The Homeowner, Part 2

Houses are money pits. It’s not their fault; it’s their nature. I suppose I still would have bought my house had I known how expensive it would be. It’s equity, after all. Don’t get me wrong; I’m not stupid; I knew it would be expensive. I knew we had to put a sizable down on it, to reduce the years we would need to pay for it (interest rates were about six percent back then, far better than the sixteen when I graduated, but six percent still made for fairly big payments); and I knew we had a lot of furniture to buy, considering neither Bev nor I had much of anything. What I didn’t realize was all the other stuff we had to buy too.

We were lucky in that we were able to buy much of our first furniture from the prior owners. That saved us a lot of money. And we were able to buy some discontinued floor models from the furniture stores, saving us a bundle more.

We were very lucky in that my parents bought us a used snow blower as our house-warming gift. It was also my birthday gift and my Christmas gift that year.

We were not so lucky in much else. There was a lawnmower to buy, rakes and shovels and deck furniture. And a barbeque. And utensils for the barbeque. There were can openers, there were pots and pans and utensils and cutlery. Spices! There were sheets, and pillows and headboards and skirts. And there were phones and cable and utilities to connect. I really don’t think either of us realized just how much there was to do when setting up your first house.

There were the big expenses, to: there were taxes, there was insurance.

That left little for food. I jest, but that’s what it felt like. Jeff was rightly amused one day by the thinness of fast-fry steaks I’d bought to barbeque, but when one is on a budget, one must scrimp where one must save. But food was a must.

That left even less for vacations. Maybe we ought to have skipped one that year, but we didn't. We did go to Manitoulin that year in September. It didn’t cost much, just the gas and the groceries, and we’d have bought those, either way.

Summer became autumn, the leaves paled, green to yellow and then spotted brown, falling, becoming brittle and crunching underfoot. Winds shifted from West to North. The first snows lit upon the blanket of leaves I’d ceased racking after the October rains became November flurries.

There were Christmas trees to buy, Christmas lights, Christmas gifts.

Then the snow came.

It was a big year for snow. It snowed every day. It snowed every day! There were flurries, there were centimeters of accumulation. There were three to five, there were ten to fifteen. If it did not snow, it blew.

The wind picked it up and swirled it around and I discovered that my house was built in such a way as to invite an eddy at my door. I also discovered that a double wide drive is not a boon. A double wide drive holds a lot of snow, far more than a single. The banks are higher, the crests reaching a meter in height in no time, making it a chore to throw the snow over it, snowblower or no snowblower. My snowblower was old, the chute lower than later models. I had to pull the banks down when they rose too high.

I cleaned out the driveway everyday one week, only to watch as the wind carried another meter back into it. I cleaned it before going off to nightshift, only to discover that an equal amount had filled it while I was gone, and had to clear it again so that Bev could get to work, a task that took about an hour.
Then the melted windblown snow stalled the machine. I had to finish by hand. I cleared what I could and collapsed into bed, only to rise to a blinding blanket of sunlit snow having swept back across the width of the drive, once again.

I woke too early, having slept for no more than five hours. Seeing that much snow again crushed me. “Will this never end?” I thought. I staggered out to clear it again before Bev got home. The blower would not start. I’d always had trouble with the electric start. If the machine didn’t start on the first pull, it flooded, and it flooded just then. I called my father, asking him to come over to help me. When he arrived, he noted that the shaft was slightly bent on the electric starter, causing the teeth to wear down. “That might be the problem,” he said. He removed it to have it repaired, while I started back in on scooping up the snow and wrestling it up hill, up a track I’d built on either side of the driveway. My father tried starting the machine again, saying that it had probably sat long enough. It started on the first pull, manually. I never used the electric start again, and never really had trouble with it ever again, either, not until it had grown old, the belts and springs and bushings likely worn out like the teeth on the starter. The only real trouble I ever had with it was when the auger belt went, years later. None fit it. The manufacturer had stopped making that exact diameter of sheave wheel. Any replacement belt I tried was either they were too loose or too tight. I finally found one that almost fit. The blades never stopped rotating after that.

The next day, my neighbour left a note under my windshield wiper: “Please don’t put any snow in my yard.”

I noticed that he had no issue putting about three quarters of his own snow in his neighbour’s.

I ignored his note. What’s good for the goose, and all that….

 

The Homeowner

I decided that it was high time to kick start my life. I’d listened to prophesies of doom for too long. I’d lived in my parents’ house for far too long. I wanted my own place, my own roof, my own rules. There weren’t many rules at my parents’ house, if any (I was an adult, after all), but I’d carried most of those from years past into those years I’d stayed with them after college and university. Some, like no overnight guests, may have been inferred. Rules or no rules, it was a big scary world out there; interest rates were just easing up; the commodity market had never been in worse shape; the threat of layoffs forever loomed. My parents’ place seemed a safe haven. Or was it a trap. Arrested development, failure to launch? Either way, having to admit to a girl that I still lived with my parents had long since become an embarrassment.

I decided that it was high time that I moved out. To buy or rent? I thought renting was throwing good money after bad. There was no equity to be gained by renting. And renting in Timmins cost about as much as a monthly mortgage. I decided that I ought to invest in equity. I asked around at work on how one did that these days. I received advice. I went to a number of banks for preapproval. My bank matched the best of them.

Then I asked Bev. Would you like to move in with me? Would you like to buy the house with me? She had to think it over. That’s understandable. It was a huge step. But we’d been going out for a year by then, too. If she didn’t know how she felt about me by then, it was likely that she’d already made up her mind. The truth is, she was scared what her father would say.

I already knew what her father would say, and I simply did not care. We should get married first, he’d say. Then buy a house. Then have children. That was the way things were done. It was beside the point that he had married, divorced, catted around, knocked up Alma, and had a shotgun wedding where Bev was the undeclared special guest. Enough said about that. I was thirty-six. I didn’t want to wait another two years or so, scraping together enough money for a wedding and a house at the same time. I had enough money for one or the other, and I had no intention of dropping ten grand on a piece of paper and then living in some slum lord’s apartment. Should I have saved up my money over the years for this eventuality? Maybe. But travelling had saved my sanity so I’m unwilling to speculate on what I might have done were I more pragmatic. Were I to do it all over again, I’d likely do the same.

I began looking at houses. I asked Bev if she wanted to join me, without her having committed one way or the other yet to the prospect of going all in with me. She said she’d look at them once I’d eliminated the chaff. That was promising, a commitment of sorts.

There was a lot of chaff. There was a lot of threshing. Most of the houses were a misery of renovations waiting to happen, time capsules from the ‘70s, Sanford and Son sets, all priced for the expectation of promise and not what they were worth, to my mind.

My mother helped me pare down the list, pointing out which she liked and why, which would cost a lot to repair, and which might be nightmares. I finally had it down to a list of three or so. I asked Bev to view them.
The first was a split level on Diane, a stone’s throw from where I’d grown up. I pointed out a crackling corner which might be a problem. What we didn’t like about it was the crawlspace under the living room. It had been renovated as a half-height playroom for toddlers. I thought the idea brilliant, but otherwise useless for anyone with children topping three-and-a-half feet in height.

The second showed some promise, until closer scrutiny revealed shifting cinderblocks in the basement. The cinderblocks were pressing inward. I had visions of the house having to be lifted on stilts while the foundation was put to rights.

The third was vetoed immediately upon entering it. A migraine hit Bev like a hammer blow, the spike driven in so suddenly that she almost staggered under the blow. She’d never once had a migraine. She’d never actually ever suffered from any form of headaches. She was fine again twenty minutes after we left.

Then one day my mother suggested a Sunday drive to look at houses. I couldn’t think of a more exciting prospect. Feel the sarcasm. We did not have to drive far. We left the house and rounded Blahey, a court a block away from my parents’ place on Victoria. We noted a private sale sign hammered into the lawn of a simple white bungalow, a mature birch spreading its canopy across the front lawn. A man was tending the grass.

“What do you think?” my mother asked.

It looked nice. Well kept. Nowhere near as tumbledown as most houses I’d had the good fortune to inspect over the past month. It had to be outside my price range.

My mother insisted we stop and ask to see it.

We did. The owner mulled over the prospect for a moment and then agreed.

I was taken on the grand tour. It was clean. There were no cracks in the corners. It was not a time capsule. The basement has largely complete. The rooms were spacious. I thought the atrium too spacious, a waste of space actually, but the rest was good. The rest was great.

And it was within my price range! And it was only ten or twelve thousand dollars more than the tumbledown money pits and deathtraps I’d had the good fortune to have walked through. There was no way I’d be able to sink ten to twelve thousand dollars into any of those and have them look like this house. I asked if I could bring my girlfriend around the next day. He said sure, but he did say that he would entertain any offer that was tendered.

“How many offers have you had?” I asked.

“None,” he said.
That was worrying. What was wrong with it, I wondered.

“How long has it been on the market?” I asked.

“I put the sign up, yesterday,” he said.

I brought Bev the next day. She didn’t say much. I think she was thinking about what her father might say.

“What do you think?” I asked.

“It’s a big step,” she said.

“I know it’s a big step, but what do you think?”

Silence. Fear of father radiated from her.

“I want it,” I said. “I want my own place.” I knew I was applying pressure on her, but I believed that she needed to escape her parents’ house as much as I did mine. If we didn’t soon, we’d become those middle-aged people who never left.

“Let’s buy it,” I said. “I don’t think we’ll ever find another house as good as this for the price.”

“Okay,” she said.

My parents were thrilled. So was Bev’s mother.

Albert was not. Personally, I don’t think that Albert ever liked me. I don’t think he ever approved of anything I ever did.

But enough said about that.

No sooner had I bought the house, the manager of the Mine was standing in front of we the body of employees saying, “Things aren’t looking good right now: the market, the exchange rate. Now is not the time to be making any big purchases.”