We Bought A House!

So, so we bought a house?!

Okay, I’m going to take us well back (yes I know the blog is a year behind but loads of things happened okay?! Wow that punctuation seems a bit aggressive).

For those who want to be more current, I highly recommend you follow Autistic On The Range on Facebook, Instagram, and Tik Tok. Shameless self-promotion, I know. We also try to stream on twitch from time to time at twitch.tv/phoenixdog.

I’m leaving it to Shawn to actually describe the journey. It is a blur of vomiting and driving for me to be entirely honest. That will be a blog posted after this one.

First of all, just as a word of warning to anyone doing what we did. Buying a house sight unseen 2000kms from home in a pandemic is an exercise in how to give yourself cardiac distress. Fortunately I had been researching and working towards this for nearly 6 years by this point. I had multiple realtors in the areas we were interested in (not on contract, but excellent wonderful people who were very kind in keeping in touch with me), but we got the very, very best recommendation of Lynn Colpitts who turned into my absolute saviour. I still text her when I need recommendations for things.

So the thrill began in mid-August when we put in our first official offer on a house in Economy, NS. The video showing was lovely, but it was definitely at the upper end of our budget. The seller was a bit grumpy and would not budge on price. Unfortunately the home inspection was *simply awful* and we didn’t have an extra hundred something thousand dollars laying around to do the work we’d need to make it year round liveable. So we opted to collapse the deal. This was also a good thing as that home would have been reliant on my cousin moving in with us, and given it is now March and he’s still “not sure”, I’m rather glad the pricey home did not become the one we bought.

We learned we were ready though. My in-laws had helped us tremendously to make sure we could pull the trigger when it was time. Seriously we would not be here without them.

Now I had the bug. I knew the process, the paperwork, how quickly things could move.

Then our place listed.

This place I had looked at a year and a half prior when it was on the market before. I had cried about not being able to move on it as it seemed to be a *very very* good fit. I spent all day every day with viewpoint open on my phone, refreshing it at least twice hourly, in case something new listed. SIX MINUTES after this place listed I was on the phone to the realtor. All I could squeak out was “Lynn I need you to get us this place, this is the one!”

The following morning she rushed out to show us the place over video call and we had the offer together the same day. We knew we’d be in competition as this place is incredible. Four bedrooms, one bath, 12+ acres, close to town but not *too* close. Hindsight being what it is we’re pretty glad for the proximity given current fuel prices.

Shawn and I sat in the icky basement apartment while Lynn took us through this house. We didn’t necessarily know everything; I couldn’t get my hands on anything in the house. I knew there would be some surprises (It’s going to take us years to work out some of the surprises), but the house looked well, and it was just as I had hoped it would be.

We knew we needed to put a condition on the water test and the septic as those are big ticket items to solve, but we opted to drop the inspection condition as we knew it had been recently renovated and we knew we’d be in competition. Apparently we were one of 5 offers that were in within 48 hours of the house listing. We had the highest offer, but we had some conditions and we just hoped it would be enough.

Spoiler: It obviously was.

Turns out the septic *was* an issue and we asked for 5k to come off the asking price. Fortunately they were good with that and we could use that to replace the septic after we landed.

We were in process of buying a house we’d never ever seen, farther away from home Shawn had ever been. We’ve never been ones to do things the typical way, right? So we just unabashedly dove in as we do. At that point what else is there to do? Shawn had a job offer, we had a mover, and we had a house.

The heartbreak of the situation was still being in global panini protocols, which meant saying goodbye to people was going to be more difficult than anticipated. Our goodbye hugs to friends were often the first time we’d so much as touched them in nearly 2 years. I never had any qualms about moving *locations* but I wasn’t quite ready for how rough leaving my special people would be. To be fair it’s been almost seven months and I’m still not terribly okay with it. In all honesty, huge relief that my brother-in-law Caleb has a podcast. I played and replayed episodes (especially ones with Ryan and Nikki) over and over for company on the road and to feel like I wasn’t a million miles from everyone I knew and loved. I’m sure I’ll go into more detail about that on another entry, and I’m not going to talk move logistics, that’s Shawn’s department.

Skipping forward to the actual days of moving.

On our drive, as we left the gates of Canadian Forces Base Gagetown behind as the sun was rising in the riot of colours you can only see in the Maritimes, I picked up the phone and called Shawn. We were now farther east than he had ever been. He picked up the phone and said, “Yeah, I’m okay, are you okay?”

I was also okay, but wanted to know what he thought about where he was. “I thought it too,” he said, “I’m the furthest I’ve ever been and just trusting the process.”

I couldn’t say much more than, “Thank you for trusting me.”

After some fiddling around with the toll pass and changing directions we managed to make it to our closing walkthrough only 10 minutes late, which is half an hour early according to Mari-time I have learned. We had some moments on the way of tracing the route of the mass shooter not a year and a half prior, and seeing the memorials sprinkled along the way. We were already well in our feelings and this decidedly added to it. Shawn had been leading the whole way, but he pulled over before the final stretch so I could take us home. In my nerves I didn’t really stop to chat, I was worried about being late, totally missed his romantic moment of wanting to savour it, but I was on a mission. I’m pretty infamous for missing the emotional moments because there are things to do and I am focused.

To be honest, it didn’t matter what the house looked like at closing. We were already here and our things were on their way. The walkthrough was a formality. We dropped some things that were crowding the car into the house (much to the other realtor’s annoyance, but that’s another tale for another time. The guinea pigs needed to get out of the car). In all the bluster it didn’t really feel real. We had to go from the walkthrough and immediately run into town to go do the paperwork and finish that off. The lawyer was an absolute saint who dealt with the other realtor for us. We then went to Canadian Tire, Dollarama, and got Groceries for a massive shop with some very discombobulated dogs. We rushed back to the house because as it turned out the internet installer beat us to the house and needed us to sign papers. I had a moment of unadulterated pride in us for organizing having everything ready to go as we moved in. We also had already ordered a king size bed from Leon’s since we wouldn’t have our belongings until the following day. In hindsight we were accommodated to the max by our movers to get there literally the day after we closed, we’ve heard some absolute horror stories since.

We emptied out the cars fully as the internet was being installed and let the dogs stretch their legs and have a drink and set the cat up in another room so she could acclimatise after two long days in the car. We picked some cupboards and rooms to throw some things into so it almost looked like someone lived there. Then we and the dogs piled back in to go get the bed. I think we were the last people through the store, and had some problems with the debit due to all the shopping and such, but we managed to get that sorted after much stressing. We had also bought a set of straps in the earlier shopping so we could put the mattress on the car.

Stop and think about that for a moment. We strapped a king sized bed and twin box springs to the roof of my Jetta Wagon, in what was surely the most ridiculous thing I’ve ever strapped to a car.

Despite my exhaustion I was now determined that I was going to drive the bed home. The amount of cell phones taking pictures of our chaos was comical. I made a few people mad because I wasn’t sure if you could turn right on a red in NS and there was a spider web of one way streets to get to the back roads to go home.

Yup, to go HOME. We went slow with a giant wing of a mattress on top of the car and pulled over a lot to let people pass. Even the cows in the fields were looking at us oddly, very unsure what this flapping mass was on their road.

We backed up to the door of the master bedroom. I thought it was funny how many exterior doors were on the house, until winter when the snow and the drifts told us very much WHY you have lots of exterior doors on a Nova Scotia house. We managed to load in and set up so we’d at least have somewhere to sleep. We had blankets and a new dog bed for the boys so we knew we were set for our first night.

There is something indescribable about the unmitigated exhaustion of all of that, I can’t describe the blackness of sleep that night, which was abruptly disrupted by the wonderfully early arrival of our things the next morning.

We’d made it. We’d done the thing.  

We bought a house.