Holy crap, every time I look at the calendar I am surprised. Only 3 1/2 weeks until we get possession of our new home! That’s, um, soon.
When we sold our place in Edmonton and moved to Vancouver the concept of ever owning here was extremely abstract. Our new place cost almost 4 times what we sold our place for just 4 years ago, so it’s kind of insane. I feel so fortunate to be in a position where we can do this.
Since leaving Edmonton I’ve missed our loft – great layout (square not long and skinny like everything in Vancouver), lots of windows, area we loved, stainless steel appliances, jacuzzi tub. Only now, we’ve somehow managed to buy our Edmonton place only a billion times better. All of the above plus an extra 500 sq ft, an extra level (valuable for live/work separation), street front access, a fridge that makes me ice (hey, it’s the little things), and it’s in VANCOUVER.
To add even more to that, when we first moved here we moved into the perfect building – close to Gastown and everything else, live/work zoned loft spaces with a HUGE 7000 sq. foot amenities room complete with underutilized darkroom, pottery room with multiple kilns, music rehearsal studios, woodworking shop, gym, metalworking shop, and common room. Pretty much any creative person’s dream and the only building of it’s kind in Vancouver. We are even somewhat responsible for the fact that our very good friend Darren bought in the building earlier this year – all we had to say was “jam space” and I think he was sold.
Only, even with 165 units in the building, there was literally only one unit that met our needs. Most were too small, the rest too large, and the few in between had awful layouts for having any sort of live/work space. Except one.
It showed up on the market earlier this year – we saw it (long before we were even thinking of buying, because I’m obsessed with the building), and lamented that it was too bad our perfect place was for sale and we weren’t buying. The right size, a great layout, street level access, and more importantly roughly in our budget. Regardless, we weren’t buying, so it was irrelevant. The listing disappeared a while later.
We started our home buying savings account a while back, squirreling away our pennies with a plan to buy next year. Being self employed it’s also – or so I thought – not so easy to get a mortgage so we weren’t sure how challenging that part would be.
We’d been checking out listings with the intent to be familiar enough with the types of places coming up in our price range so that we’d be well prepared when we started officially looking. Out of the blue, I came across a townhouse listing that made me stop in my tracks.
While we had no interest previous to this in a townhouse, this place was beautiful! Only a few blocks from here, completely renovated, hundreds of square feet of outdoor space, and for a crazy low amount of money. We went to the open house just for fun, only to hear everyone else lamenting about the area. Were these people insane?! This place was worth way more than they were asking for what it was, and we happen to love our neighbourhood regardless of how rough it might be around the edges. We made some calls, ran some numbers, and thanks to many things coming together we found ourselves putting in an offer.
Of course, if it seems too good to be true…. the mortgage was approved effortlessly, everything looked good and we were ready to remove conditions – until the inspection. The unit? Perfect in every way. The building, however? Unknown. Not bad, not good, just unknown. All an inspector can see is what’s on the outside and she can’t see through walls. Combined with a lack of detail in the strata documents our inspector issued the “possible leaky condo” caution and it was enough to make us back down.
Huh. Now what?
Well – the money was in place, the financing was arranged, regardless of the minor fact that we are in our craziest time of year business wise it seemed we were house shopping. Well, crap.
There was another place on the market that suited most of our needs. It was huge, storefront, zoned properly, priced right. So-so neighborhood (and it would mean moving away from where we are now), and needed tonnes of renos. We could see the potential it had but it didn’t make me fall over in excitement. We decided to look ahead at what we could do with it instead, and made an offer.
This time everything else was working and right out of left field, the bank didn’t want to finance the property over something minor. Sometimes life has a funny way of telling you what you already knew.
The night before we were to remove conditions that amazing-incredible-too-bad-it-won’t-be-for-sale-when-we’re-buying loft that I told you about showed back on the market. Turns out it hadn’t sold earlier in the year when they’d tried, and it was now up for an even lower price. What are the chances?
I told our mortgage broker I didn’t care about the second place, and told MJ our realtor extraordinaire to get us in to see it ASAP.
It was a chunk more cash than we’d been originally approved for, but Chris made it work. Within a few days our offer was accepted, strata docs and the suite passed with flying colours, and conditions were removed.
It’s ours!
It’s funny how things work out the way they’re supposed to. If we hadn’t spontaneously tried to buy the townhouse, we would have never been trying to buy now. And, if we hadn’t, our perfect place would have been long sold by the time we were in the market.
I can’t wait to give you a proper tour once our stuff gets in there. Party, anyone? It would seem we have lots of space 
