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.

Kyle Comes Calling

Hurricane Kyle has come and gone. The most damage it did in our neighbourhood was to knock over one of the porta-potties that the snowmobile racing people left in the field down the road. Ewwww...

I guess there were some trees down and some minor flooding along the southern coast of the province, and a bunch of people are without power, but Kyle mostly behaved himself.


In other news, sighs of relief will be heard throughout the country tomorrow when the telemarketing Do-Not-Call List takes effect. Now this is something I can really get behind - I mean, who actually WANTS telemarketers to call? Well, I guess there's my friend Martin, who seems to have a talent for making friends with telemarketers. Once he answered the phone in my house and ended up with the personal home address of a girl in the Bahamas. I am taking creative license because this conversation took place a few years ago, but it went thusly:

TELEMARKETER: Good afternoon sir, I'd like to tell you about my product that blah blah blah....

MARTIN (interrupting): What's your name?

T: My name is Amy. Our product is something you can't live without because blah blah blah...

M: Where are you from?

(telemarketer keeps talking, ignores question, Martin repeats it.)

T: ...uh, Bahamas. Our product-

M: What's the weather like there right now? It's sunny here.

T: It's very nice here today sir.

M: I've never been there. Do you guys get winter?

That was it. She didn't stand a chance. They chatted for a while about this and that, and Martin asked her for her address so he could send her a postcard. I don't think he ever ended up writing to her, but I'd like to think that he brightened her day. I admire his utter enjoyment of other human beings - I never have the patience to try and crack the shell like I've seen him do with strangers.

ANYWAY. Do-Not-Call list for Canada. Go to their website or call 1-866-580-3625 to sign up starting September 30.

Underwhelming

There's a field down the road that we walk past every day with the dogs. It's an empty field that I've never seen a sign of human life at - until this week.

Early in the week, mowers came out and mowed it until it looked spiffy. A few days later a little hut on wheels appeared in the middle of the field. A day after that, men in pickup trucks brought three or four more little huts, and some bright orange temporary fencing that they put up all over the place.

After all that work, the field was ready to do its duty. Today, a great many country folk showed up towing trailers full of snowmobiles!! Some sort of non-snow snowmobile race took place, and you can bet we went and gawked for a while. There were a lot of gawkers - tons of people were buzzing around the general area on ATVs, bicycles, and horses. I noticed this teensy tiny ATV beside one of the snowmobiles - cute, huh?


It was actually not quite as much fun as I had hoped - I mean, people racing snowmobiles without any snow? That has a lot of potential in my books. But nobody crashed or got drunk and rowdy, alas. If you find it exciting to watch snowmobiles rip up grass and dirt for approximately ten seconds per race, well, that was all that happened.


I got some pictures anyway.

A Fell Wind

So word around the neighbourhood is that the tropical storm/hurricane we are expecting this weekend might be worse than Hurricane Juan was a few years back. (Non-Nova Scotians: Juan decimated parts of the province, ripping up roads, smashing cars with trees, and destroying large sections of the waterfront.)

But... I find it extremely hard to take a hurricane seriously when it's named KYLE. It's like, it should be teaching the other hurricanes to play tennis or re-decorating their houses for them. Oh Kyle, with your peppy back-hand and your instinctive sense of style, please don't tip over my travel trailer!

Kyle.

Sheesh.

So anyway, Tropical Storm Kyle, or possibly Hurricane Kyle by the time it gets here, is coming to visit. I don't really care because I can't possibly take it seriously. Am I the only one that feels this way?