It’s been a while since I posted anything, and that’s because life has moved very quickly in the last three weeks.
One of the things our two months in England confirmed for us was that we want to live somewhere where we’re less dependent on the car to run errands. The second thing was that we could quite happily live in a bungalow, and the third was that we really liked not being responsible for the lawn and garden. We’d thought it was time to leave this old two-storey rural house, with its quarter-acre of lawn and garden, 10 miles from anywhere: what England told us is that we were right.
We always said we’d move before it was too late, when we could make the choice. We came home, spent some time wandering around neighbourhoods in the university town north of us that we know well and love. We narrowed it down to two, and then to one. And yesterday, we bought a house.
It’s not quite a bungalow, in that it has a bedroom and ensuite on a second floor, but we don’t need to use those except for guests, or, for the foreseeable future, as BD’s study. It’s a 10 minute walk to the university’s arboretum, for walking and birding; a 15 minute walk (or 5 minutes on the bike) to the university library, where I like to work, a ten-minute walk to a grocery store, on quiet back roads. We can bike downtown, to movies, to lunch, to the arts centre, to the bookstore, to the summer outdoor concerts.
While we own the house, and can do what we like with it, indoors and out, we don’t own the land it sits on: the university does. So we pay, effectively, condo fees – and for that we get the lawn and garden taken care of, the snow ploughed and shovelled to our front steps, and the use of a large and well-equipped recreation centre. Or, as BD put it yesterday, to be permanently on vacation.
It’s ours in just less than two months, assuming all goes well with the inspection and the bridge financing – we have to get the existing house on the market, but there’s a bit of work to be done yet. The new house needs its interior walls painted and a few other cosmetic bits and pieces. One thing for sure, this adventure over the next couple of months – as we try to do this as mindfully as possible, fitting what we already own into the new house, figuring out what we really need (like a new bed), disposing of what we don’t – will give me plenty to write about!
Random Ramblings 