biggest things that drew us to this house is that it has a master bedroom over the garage with both a walk-in closet and a large en suite master bath. This will make getting away from the kids so much easier than locking our current bedroom door and holding pillows over our heads until the screaming stops! 😉
Opportunity for Upgrades/Decluttering
If I’m completely honest, there’s a lot of things Shea and I were unlikely to do in our own house – downsize and declutter fifteen years of accumulated “stuff” and get away from the easy familiarity of our long-time satellite and Internet providers. Moving has given us an excuse to look for the absolute best, top-of-the-line providers in both areas which we would’ve been unlikely to change if we maintained status quo.
Jetted Tub In my post about things we’ll miss, I didn’t mention the two person tub that was literally the first major reno we did in our new house since we’d loved the jetted tub we had in our condo in Calgary. This tub wasn’t jetted but it was incredibly relaxing and we spent a lot of hours in it (er, separately of course!) Our new house doesn’t have a two-person tub but it does have a single jetted tub and at this point in our marriage, that’s probably more appealing anyhow! 😉
Our realtor had a photographer come to our old/current house today to take photos in preparation for our house being listed later this week and it brought home, perhaps more than any other step, that soon, the house we’ve called a home for fifteen years will likely soon no longer be ours.
As excited as we are to start another chapter of our lives in a new house, of course, we’re sad to leave this one behind.
Beyond the sentimental reasons of being the house where we raised our kids, had so many family milestones and even where we completed various renovations, there are some practical reasons I’m sad to leave our house behind.
In no particular order, here are five of them:
“The Overhang”
This is a weird one but one side of our house has an overhang meaning that there’s a about a two foot covered portion along the side of the house that created a perfect spot for year-round storage of lawn chairs, toy boxes and more that was fairly sheltered from rain, snow and even sun.
“The Counter”
We have a fairly large downstairs bathroom that doubles as our laundry room and one project Shea’s dad completed for us was installing a counter over the the length of the (front load) washer and dryer which gave an incredible amount of space for folding laundry and just storing laundry baskets. Our new house has a laundry area but it doesn’t have nearly as much room as we had in our house so I’m not sure how we’ll fold and sort laundry. (Plus since our laundry room is downstairs in our current house and on the main floor of our new one, Sasha’s really worried because she can’t “throw my laundry over the rail to downstairs anymore!”) 🙂
“The Step”
One of my dad’s contributions to our current house was to replace an aging front step. He was able to make it a bit narrower than our bulky/wide previous step, put on very nice rails and underneath created a perfect spot to store our garbage and recycling bins that we haul to the curb every week. Our new house has the bins behind a fence gate at the side of the house which is a lot less convenient than our current arrangement.
“The Storage Locker”
When we were looking for a house, one of the things that was an absolute “must” on our list was a garage. Unfortunately, we lacked the foresight (or possibly the funds) to make sure that garage was an *attached* garage. We bought a house with a detached garage that, because it was basically behind the house down a single car driveway, we rarely used – either because Shea and I couldn’t coordinate our leaving times for work or we’d risk having to shovel a long driveway in winter if we parked in it or, probably the main reason, we didn’t use it and will miss it – it basically became a huge storage shed with all kinds of toys, equipment including a lawn mower and snow blower, and tons of other crap (much of which we thankfully got rid of prepping for the move). Our new house has an attached garage and we’re really excited about actually parking inside going forward but we’re also nervous about losing a lot of the space we had for storage in our current garage.
“The Patio”
One of our earliest renos was having rubber paving put down on the patio stones along the side of our house opposite the driveway/garage. Combined with a new fence we put in a few years back, some strategic lighting and a propane barbecue, this area on the sunny south side of the house became our private sanctuary where we’d often have a drink after work, eat meals or sometimes just sit and read on a summer’s day.
I know that our new house will have many benefits (hmm, future blog post idea?) and unique features we don’t currently enjoy but it’ll be tough to try to replace some of the things we’re leaving behind as well. 🙁
I think I’ve probably posted this old viral video before but as we prep to move into our new house, it felt appropriate for a few reasons – the title “Home” obviously but also for how it reminds me of Sasha who’s increasingly into music and has taken to making up her own songs to sing!
We moved to a newer part of the same community we’ve lived in for fifteen years. In fact, our new house is only about ten blocks from our current house (and shorter as the crow flies)!
Because of this, the kids won’t have to change schools (a major consideration in our decision.) Not only that but their walk to school is also almost exactly the same distance as it was from our current place. The school is basically halfway between our current house and our new house.
We decided to not make our offer conditional on our house selling. It might be stressful to float two mortgages for a bit but since we had a large part of the mortgage on our current house paid off already, it made it sense to not feel pressure to sell just to get moving on plans for our new place.
This has also allowed us to have a more leisurely timeline for everything – we have two weeks between possession and actually moving in which gives a lot of time for contractors, moving stuff and getting organized, furniture delivery, etc. etc.
Even though it adds to our costs up front, we chose to hire painters, cleaners, and various other contractors before we actually moved to our new house to make it as as close to a “new” house as possible when we move in. (There’s also a cost-saving to doing this work in an empty house versus people having to work around your furniture/toys/general mess in a few years or whatever.)
We also chose to hire movers instead of doing it ourselves (been there, done that!) but also to rent a BigSteelBox so we could still move a lot of smaller boxes/easier to carry stuff and leave the awkward/heavy stuff for the movers.
We were also very fortunate to be able to put down enough of a down payment to avoid CHMC mortgage insurance requirements.
Taking possession in late November isn’t ideal but it does mean that you’re buying right around Black Friday and we expect to get some good deals if we need to buy any electronics or whatever.
It’s sad for them but fortunate for us – a long-time local institution – Alford’s Floors and Interiors – is going out of business so we saved thousands buying some new living room furniture. The north Regina Lowe’s hardware store has also just started a liquidation sale so we’ve already bought a few things we needed at 20% off and expect those discounts to increase to 50% more as they get closer to the new year.
We’ve had a ton of support from both Shea’s folks and my folks – packing up our house, cleaning, doing repairs of our current house, unloading the “Big Steel Box” full of our belongings (even if it meant I had to take a lot of abuse about how many books I own) and more.
Bonus point: Speaking of furniture and stress-free, I really liked a brand of furniture that Shea found called “Stressless“. Unfortunately, their prices weren’t quite stressless, even if their design and comfort level were, so I took a pass on that particular purchase! Maybe in a few years when I’ve replenished the bank account? 😉
(Er, obviously this is a story months and really, years, in the making but I’m sure I’ll get to the full story soon. For now, I’m heading to bed after a *very* long day!)
Obviously I wasn’t at this concert but I was at Spirit of the West’s Regina show around the same time (same tour?) after John Mann’s diagnosis and this is a pretty good capture of the mixed emotions of that show – joy, sadness, awe, fear.
After announcing his Early Onset Alzheimer’s diagnosis in 2014, John Mann, lead singer and frontman of the seminal 90’s Canadiana band, Spirit of the West, embarked on a farewell tour with the band in 2014.
I’m not sure what song it was but at one point, early in the show, my eyes welled up with tears – simply from watching him dance, as he always does, with gleeful abandon, and so many thoughts hit me – how we’re all getting older, we’re all dealing with different serious issues – our own health, the health of our loved ones and everything else that life throws at us – and yet, here was a man who’s just past 50, facing a serious medical diagnosis that will make his brain and memories wilt away and yet, he’s still dancing as if he didn’t have a care in the world.
Tragically gone too soon, his songwriting was brilliant to the end:
…but the unbridled joy of his dancing which is how I’ll always remember him (you may have to fast forward to 4:04):
