We searched and we searched….
Sorry for the delay in updating the blog. We have been very busy looking at houses.
We had our house valued by a three agents and all came up with the same price, so it must be about right. We are very pleased as the price is actually more than we thought, which is always a bonus. It seems that the work we have put into the house, especially the basement being almost finished and the granite in the kitchen has paid off. One of the agents who came round was originally from Scotland and another from Germany, so us immigrants get everywhere!
We spent Friday night on the computer looking for possible houses to buy. Because we are not tied down to one area we ended up looking at places as far west as Port Hope/Rice Lake to Prescott to the east. We spent hours driving round all the properties and viewing them from the outside to see if we wanted to progress to viewing the inside.
This is a definite bonus of actually living here. When we came in April last year to view houses before landing, we had an endless list of properties, all of which our fantastic realtor booked us in to see. Many of which we knew were wrong as soon as we saw them from the outside. Now we are here we can drive around at our leisure and know instantly if we like it or not from the outside. This cuts out lots of wasted time on our part and the realtors.
One house we saw from the outside and liked turned out to be absolutely enormous on the inside. The land was great as it was four acres and lots of it woodland, so that was great, but the interior of the house would have needed major modernising and quite a bit of money spending on it. It was so huge that if I had started cleaning it, I think I would just about have finished it before needing to start all over again. The owners of the house were also from the UK and had moved to Canada fifty years ago. We had a lovely chat with them, so not all was wasted.
By the end of Monday night we had spend three days driving literally hundreds of km in search of a house and fund none that we felt good enough about to take further. Today I phoned the realtor who we will use to sell with to explain that we dare not put our house on the market for fear of not finding a suitable house to buy.
She said that we are now approaching the slower time in real estate in Canada and we might be better to wait until the spring when the market picks up. People here tend to put houses on the market in the spring after the snows giving then time to sell and buy during the summer holidays. This way then end up moving during the kids holidays and the kids can start new schools etc if needed in September.
We will keep our eyes open, but have put moving on a semi-backburner for now.
All our animals are still keeping us entertained. Thanks for the comments about them all and the warnings of us getting too friendly with them, we just can’t help it though.
Our very bold chipmunk is now quite happy to sit with us on the front step and we no longer have to feed him at arms length. He just comes right up to us and is not bothered at all. Several other chips are getting closer, but won’t quite take from our hands yet.
We are waiting to see chipmunk and squirrel babies, which apparently will be coming out soon. We may have already seen some, but we are not sure how much smaller they are from the adults, so it is hard to say.
Most of the grackle babies have now gone their own way, as are the blue jays. We have one lovely baby cardinal who eats at our place most days. He is a pink colour as his red colour will develop over time.
