Alright my friends, this one has been a looooooong time coming …
I’m absolutely thrilled to FINALLY be sharing a house tour of our new (to us) home!
I have to say, this isn’t exactly the house I thought we’d end up with when we started looking for a new home in our hometown in northern Alberta.
You see, hubs and I have spent our whole lives living in nothing but new houses and I hadn’t really expected to end up with anything different. But, life had other plans for us as it often does. I suppose I should have known things wouldn’t be so straight forward as the housing market in our little town has always been sort of unique. Figures, there just so happened to be a major shortage of inventory as we started shopping, which not only meant that there wasn’t much to choose from, but also meant that things seemed to be selling the minute they hit the market. Giving ourselves a very wide price range, we had just five houses in the entire town to look at that didn’t already have pending offers. Five. Can you believe it?! What was even more disappointing … we didn’t like a single one of them. The newer houses all had small yards, dark kitchens and a ton of things I’d always wish I could change, but would never be able to justify replacing. The older ones had bigger yards, but were far too small for a growing family or frankly just needed too much work. Turns out we’d been quite spoiled with our brand new, beautiful home in the mountains with that lovely yard surrounded by forest and I was pretty sure we were going to miss the heck out of it.
After a bit lot of thinking and talking about our limited options, Brady eventually made me see that a house we don’t exactly love is something we could deal with, but we were both sure that we could never make ourselves settle for one of these yards that looks into 20 others from our back deck? Time to think outside of the box (and maybe a little outside of our comfort zone).
Enter my AMAZING mother-in-law who, thank goodness, just happened to know of some neighbors that were thinking about moving. With our priorities straight (and very open mind), we agreed to look at the house next door. Yep, right next door. To my mother-in-law. At an older home. Huh.
And of course, by “we”, I mean he agreed to look at, fall in love with it and then convince me to buy it sight unseen, which was a feat in and of itself for sure! That’s right, to top it all off, we were so short on time that I couldn’t even make the trip out to look at it with him before we put in an offer and committed to by this 40+ year old house next to my mother-in-law.
Luckily, I loved it just as much Brady did!
Thing is, it was actually pretty perfect for us. With a massive kitchen, two living rooms with a fireplace each (one gas, one wood), and five big bedrooms upstairs, there was a ton of room for everyone. The unfinished basement gives us an extra 1000 or so square feet of storage space for all of our skiing and biking gear with the option to finish it down the road for even more living space. Not to mention that Carson can now wander over to his Grandma’s house any time he’d like!
It’s more than 40 years old and every single room in the house needs work, but the former owners took such great care of everything that most of it is purely cosmetic. In fact, all of the boring updates like replacing the furnaces, painting the cedar siding and fencing, new soffiting, and even replacing all of the doors inside and out have already been taken care of. So, y’all know what that means – we get to spend our money on everything fun like new cabinets, light fixtures and flooring! Well, all except for the windows, which are double pane vinyl and still doing their job, but look more than a little worse for wear.
It’s got an almost perfect layout, a ton of space, a giant yard and oh so much potential! I’ve always thought I wanted new, but turns out this older home might be just the thing for our newly handy DIY family!!!
I cannot wait to share our plans with y’all soon, but for now here are few photos to give you an idea of what we’re starting with:
Buying an older home has definitely been a big step out of our comfort zone (can you tell?), but we are SO, SO excited about the AMAZING possibilities we see in this beautiful old house!
Plus, Carson’s already feeling very much at home!
Exciting right?! Stay tuned for all of our plans including where we’ve chosen to start work!
Wishing you SUCH a lovely day!