Romance of new home fades, but love grows stronger
April 15, 2010
Jennifer Wilson-Speedy
YOURHOME.CA EDITOR
Newbie advice
Lessons learned
• Take note of exclusions: Yes, we agreed
the previous owners could take the master bedroom chandelier. But we
didn’t really consider that not having a replacement for moving day
would mean a whole lot of bruised shins from stumbling around in the
dark.
• It’s going to be messy: Whether it’s
boxes and movers or drywall dust and new furniture deliveries, now’s a
good time to invest in a shop vac. Fine drywall dust can wreck your
regular vacuum.
• Things will always take longer than you
planned: Moved before supper? Unpacked by fall? Painted before
Christmas? All things I planned. None of it happened. Tempering your
expectations with some buffer time is the best way to maintain your
sanity.
• It’s never really done: A year later,
we’ve still got a few boxes to unpack and an ever-growing list of
projects and purchases. I’m slowly coming to accept that our home is a
constant work in progress.
• Tackle some aesthetics: Yes, maintenance
tasks are essential, but especially when you’re feeling overwhelmed,
it’s worth moving an easy, obvious task up the list — such as hanging
art, swapping out hardware or putting on a fresh coat of paint — to make
a room look better and give you an obvious sign of progress.
• Take time off: It’s tempting to just keep
plowing ahead, hoping at some point you’ll get all your projects done.
But, as much as you’d like to, you can’t live and breathe your home DIY.
Go out for dinner or a walk, or even just enjoy a nice beverage. You’ll
come back with more enthusiasm for you projects instead of dread.
Getting started: A few pointers for easing your transition
into your new home.
• Set up the bedroom. After a long day
moving, the last thing you want to do at the end of the day is build
your bed before you can get in it.
• Change your locks. A new home, and a new
neighbourhood, means a whole lot of new noises when you’re trying to
sleep at night. Changing up the locks — and knowing the previous owners,
their family, friends, contractors and other services no longer have
the keys — can help put your mind at ease.
• Pack an overnight bag. While everyone has
high expectations for their unpacking, it’s a good idea to keep all of
your essentials in one, easily reachable place. A few things to start
with: cleaning supplies, hand soap, towels, and toilet paper.
Our project list: For two not-so-handy-people, our “move-in
ready” home still meant a lengthy to-do list.
• Knob and tube rewiring (hired the
experts)
• Drywall patching (hired)
• Priming and painting every room in the
house (working on it. We’ve managed the bathroom, bedroom, office,
living room, dining room and mudroom so far. Still to come: second
bedroom, hallway, basement and kitchen.)
• Re-shingling the garage roof. (Mr. Speedy
and his father tackled this one. I went shopping. )
• Repairing the chimney (hired.)
• Hanging wallpaper. (Mr. Speedy and his
father. I went shopping.)
• Re-flooring the bathroom, kitchen,
mudroom, and basement. (We’re trying it. New tiles are purchased,
happily sitting in boxes in the basement.)
• Flooded basement. (Once the hot water
heater was swapped out, by the pros, it ended up being mostly cleanup.)
• New light fixtures (a relatively painless
— barring the shopping — team effort.)
Rookie mistakes: Things I won’t do again.
• Enlist friends to move. Not only has the
appeal of beer and pizza in exchange for moving started to wear off, but
it’s impossible to supervise multiple trips on both ends. Next time,
we’ll hire movers.
• Move in a weekend. If possible, next time
I’d like to take an extra day or two to settle into the home. Leaving
work on a Friday, packing, moving Saturday and then trying to get all
unpacked and ready for work Monday morning is a recipe for sleepless
nights, lost boxes and tears.
• Stay home during a renovation. Watching
the electricians cut holes in the walls was tough, even worse was
working around the dust and power outages. If I could have afforded to
keep my apartment for an extra month while the work was going on I
certainly would have.
— Jennifer Wilson-Speedy
It’s been over a year since my husband and I decided we were ready to make the biggest investment of time, money and sanity in our twenty-something lives and buy our first home.
Turns out, buying a home is a lot like dating. You enter the market full of
enthusiasm, encounter a lot of duds and then finally meet a match that
fits the bill.
But, unlike dating, you’re not allowed an ounce of commitment-phobia when you’re buying a home in the Toronto market. We were lucky to get in two “dates” with our East York semi, plus a once-over by a home inspector (akin to that nod of parental approval) before we were handing over deposits, signing a mountain of paperwork and packing boxes.
The first visit to what would become our home was like a really great first date. Freshly groomed, and bearing fresh flowers, the house was showing off all of its best angles and just screamed potential as we checked off the boxes on our “must-have” list: three-bedrooms, close to transit, move-in-ready, a yard and a basement video game haven for Mr. Speedy.
It was puppy love. The property treated us right on our second visit too: quiet, nice neighbours, and some lovely cosmetic touches, like a great damask wallpaper. It was obviously ready for a long-term commitment.
So, just two days after our first meeting, we put in an offer, and, after an awful lot of tea and anxious waiting, it was all ours.
Then, just like any relationship, that’s when the little flaws started to show and the romance started to fade a little bit.
To begin with, the mere act of moving is a trial, in and of itself. Before buying the house, we’d moved 10 times in the past four years, so we thought we had gotten pretty good at it. But, apparently, practice does not make perfect.
Packing up all our dishes the night before meant we were mostly packed by the time friends and family arrived. But, it also meant no food in the morning. A caffeine-deprived and hungry new homeowner is not a happy new homeowner. At least until their friends sneak off to build the bedroom so they can sleep that night. Then they’re just exhausted and eternally grateful.
Labelling boxes is a great way of directing traffic, if people can a) read the directions and b) care. If everyone is focused on a dump and run, you end up with a “to donate” pile in the living room, dishes in the basement, and the contents of your closet in a garbage bag in the kitchen.
Once the dust settled from moving day, along with some emergency purchases like new locks and shower curtains, we started stirring it up again with our knob and tube rewiring. We decided to have the guys start work right away so that we could hold off unpacking until it was all done and cleaned up. We moved on a Saturday and, by Monday, I was sitting in my plastic-covered living room watching men poke holes in my newly purchased walls.
While logically we were making the house safer, and adding value, emotionally it felt like we were paying an awful lot of money to make the place messier and uglier. Blissfully, the project came in mostly on time and on budget, and we couldn’t have been happier to be able to start closing up the walls — which, of course, got delayed because of H1N1. The crew recovered, and, when we were all patched up, the mess was absolutely unreal.
We’d been warned it would be messy. I was even mostly prepared for the thin layer of dust on every single millimetre of the house. But I couldn’t believe how pervasive the drywall dust was. Wipe a surface and, a few hours later, it would be dusty again. Even now, almost a year later, and despite my best domestic diva efforts, I still find traces in hard-to-reach places.
After the excruciating first few months of living in a construction zone — I can’t imagine how people cope with larger projects — the real work began.
Every single room in the house needed to be primed and painted. I thought I’d be clever and take a shortcut in re-painting the main floor, where only two walls in the living and dining room needed repainting, by colour-matching the paint. As is often the case, my time-saving trick didn’t work. Instead, I ended up fully painting both rooms in colours that were similar, but not exactly matching, the previous owners’ taste. Someday, when the rest of the house is painted, those rooms will get a fresh coat of the same grey hue. For now, at least we’ve banished the big white splotches.
Hoped for upgrades fell further and further down the priority list as we just tried to tackle the dust, unpack and make everything livable.
That time also included a lot of sticker shock. From closing costs, monthly bills and insurance to paint, furniture and decor items, the bank accounts kept draining and the list of “to-dos” and “to-buys” just kept growing. Every time one room was completed, the others looked even more shoddy by comparison.
Practically every day, as we trudged home from work to open boxes and clean, we asked ourselves “What on Earth have we gotten ourselves into?” Maintaining, decorating and cleaning our much-larger space was taking up a lot of our time. But, for as many times as we panicked — and there were many — there were also the moments of awe and pride. Sure, maybe it was expensive. And a little bit messy. But it was ours. A place to call home. A sound financial decision. And, a blank slate where we could showcase our hobbies and create our own traditions.
Every week got a little easier as more boxes were unpacked, more walls painted and more little annoyances, like wiggly closet handles and ripped screens, were fixed. By the end of that first summer, it started to feel less like a work in progress and more like a real home.
Of course, there were still some bumps in the road. We went away for Thanksgiving and, upon our return, Mr. Speedy promptly went down to the basement to feed our bunny Allistair. His hollers of “We have a problem” had me fearing a dead rabbit, so I was almost relieved to find Al merrily munching away and myself ankle deep in water. Turns out our hot water tank had given out sometime during our holiday and, after moving several soggy boxes and a frantic call to the hot water people, we were left with a funky smelling basement. At least it was a great incentive to unpack all those boxes left in storage and get rid of the ugly carpet.
If I had to describe my first year of home ownership in three words, I’d say: expensive, dusty and rewarding. Despite all the challenges, the pride of home ownership is still running strong.
Showing friends and family our home and watching it all come together — however slowly — is a constant source of pride. Sitting out on the deck in nice weather, sharing a barbeque with friends and watching the rabbit hop about the plants that have survived my black thumb is truly blissful. And, just coming home from work at the end of the day to a place that is truly ours, and paying our own mortgage instead of someone else’s, is amazing.
Now, on to that next project.
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