Dream Home, Part 1 – Finding, Living, then Moving the Cottage Home

Here are the links to the whole saga: Part 1 | Part 2

In the early summer of 1999, we made a deal with Rose to purchase our first home at 318 Chalfont Road. The house was built after the second world war and was a sweet small cottage style house. Rose and Doug had renovated the main floor quite a bit. The most wonderful thing about the house was that it sat on Chalfont Road, in Charleswood (the country in the city), across from the Assiniboine forest and sat on half an acre of beautiful green space. Here is a look at the beautiful backyard with the lush green trees and the comfortable hammock hooked up.

We bought the house, despite the fact that it didn’t meet most items on our list of requirements. We bought the house because we had a future plan of building a new house in the same location. In August of 1999, we were expecting our first child and so we renovated the entire second floor of our house. Basically, 318 Chalfont had a new main and second floor now, it was too much of a waste, if we ever knocked it down to build a new house. The new house was 10 years away, we thought. I searched and searched for a picture of our old house or old-old house as the kids call it, but I couldn’t find one from when we lived there. I guess this goes to show you how important the house was to us. We do have loads of photos from the backyard however and of course from the inside of the house.

We had our second child in October of 2002 and started talking about alternatives to knocking our cottage-house down to prepare for when we would be ready to build. We wanted to be environmentally and fiscally responsible as much as we could and we felt knocking the house down would be a waste. We were up for an adventure and we thought of trying something different. We listed just the house for sale in the summer of 2003 to see what kind of interest was out there. We got a few interested parties, but because ours was a one-and-a-half story house, the cost of bringing down Hydro/MTS/… etc lines was prohibitive for someone to move it to the country. So, we had to find a piece of land close by and either move the house ourselves and renovate it and sell it or find someone who would purchase the package of our house with the new land. We were hoping to find this special person, but it wasn’t going to be easy. A lot of people thought we were crazy to do things this way. The told us to sell our Chalfont lot and house and purchase a lot elsewhere and build, but we loved Chalfont and had faith that we could pull this off.

With God’s blessing, we found a lot on Laxdale Rd., just 6 blocks away and bought it for $32, 000 in October of 2003. It was a great find. Chuti had been talking to a guy named Clemente, who he had seen working on a house project on Harrow St. and Wilton Ave. Clemente had bought the corner house, lifted it, removed the old basement, poured a new one, and renovated the house in order to sell it. Clemente had suggested to Chuti to sell our house and other land as a package and then later said he was interested in the project. Unfortunately for us, Clemente’s funds were tied up in the another project and until it sold he couldn’t commit to our project financially. He brought two financiers on two separate occasions, but in the end the deal fell through. We had an offer from someone else, but it was too low and we turned it down. It was now December, 2003 and we were starting to think that maybe this wasn’t meant to be and we would leave it for now and see what happens later, after all it was originally a 10 year plan and we were only in year 3 since we had made this plan in the year 2000. We listed the Laxdale land for sale with our agent Peter Vasko.

D knew about our hopes for the house and was always wishing that someone would just buy our old house and take it away, so we could build a new house. She would make comments like “the moon is telling the house ‘it’s time to go!!’”. On January 17, 2004, we were driving home from dinner and it was a very starry night. We saw a shooting star and I told her to make a wish, she did and told us that she couldn’t tell us what she wished for because it wouldn’t come true. When we got home, as Chuti was checking the messages on the answering machine, D told me that she had wished that someone would come and buy our house. Chuti then came to tell us seconds later that there was a call from a guy named Frank, a friend of Clemente’s, who had called to say he was interested in the project. Unfortunately, Chuti couldn’t get a hold of him and simply left a message.

Here is a photo from when we moved the house (this is explained further down). The house in this picture has been lifted onto steel beams and was loaded on a truck ready to be moved. Neat, huh?!!!

The Cute Cottage House

On Monday morning (January 19th) Peter Vasko called to say that we had had an offer on the Laxdale land and we made an appointment to sign for the sale at 9:30 p.m. that night. As we were eating supper at 6:00 p.m., Frank called to make an appointment to come by. Chuti told him that we were selling the lot and that if he really was interested, he should come by right away and if he wanted to commit to the deal, he had to give us a deposit. Frank showed up on time, looked around with his brothers and gave us $1000 in cash. We couldn’t believe it. When Peter Vasko came by that night, we explained what had happened and he suggested we sign the sale, conditional on Frank turning it down. Frank came by the next day with another $1000 and we finalized the deal on Wednesday, January 21st. He paid us $32, 000 for the Laxdale lot and another $23, 000 for the house, which was a sweet deal indeed. The mover who moved the house in August of 2004 told Chuti that usually people only get at most $5, 000 for the house. The house moved on August 3rd at 3:30 a.m. in the morning and it was a bit surreal to see your home being driven away.

What we didn’t know then, but know now is about the law of attraction and the power of a vision. Once we learned about these things, we could look back and see how we had attracted exactly what and who we visioned to get this project off the ground.

Then came the second part of the saga, to design the house we wanted to build and find the right builder.

This post will come shortly.