Rewind: Buying our First Home

It’s been a while since I last posted about our search for our first home. I’ve just been so darn busy since January. As soon as the suite renos were done, we jumped into the landscaping and gardening. And what a project that has been! Not much landscaping has EVER been done here. There was a lot to clean up and haul away, and literally tons to bring in (top soil, sod, gravel, bark mulch, sand, stone, bricks, lumber…). I’m almost finished planting, and there is a gigantic pile of top soil and bark mulch to spread. Oh, and I have to finish painting the front deck. On and on!

So where did I leave off? I had seen our home on MLS a month or so earlier while doing cursory searches (probably around June). It wasn’t until we were SERIOUSLY looking to buy (late July) that I saw it the second time and decided we should have a look even though it was in Sooke, about a 45-minute drive from Victoria. And so we did. We were quite taken with the house and the property immediately. We loved the old character and appreciated the updates: kitchen and bathrooms. And really, the kitchen is quite beautiful. I loved all the space: a family room, formal living room and a separate dining room. Three bedrooms upstairs and a huge bathroom. The real estate agent selling the house showed us around and gave us the details. (We didn’t have an agent yet.)

- The house had been moved from Oak Bay in 1989 (the proved to be incorrect, the house was actually from the Gorge area, where a Tim Horton’s now resides). Because of new building codes, the electrical and plumbing was updated, the plaster walls were replaced with gyrock, and of course a new foundation was poured. The lower floor was added when the house was moved, and more recently renovated into a one-bedroom suite (we turned it into a two-bedroom suite).

- The property is about 0.28 of an acre. It was once two lots, when our road and the cross road leading to the highway was subdivided and a subdivision was planned. That fell through, and when the house was moved two lots were converted into one. The smaller lot to the west has an easement on it, meaning we can’t build anything there without permission from our neighbour, as their septic field actually sits at the top corner of our property. The neighbour’s lots is long and skinny – no room for a septic field. There’s talk that this side of Sooke should have municipal sewer in five years or so, but who knows.

We looked at another house, a new one, past the village of Sooke up Otter Point Road. It was very nice and we liked it quite a lot. One acre and it overlooks a lake. It was $425,000. However, we didn’t see a lot of potential there, and it didn’t have a suite. It was also another 15-minute drive.

We liked our house much more. And it didn’t take us long to decide to put in an offer, although we did have to talk a lot about it. Moving out to Sooke was a big decision, considering Tyler works in James Bay. That means he would have to commute every day. We asked around, and discovered that Tyler’s hours would just miss the heavy traffic rush hours. Bonus! I really wanted this house, and Ty’s commute could have been the deal-breaker. We figured the house had tons of potential:

- A good-sized suite for extra income. As well, it’s nice enough for us to live in if we ever need to, and rent out the top two floors instead.

- We could run a bed and breakfast here.

- If and when we hook up to municipal sewer, we can subdivide and sell the other lot. Or we could build a carriage house there and have it as a vacation rental.

- We love the idea of fixing up a house rather than paying for someone else to do the work. While the house certainly had some big and expensive updates, it still needed quite a lot of work. We felt that instead of buying a house that needed EVERYTHING renovated, maybe it would be good to “get our feet wet” and start out with something just slightly less than perfect.

- We could run a photography studio here. The master bedroom is big enough for a studio, and we could use the formal living room as a gallery and client meeting space.

- Because of the character of the house, it’s perfect for branding. We are in fact re-branding my photography to Three Stories. The name works for photography AND for the house. It’s so perfect if we ever open a gallery here.

- Sooke is an up-and-coming area. Lots of development going on, and we expect house prices to remain steady or increase in the next few years.

- The house is close to the Sooke Basin (it even has “ocean glimpses”), a pebble beach, the Galloping Goose trail and lots of recreation.

With all this potential, we felt this house was perfect for us. We wanted to be wise first-time home buyers, and I still feel we made an excellent decision. We decided to use the same real estate agent, and we put in an offer after our second viewing. Talk about scary when it’s your first time! But the agent was gentle with us and answered all our first-timer questions. We put in an offer of $438,000 that evening. (The asking price was $449,000.) We had until noon the next day to seal the deal. In the morning the seller countered at $448,000 and added a few things, like curtains and the fridge or something. We were blown away, and quite annoyed. She hadn’t come down much, and didn’t offer much either. We were in fits, back and forth discussing everything. Holy smokes this was stressful! She wasn’t coming down, and we didn’t want to go up much. I think we went up to $443,000 with all the appliances and she was at $447,000. Noon passed and things looked grim. We were babysitting Ty’s niece Sophie that afternoon, and we drove out to the Red Barn for ice cream. I was just sick to my stomach. I didn’t want to lose the house over a few thousand dollars. It seemed so silly. But Ty stood firm, and I’m glad he did. Our agent called in the afternoon with the news that she would forgo $1,000 of her commission and the seller’s buying agent would waive $4,000 so the deal could go through.

So the house was ours! Yah!

Oh, and then three stressful, horrible months of my life began…. I never want to go through that again.

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Rewind: Browsing for a Home

Looking for a house to buy is hard work, especially when you aren’t even sure exactly where you want to live. If we could have afforded it, I would have bought a house in Oak Bay without question. However, house prices there are ridiculous, and there are few properties with suites (“mortgage helpers”). Of course, I looked, but do an mls search in Oak Bay and the least expensive house is often over $600,000! They say to buy the worst house in the best neighbourhood, and while this maxim is generally a good rule of thumb, it’s not so black and white. We couldn’t afford a house in Oak Bay. Well, actually we COULD, but then we would be absolutely stretched to the maximum debt to income ratio and we were not interested in putting ourselves in that position. We had to leave ourselves some room to breathe in case of job loss, increase in interest rates, etc.

So we looked at houses all over town — old and new and newly renovated. We had little idea of what we were looking for.

• Fairfield. The cheapest house at the time we were looking was $525,000 and needed major renovations. It was also TINY.
• James Bay. Way too expensive.
• Fernwood. We looked at a lot of houses in Fernwood, thinking it was still a “reasonably” priced area with lots of potential to increase in value. Nothing. The cheapest house we looked at, around $400,000, seemed a tear-down to me. There was one I really liked, but it hardly had a yard at all. I wanted lots of greenspace to garden.
• Oaklands. I love the Oaklands area. We couldn’t find anything here.
• North and South Jubilee. We spied a couple houses in these areas, but for the price they just seemed too much. Small houses with big price tags. 1,200 square feet? No suite? Postage-stamp-size lots? For close to half a million dollars? There was a cute house near Oak Bay border that I really liked, but it had an odd layout and no bathroom upstairs by the master bedroom. I thought it was a possibility, for the price of $420,000, but Tyler said no way. And that house didn’t sell for MONTHS. He must have known something wasn’t quite right.
• Saanich, Hillside, Quadra Village, Burnside, etc. We looked all over and just couldn’t find anything quite right for us.

I learned a lot by looking for a house. Never owning a house before, I hadn’t ever even thought about assessments and what they meant. In many areas and depending on the age of the house, the house was assessed at a lot less than the land, like the house we rented in Oak Bay for example. I came to realize that it is the LAND that holds so much VALUE. So buying a new home on a tiny piece of property, especially in a new subdivision, would just be silly for us. Even an older home on a small property doesn’t make sense. We wanted something that had lots of potential. We wanted to buy a home that would always have a lot of value. We also realized we didn’t want to buy a new home or a newly renovated home, as we would be paying more. But we also didn’t want to take on a total home renovation project for our first home. We had to find some middle ground.

During our search, our landlord told us that he had decided to sell the house. He felt pretty bad, because he knew we wanted to stay there for a few years and he really liked us. I even ran into him downtown around Christmas time and he told me, once again, that we were the best tenants he ever had, by far, and he was so happy we had found a wonderful home to buy. I miss him a little bit, actually. Jerry and I had a rapport with one another. As well, it had only been a few months since Tyler and I had rented the whole house from Jerry, and rented out the lower suite ourselves. Our friend Jenny had moved in, so it was a bit of a shock to her that the house was going up for sale, quickly at that.

We loved that house. There were lots of things that I didn’t love, the DIY repairs and such, but the house had an energy that just always felt right and good. The asking price was $860,000, way out of our price range of course, but we pitched Jerry an idea for us to all go into “business” together so that we could eventually buy the house from him. He actually gave it some thought, but they needed the money. They were moving back east to go back to school. I thought that would be the case, but I was glad I tried. I really do love that house. And its location a block from Willows Beach makes it highly desirable. (Oh, how I yearn to be back there. Location location! I miss that beach.) The listing is still online if you want to take a look.

But at this point we realized buying a house was the right direction for us. Was it coincidence that Jerry decided to sell the house the same time we decided to buy? We didn’t want to rent again, and we didn’t want to move again for at least five years. Knowing that we would have to move once the house sold, which we thought would be quick, we really set about to find something.

And that’s when I came across the listing for our house. I had looked at it months earlier, in fact, and LOVED it, but since it was in Sooke, I felt it wasn’t an option for us. We discussed moving out of town a bit, but had decided against it. Coming across the house a second time, however, we thought we could go have a look at least. And that will be the subject of the next posting…

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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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