Saga of a House

This is a hard post to write.

It’s hard because ever since I, a kid who grew up wearing hand-me-downs and eating canned soup and fish sticks and playing with toys that used to be my mom’s, spent six months in India at age 20, I have been more aware of my privilege than most. I’d grown up poor, so I thought.

I’d had no idea what that really meant.

Privilege. I didn’t know that’s what that awareness was called until this year. I think that’s a new term for the old sensation of recognizing that your own position in life has certain advantages that you didn’t ask for, but you definitely have, no matter what situation you were born into.

The biggest lesson I came home from India with more than twenty years ago was to be grateful, and to not complain about what I have because there are many others who have not. And also? Don’t brag about what you have either because, but for the grace of God, you may have been (or may become) a have-not.

In 2020, it seems the number of people going without is growing exponentially. People are living in unwinterized campers in local campgrounds or on the side of the road wherever they can find a patch to park. Or maybe they’re not lucky enough to have campers, or shelter of any kind.

There are always homeless people in my town, even as far north as I am. Many of them try to find warmer places to be in the winter, but they can’t always do that. Our local soup kitchen runs year-round, as far as I know.

So this post is hard because, first of all, I’m going to tell you about our new home, and I don’t want to sound as though I’m flaunting my privilege. I’m not. I am so, so grateful that we have been blessed enough to be able to do this, and I have lived a long time by “making do” in various circumstances, so I know this isn’t a privilege to be taken for granted.

Second of all, the process to get this far has had challenges, and the challenges have been stressful. The stress hasn’t stopped, and won’t stop soon—not until we’re done setting up the house and renovating and moving in and have time to really settle and feel at home.*

Again, I’m grateful. I know I’m blessed.

And I can’t wait for this whole thing to just be done already.

The Road to Here

We were blessed when we moved to this property in the country. We bought it for cheap, so cheap, off my step-dad, who had bought the quarter and subdivided it. Normally, that means you can make a lot of money because each piece nearly doubles in price the smaller it gets. (Why is that? Real estate is weird.) But we got to buy it for what he paid for it. (Thanks, Mike!)

We got a loan, paid cash for a crappy old mobile home from 1970s, moved it onto the property, and have been happily living here ever since for a fraction of the cost of the house we once owned in town with three or four times the square footage.

Okay, maybe not completely happily.

That first mobile home was in pretty bad shape. It had been around the block—literally—a time or two, and had some leakage issues. Within months of moving in there, Noah (who was five at the time) developed a dry cough that wouldn’t go away. It was winter by then, so we thought it was just some kind of cold. But when it was still hanging on nine months later (the following summer), we began to suspect something was up.

Jason also got hospitalized with pneumonia during that time, and almost died.

So we tested for mold. The test grew so many pretty colours so quickly that it was a wonder the place wasn’t growing mold on the walls, not just in them.

It was the following spring before we were able to find a home to replace it. The “new” mobile home, which we still live in, was almost the same age (if not exactly the same, I don’t remember) as the one we were in, but it had only had one owner who had loved it very much, it had only been moved once, and it was slightly bigger (bonus!).

The sellers gave us a pretty good deal on the place and we got it moved onto our property with minimal trouble and fuss in the middle of summer. By the time the snow flew, we were warm and snug in our new mold-free home—though we’d blown our savings to do it.

The new place was a huge improvement over the previous one, but there were still issues related to age and size. The windows rattle in the wind and let in plenty of cold air on a winter’s night. The walls are thin and poorly insulated, so there is always a draft in winter and in summer, a moderately warm, sunny day outside can mean inside temperatures reach well over 30 degree Celsius** (that’s 86 Fahrenheit for you Americans).

Our boys were sharing two very small rooms that got more cramped the older they got. And the addition has been developing more and more leakage problems despite repairing and shingling the roof and really needs to be replaced altogether—not exactly an inexpensive project.

We’d never intended for the mobile home to be a long-term solution, but limited income meant that saving up for the house we meant to build someday would take a very, very long time. Especially since an older place like this required more money to maintain and repair than something new.

In the meantime, I kinda fell in love with it. Even my husband, who used to get a certain distaste in his mouth at having to live in a mobile home, grew accustomed to it.

I think he would have been fine with staying in it, too, if it weren’t for those aforementioned expensive-to-repair issues. And when you repair a mobile home, it’s not an investment. You don’t make that money back when you sell—which is fine, if you don’t mean to sell. But we’ve always kept our feelers out for opportunities to move back to where the larger portion of our families live (an attitude which hasn’t changed), so whatever money we put in, we would like to make back and then some at some point.

So, every spring, we’d start looking at options to either improve our current house or buy a new one. Every couple years, it seemed, we’d go looking at places to move here to see if we could find a deal. But in the end, we just couldn’t justify the expense of either option. There wasn’t enough wiggle room in our budget, and we couldn’t agree on the best course of action, either.

The 2020 Chapter Begins

This spring, the cycle began again. This time, though, there was a difference—for the first time ever, I was earning enough of an income that we had options open to us that had never been possible before.

Not a lot more options. But definitely some.

In early March, I approached Jason about the idea of finally replacing our addition. It had been warm enough to start melting snow from the frequent spring storms off the roof, and there were a couple soft spots in the ceiling tiles in my office—one of which is directly above my monitor—that were making me nervous. I kept waiting for the whole thing to come crashing down on me during the next good melt.

A day after we started that discussion, Jason found a house for sale on Kijiji. It wasn’t terribly far away, relatively speaking, and the price was not quite within our range, but maybe we could convince the seller to come down a bit.

We booked a viewing. And almost the same day, lockdown hit in Canada.

We looked at the new house in late March. There were some things about it I didn’t love, but which Jason assured me we could renovate to improve. And the seller was, indeed, flexible with his price, as well as being very accommodating in assisting us in whatever way possible.

We ended up deciding to purchase the home, thinking we’d have it moved and in our yard by mid-summer, giving us plenty of time to complete setup and to renovate and move in long before winter.

But we’ve never been in a lockdown before. We had no idea what we were dealing with.

This project has been riddled with delay after delay. While a couple of those delays were our fault because of steps in the process that needed to be completed while we were both so slammed at work we barely had time to sleep, most of them were the fault of the bank and the general craziness the whole world was getting accustomed to during lockdown.

I’ll spare you the miserable details of all that went wrong to get this far. But by the time September rolled around and we were still waiting to hear if our financing was even approved (and the seller was getting antsy, too), we were about ready to throw in the towel.

It was close. We almost did back out. But finally, in the first week of October, the financing came through.

Aside for context:

If you’re reading this from a part of the world where you don’t understand my climate, let me illuminate you as to what it’s like.

I live in northern Alberta. Sir Alexander Mackenzie travelled through here along the Peace River in pursuit of the Northwest Passage that would give a water route to the Arctic Ocean. Winter typically lasts six months a year, beginning almost like clockwork on October 30 and finally melting off and getting warm enough to strip to a warm sweater in April—but there are always exceptions, such as winter starting October 14 and having major blizzards on the third or fourth weekend of May. There is almost always hard frost on June 1 and the first weekend of September.

There have been years since I moved here that this week we’re in right now has seen temperatures of -40 and a huge pile of snow on the ground.

We had no idea, in early October, that the weather wouldn’t be exactly the same this year. The Farmer’s Almanac is predicting a snowy, cold winter. Whee.

End of aside.

Jason’s stress has been through the roof, and knowing that the project was going to go ahead after all in mid-October wasn’t actually a relief. Now he had to worry about getting the house here, running the utilities to the new location, coordinating contractors, and getting skirting on (it’s a manufactured home plus addition which will be welded to screw piles, with a fair amount of crawl space beneath the house) before it was too cold to even work outside.

But the project has trudged on with jolting, irregular steps.

On October 23, the screw piles for the main house went in. The contractor said this was the hardest ground he ever drilled into—our house won’t be moving at all. He later came back with a higher-powered drill and only got these a little deeper before his welder cut them off and capped them evenly.

We grow rocks here. It’s what we do.

October 25: Jason digging the trench for the sewer and water lines. Our neighbour, Brian Stanley, also brought over his little Kubota tractor to help.

October 29: Water and sewer mostly finished. Whew! Screw piles have been drilled a little deeper by this point too.

View of the waterline work from a different window, included so you can see the derelict mold-filled trailer husk we wish we could just burn down and be done with in the background. Anyone looking for some scrap metal and want to take it off our hands? (The blue Styrofoam is to insulate the house skirting.)

Same view, morning of October 30. Right on schedule. Fortunately, it didn’t stay for long. Yay! God was looking out for us.

Monday, November 3: The day the movers, Jason, and Brian were at the seller’s doing the final prep for the house to be moved—taking the two pieces apart, etc. Meanwhile back at the ranch, the screw piles have been cut and capped and the snow has melted. Yay!

Last Wednesday morning (after an icy rain the night before), the first piece arrived—the main house. There was still a large addition to bring from the seller’s land nearly 150 km away, and the next day was spent in putting the main house on blocks at our place before the house movers headed back to the seller’s location.

Thursday morning, my phone alerted me that there was a winter storm warning for that evening until the next morning—lots of snow and driving winds. The movers had the addition here by that night anyway—but it was covered in road grime and ice from the storm and had lost quite a few shingles along the way. It was late and dark—there was no way any more work would be done that night. Which meant we couldn’t get gas and power put in until Monday at the earliest.

On Friday, they managed to get the main house on the screw piles and welded down to the caps, and they lined up the addition to move it onto the screw piles, but left it on the trailer.

Then the movers decided to finish the job on Monday and go home to see their families for the first time all week. Understandable, but we’ve been looking at this project all weekend, which we can’t hook up to the heat and power and water until the whole thing is put together. It’s too cold in there for me to even wash walls in it to prep for painting.

How everything looked when I got home from town Friday night. I don’t think this snow is going anywhere. Winter has begun in earnest.

So we’re waiting again.

In addition, the weather is going south quickly. South in the sense of getting worse, not getting warmer. (We wish!) So some or most of those renovations we’d wanted to do may have to wait until next summer, if they happen at all.

However, I’m still going to paint. We definitely need to build some storage closets—one of the house’s main flaws is that in all that space (it’s about double the floor space of our current house, most of which is a large living room), there was almost no storage available. The only way I’ve managed in a small house this long is by using ample storage and organization, so that’s obviously a fatal flaw that will need to be remedied. Our stored stuff still has to go somewhere.

But when we’re done, we will finally, finally have two bathrooms. And a guest bedroom for the first time in thirteen years (when it’s not occupied by our oldest son during brief sojourns home). We can finally host overnight company and not feel guilty for making them sleep on an air mattress in our living room. Yay!

So there we are. We hope to be moving in within a month. And even though it’s literally just next door, moving out of here causes distress on its own. I love my house, which I’ve worked very hard to make into a home. It’s going to be a long time before this new place feels that way.

But still I’m grateful. However, if you don’t see regular posts from me in the next little while, you’ll know why.

And, for those who are wondering about my mom (see “A Season of Transitions”), she’s starting to feel a little better, thanks to the natural treatments and measures she’s undergoing. She’ll be getting a laparoscopy (her appendix removed, along with the largest mass) in a week, and they’ll be exploring to see how far the cancer has spread at that point. That will tell them exactly what they’re dealing with and will determine the kind of treatment she will have going forward. Thank you for all your kind words and prayers. She appreciates them, and so do I.

If you read to the end, I hope you were at least somewhat entertained by my trials and foibles. One of the things I’m looking forward to is updating the colour scheme of my surroundings—I’ve been wanting to paint my house for almost three years, but it’s difficult to make that project work when you live in a space and a life so jammed full.

While I’ve waited for the house to be ready, I’ve been looking through paint colours.

Colour is awesome. I love it.

I love choosing paint. So much fun. Can’t wait to see how it all looks when we’re done!

More updates to come.

Happy wee-hours-in-the-morning Monday!

*I think the test for this is when you can cook an entire meal and not have to wonder where the new “spot” for that thing you need is a single time. Or maybe when you finally unpack the last box. Not sure which.

**At a certain point, our thermometer stops measuring, so I don’t know exactly how much over. It gets hot, okay? Like, my-computer-shuts-down-on-its-own hot.