a smug detective

In just over two weeks we will be moving! Finally, we are confident that we will own our own house soon. We have been camping, staying with friends, or staying with family for over eight months now. The changing of the seasons has been melancholic, because each change represents a chunk of time that has gone by while we still haven't accomplished our goal.

What were we thinking??!

Actually, I know what we were thinking. We were thinking that it would be cool to take a super-long road trip all around the continent (and it was). After that, we were thinking that we could buy a place with only a bit of stress and no heartache, in a reasonable amount of time. Alas! You should all send sympathy cards to my poor parents who had dealt with us for so very long.

Anyway I've done some real, concrete things to get ready to move, like calling to set up utilities and junk. It's exciting to have made it to this stage without disaster striking.

Every time I call someone in the town of Bridgetown (where we are moving to) I find I'm talking to a really nice, friendly person. It bodes very well and it's awesome! Like, I phoned the post office to set up delivery, and the girl I talked to was funny and chatty. She told me to pop in once we were physically there, but when I asked her where the post office was she was surprised. I had to explain to her that I wasn't from there, and she found it hilarious that I didn't know where anything in Bridgetown was. She gave me the address for the post office, and their address on Court Street is: 2. But don't worry, there is no number one, so I'll see it, she tells me. As though if there was more than one building I would get confused! Two. I love it.

I'm bracing myself for some annoyances when we do finally move. The current owner of the house seems to have treated it like a rental property - there's obviously been no upkeep done in the two years she has owned the place, and there are things she SHOULD be doing that I strongly suspect we'll have to deal with as soon as we get there. When we viewed the place in late summer, all of the storm windows were stacked in the basement. I'm willing to bet that, even with the sub-zero weather we've been getting, they haven't been put on the windows. I suspect the yard will look like a hayfield and will need to be mowed over before the snow hits. I'm CERTAIN I will have to scrub every surface of every room, which I'm willing to live with, but if the place smells distinctly of cat poo I'm going to put up a stink. Get it??! Ha! Ahem. Sorry.

Mark thinks I'm being mean by assuming all that stuff about the current owner, but I can't help it. Have I mentioned that we found out she's on the welfare brand of mortgages, for people who 'may have had bad credit in the past'? I had predicted something to that effect before we found out, and when we saw the mortgage information I felt very satisfied that I'd guessed correctly. Mark told me I was mean to be smug about the fact that she's got a "special" mortgage, but in my defense I am really only smug about the fact that I deduced correctly! Really!

In all honesty I'm not hoping for anything bad to happen to the current owner or anything. I'm happy that she was selling her house right when we wanted to buy it, and if she is respectful enough to leave it in a decent state when she vacates, I will write about it here and then Mark will be smug.

Views of the Valley

I have nothing heavy to talk about. Weather near Truro has been cold but very nice. The sun is shiny and the fallen leaves are crunchy (haven't experienced that in about six years).

We might sell our travel trailer, the mighty Yukon Ho.

Anyway here are some pics.

Communities near Bridgetown:


This is a view from across the Annapolis River, looking at the very quaint town of Annapolis Royal.


Below is a field in the Granville Beach area, near Annapolis Royal.


I know the sign in this next picture is blurry, but I liked the trees and clouds so much that I had to post it anyway. For those of you who care, the sign is for Bridgetown and Paradise.


This next one is not from the valley. I don't know how I missed posting this one for you guys. It's from months ago when we were in the states - somewhere in New England. BEHOLD:


Love it!

Cuckoo

Don't worry! There's nothing wrong with our current real estate deal, other than the fact that the owner doesn't seem to know or care where her own property lines are. Not a big deal in my books. Just tiring, dealing with the Mental Defective League.

The trouble lies with our previous real estate deal - that gem with no Occupancy Permit and a basement that is slowly buckling in on itself and taking the rest of the house with it. Most of you will know that when you make an offer on a house and it's accepted, you usually have to give a $1,000 deposit to the listing office to hold in trust. We did that; we've been chasing the listing agent for our money ever since the deal was terminated; and the bad news is, we still don't have our deposit back. The good news is that the seller doesn't have it either. They have to sign a form before our money is released to us, and they haven't done it yet. It's not that they said they wouldn't release it to us; they just haven't made up their minds yet. I guess two months is just not enough time to thoroughly consider the matter. (Another member of the Mental Defective League I guess.)

SO... today I called the Real Estate Commission to see if there's anything we can do. The guy I talked to was really nice and he called the broker, who is the person at the listing office who is in charge of the money that gets put into trust. They promised him that they would have an answer either way by the end of the day tomorrow.

Here are the scenarios:

1. The people who own that house sign the form we sent them ages ago, and we get our deposit back.

2. They refuse to sign the form we sent them ages ago, and we take them to court to get our money back. Hopefully, this means they will be forced to travel to Nova Scotia (they are from the States).

I can hear you all asking: 'How are you not going crazy, Julie?'

OH, BUT I AM.

Wentworth

On Thanksgiving weekend Mark and I went with my parents to "Ski Wentworth", one of the few places in Nova Scotia to go downhill skiing. At least nobody's calling it a mountain.


It's not ski season yet, but the famous fall colours are here and you're allowed to go up the chair lift and hike back down. The views were really nice. We noticed that lots of people were there with mountain bikes - that would be lots of fun too, assuming you don't fall off the chair lift while wrestling with your bike.



I was a bit worried about my mom getting near a chair lift, but she made it.


That was a couple of weeks ago, and I have to say it's getting COLD here lately. Last time I checked, there was snow in the forecast for tomorrow. We've had to trade our fall jackets for warmer gear and there's been heavy frost most nights that doesn't melt until mid-morning. Arlo the wonder-dog is perfectly happy with the changing weather, but poor shrimpy Oliver is IN FOR IT once the real cold weather hits. He has no idea.

Special Request

Kristina has asked for more details about the house we are buying. This post is for her! (But the rest of you can read it too.)

The house is over 100 years old and is, like I said, in Bridgetown. The property has a really decent area to put a vegetable garden and also has lots of trees and bushes and stuff on it. Here's a picture of the very back of the back yard - you can see the graveyard behind it.


Here's a picture of the house from the back yard - Mark is kind of standing where the garden will start.


The place is definitely a fixer-upper, which is what we were looking for, but recent owners (NOT the current one) did lots of renovations, including this giant bathroom on the second floor:


and in the giant bathroom they put a giant jacuzzi tub:


which makes me happy.

Bridgetown is a small town; probably 1000 people live there. There are at least two pizza shops and one Tim Hortons. Oh, and guess what, west coast people? I'm pretty sure there's not a Starbucks within 150 kilometres of this place.

Anyway that part of Nova Scotia is extremely beautiful, will rolling pastoral farms, treed hills and valleys that are gold and red with Autumn leaves these days, views of the Bay of Fundy as well as the Annapolis River (which is a two minute walk from the house), and of course, colourful historic buildings everywhere.

Some of you may not know that Mark and I met in the Annapolis Valley. We both went to Acadia University, which is in Wolfville.

Anyway, more about the house. Here's the kitchen.


Here's the woodstove, which is between the kitchen and the dining area.


That's probably all the pictures you'll see of this place until a month from now, and then I'm sure I'll be frenetically posting dozens of pictures of the mess that we create when we move in, and then when we start trying to change and fix things.

Housewarming Tequila bender TBA.

Switcheroo!

I have a confession.

I've kept a secret from most of you.

Remember the Halloween House, that the lady didn't have listed on the market but said she'd sell if the agent brought her someone who would buy it? Well... she lied. We negotiated verbally and mutually agreed on a price, but when Mark and I signed the paperwork, the seller asked us to post-date our offer by a week to give her a chance to clear up some personal things. We were NOT happy about post-dating anything, but we knew we wouldn't have the time to look at any other properties for a week, so we went ahead and did it.

She didn't sell. We were not amused. Although the real estate agent remained diplomatic, I got the impression that she was not amused either.

SO... while we had been waiting for news either way about that offer, we had scheduled a grueling day of house viewings in anticipation of disaster. Disaster happened, so three days after we heard back that the first lady would not sell her house, we drove about 700 km throughout one day to view nine different houses.

It was a bit of an information overload, and it actually was a very very difficult decision, but after talking about it we went with a beautiful heritage house in the middle of the small town of Bridgetown in the Annapolis Valley. It's a place that we would both be very comfortable and at home in, and it also aligns very closely to what we agreed our criteria would be for buying.


Here's an shot of the front hallway and stairs. I've professionally photoshopped out the current owner's junk:

So I'm sorry that I kept you all in the dark. I was beginning to feel that this blog had turned into a "watch Julie & Mark fail to buy houses" blog, and I just didn't feel like talking about it any more until there was finally something certain.

Now, what would REALLY be a kicker is if this deal miraculously fell apart at the last minute!! We've already had the inspection and there are really no other conditions to be met, so anything that happens at this point to kill the deal would be shocking. So I guess it would make good reading material for you guys, but let's not hope for anything bad, shall we?

So why do they call it Bridgetown? I'm assuming it's because of these two beautiful bridges that span the Annapolis River -

this one below is for cars:

and this one here used to be for trains and is now for a hiking trail that has been created over the old train tracks. It goes for miles and miles, and is a two minute walk from the house we are buying:

The end is in sight.

*sigh*.

not the point

Yesterday morning we found ourselves witness to a beautiful, red-tinged sunrise while driving along the highway. I looked over and watched a huge yet slender-looking wind turbine on the horizon, turning silently in the red sunrise.

I told Mark that that had to be the most elegant renewable power source I could think of. He was silent a minute, and then said "what about if you harnessed two distant objects in the universe together and generated energy from the outward expansion of those objects away from each other, that originated with the big bang?" or something along those lines.

All I wanted to say was that the wind turbines were pretty.