I'm just going to give a quick update on where we're at with house stuff. The last few weeks have been pretty stressful, and I didn't want to report only negative stuff, so I waited until I had something positive to share.
This would be the world's longest blog post if I wrote it all out, so point form it is!
- House Plans: they're almost complete. Our timber frame guy and house designer got together today to work out some last minute details. Yay!
- Site Plan: Complete!! So now we know where the house will be on the property. The only issue is that we had to have the house set back 20m from the lot line in order to accommodate the slope/walkout basement.
The bylaw is a minimum of 25m set back for Rural Residential properties. This means we need to apply for a minor variance. Just one more thing to do!
- Minor Variance: We've applied to Thames Centre. It was a pretty straight forward application asking what we're requesting and why. Unfortunately for us their next meeting for this type of thing isn't until September 19th. So now we wait some more. And this puts us into a winter build again which we said we would never do again. So... Now what?
- Now What: Where are we going to live?!
Our current house closes in 9 weeks, our new house won't be ready until a year from now if we wait till spring to start... Eek! Not the greatest situation to be in.
So we decided to buy another house for the year. We thought about renting, but it seemed like such a waste of money. And we need every penny!
Jake has been away camping for the past 3 days without cell reception, so I bought this house on my own. Talk about stressful! We had set a maximum budget, and Jake did have a chance to go through it before he left, but things never play out as you plan. I went over budget (oops!) and I'll find out tomorrow when he comes home if it was a good move or not. I'm sure he'll be fine with it. We just wanted to make sure that we didn't over pay so when we sell in a year, we're not out a bunch of money.
I sent him this so he'll find out we got a house when he finally gets cell reception!
(Rylan is at Girls Rock Camp this week ☺️)
It's a cute little house in the neighbourhood of the girls' school. It will be nice to drive less for the next year. And the girls can walk to/from school!
But if anything a year in the city will REALLY make us appreciate 10 acres in the country even more!
Last but not least...
- Upper Thames River Conservation Authority: We dropped off our application last week. The next day I realized that we never left a cheque for the application fees so back we went the following day to drop it off.
Turns out we got ourselves a little impromptu meeting with the "thou shall not build" officer. She told us that we need to have all of these studies redone and resubmitted and they only charge $1000 a piece to review them. Ugh.
Anyone and everyone we've spoken to about all of this thinks it's absolutely nuts that they're asking us for all of this. The property is zoned for residential use. We're not severing it, or changing the zoning. We just want to build a house! So frustrating. And annoying. I could go on venting my frustrations about the UTRCA for days... But I'm trying to focus on the positive.
The previous owners really pissed them off, and now I think we're taking the brunt of it.
At least now there isn't as big of a rush, we've got somewhere to live!
That is such a huge relief. Maybe now I'll start packing!
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