Rewind: The Lead Up to Look

Let me just preface this little story by telling you that I love houses. I can spend hours looking at MLS and real estate sites for interesting houses, and I even have a peek around now that I am settling into my own house. (I like to keep an eye on the market.) Being a passenger in the car is a great pleasure because that allows me to check out houses and the landscaping, roofs, driveways, etc. around them. HGTV? Pleasantly addicted. Some days we spend the afternoon just watching home reno or real estate shows. Don’t even get me started on how many magazines dedicated to interior design I own…

I’ve wanted my own home for many years. Perhaps it’s a nesting instinct. When I was single, owning a house was too expensive (don’t like roommates), and living in a condo did not appeal to me in the slightest (I want LOTS of space). Near the end of the first year that Tyler and I lived together, we rented the top floor of a house on a busy street while I went to photography school. It was a nice enough house, but much too small and I hated the busy road. It stressed me to no end. And it just never felt like a home to me. We decided that once I finished school in June 2006, we would move. We wanted to buy a house, but that was in our two- to three-year plan, and we needed more space immediately.

We looked for many months for a house we could afford. We found the perfect house for us, outside of our budget of course, near Willows Beach in Oak Bay. And what a house! Beautiful. After one viewing, we went home and decided we couldn’t afford it, especially if we wanted to buy our own house in the future. And then the landlord called, and told us he would lower the rent for us by $200 because he liked us so much and knew we would be great tenants. We accepted. We couldn’t resist. The house is around 2,000 square feet and you can see the ocean and beach from the front deck. The location is excellent. Oak Bay has its dissenters, as it’s an area for the well-heeled (and sometimes snobby) for sure, but after being there for just a few weeks I realized why it’s a desirable place. It’s a nice place to live. I loved living in Oak Bay almost as much as I loved living in rural Metchosin. And the house always felt like a home. That space has a good feeling about it, an energy that I can’t really describe, but thinking back to it makes me feel warm inside. I feel the house needs a lot of updating, but it still has so much charm. (We even tried to buy it, despite its close to a million-dollar price tag!)

I feel as though our lives were leading up to buying our first home, we just hadn’t realized it. I was constantly crunching numbers and trying to see how we could afford a house. With a boatload of debt and student loans, and prices in Victoria rising faster than a rocket to outer space, it seemed so out of reach. And then in July 2007, a friend of mine and her husband bought a house for over $500,000 on the outskirts of Victoria. I was stunned. If they could afford it, we should be able to as well! She gave me the skinny on their acquisition, and so I made an appointment with the same mortgage broker she used. He looked at all the numbers and set about to show us our options. We could do this!

And with a budget in mind, we set about to look for a house to buy. I was beside myself. We didn’t know if this was actually going to happen, so we didn’t tell anyone. We were especially concerned about our landlord, since we had told him we would stay for at least three years. He was also planning on going back to school in Toronto and wanted tenants he could trust to take care of his house. He told us he would never sell it. I didn’t want to leave him high and dry, but we also had to move forward with our own lives.

And so we looked at houses, and looked, and looked…

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