Let me describe my home, before we married, we both lived with our family and after meeting we decided to look for a place to live together… we spent a few months planning for our first big ski holiday in Whistler… a week before we left, the perfect home for us came on the market.
We did not know it right away, and really were not that keen, but my mom the realtor insisted it was perfect for all of us. We took a massive leap of faith, engaged everyone in our family, and cashed in all if our savings, RRSPs leveraged our lives forever to the bank and dove into the home ownership market. To this day I am surprised we still have any friends, our first few months were a blur or paint, plaster, peeling, and surprises of all kinds, most of them good ones.
We bought our last home first!
We figured we were in debt together forever anyway, getting married could just wait for the moment. We immediately moved in my mother and always intended to have a home for his parents when they were tired of life in the country. We were lucky, we learned quickly that making commitments and embarking on home ownership and learning as we went to do all of the things necessary to keep a house and home as well as keeping tenants happy was not always fun, it was tiring, frustrating, and always required spending money in large quantities.
As a couple in a newer relationship, working full time in demanding careers both self-employed in our fields, we had to navigate a lot of pitfalls, challenges, triumphs and even some not so fun emergencies. Nothing spells heart failure like a note on the door with a warning “do not step on the glass when entering…”. It turned out that three years after we installed our beautiful chandeliers with massive hooks into gargantuan beams; while we were away for the weekend one hook had let loose in the over dry wood and crashed to the table top below taking out everything including smashing into pieces. To add insult to injury before we even took a breath and less than 24 hours later the same thing happened in my mom’s living room. ….
it was unbelievable. We were in shock.
This is where you really need to learn to breathe deeply, remember the name of your insurance company and hope this unique event is insured….. thank goodness we were covered. It was early days, we were still pretty much living on noodles and soup. Having decided to move my work to a home office in our basement and starting over again in a new company we were both working long hours and soon to be expecting our first daughter. Could we really handle any more pressure… well it came anyway in the most unexpected way.