Tag Archives: parry sound

Aunt Cecilia braved the summer traffic to come and visit

What I've Been Up To, ,

Aunt Cecilia drove up from Toronto on Saturday morning to visit us for the weekend. It was a great weekend!

On Saturday we went for a scenic tour. We wanted to see what Parry Island was all about, but there wasn’t much to see so we headed into Parry Sound for lunch and then headed up to Killbear Provincial Park.

I have never seen a provincial park so packed! There were people EVERYWHERE! We took a couple short hikes and visited their visitor’s centre. They had two Massassauga Rattle Snakes living in glass displays. Killbear is known for being a hot spot for these rattle snakes, but we didn’t see any (okay with me – almost stepped on one once with my Dad and those memories will last a lifetime).

Here are some pictures from Killbear:


Cecilia's Visit

Cecilia's Visit

Cecilia's Visit


The weather was nice this weekend – almost too warm. We sat outside and drank some beers and soaked up some sun and then some shade when the sun was too hot. Jeff cooked up some grouse and deer for dinner. It was really good. He made a breading for the grouse that was yummy.

On Sunday we hiked back to the swampy pond back in the property here. We made a wrong turn, or maybe forgot to turn, on the way back and ended up on the highway down by the stop sign. Nothing a hike back up the side of the highway can’t rectify.

Cecilia and I went to Rosseau to see what it was all about in the summer. The little town was packed with summer visitors. There were several antique stores and people peddling antiques and “stuff” on the lawns around the shops. It was totally ridiculous the prices they had on things. Like a set of old dishes you’d pay maybe $10 for, but they were asking a few hundred for. I found a set of someone’s old family photographs from around 1906. They were fascinating to look at. The names were all on the back. People just didn’t smile in photos back then. They looked so uncomfortable.

Thanks for battling the summer traffic to come and visit us Aunt Cecilia – you’re welcome anytime.

Highway 141

House/Moving/Repairs

We are now residing at 72 Highway 141 West !!

It’s a great place. It’s a big house (by my standards) – 3 bedrooms and a full basement. It’s surrounded by red pine trees. There are some old growth pine in the stand too – beautiful – I’ll get some pictures up soon.

The cable man came today to hook up the cable and the internet. Hopefully the digital cable box comes tomorrow by courier!

We found out that this area doesn’t have Bell voicemail! How crazy is that? We have call display but if you call and we don’t answer, neither is voice mail because it doesn’t exist here! I guess you’ll have to email!

The power went off for a few hours starting at 4pm. There was a small thunderstorm and some heavy rain so a tree probably went down somewhere.

The house we’re renting is furnished. We have a big rec room in the basement that is very 1950′s – it’s so very much like the furniture I remember from the basement rec room on Fleet St. in London (Grandma & Pa’s place) or from the back room in the cottage – those big long purple like stiff looking couches. Coffee tables, end tables, bar! There is also a piano and a guitar and clocks and things. All the bedrooms had a little side table beside the bed with a doily, a lamp, and an alarm clock. The living room is nice and big – a couch and two chairs – one a recliner and one with a foot stool. The kitchen is loaded with things – all very much from Grandma Stock’s era. There is towels and tablecloths – even a full drawer of cookbooks! We are totally set.

Highway 141 is a busy road. We are right before the hamlet of Humphrey which even has a store with a liquor agency in it and movie rentals – its just one km away so easily walkable. At night last night while we were walking the dogs in the back yard we could hear the hum of Highway 400 because it really isn’t too far from here.

Anyway, photos of the place will follow – perhaps tomorrow.

Parry Sound, Here We Come

House/Moving/Repairs

Turns out that Jeff’s interview in Halifax yesterday was just another 3+ hour test and presentation and no interview – there is still another step to go!! So he won’t know until mid-April if he has the job or not. He won’t even know for a couple weeks if he qualifies for an interview! Uh oh!

So the plan is to move to Parry Sound. If he ends up getting one of the Nova Scotia positions, then we’ll have to move again. Both moves should be carried out by government movers so that part shouldn’t be painful, it’s just the part of finding a place to live in Parry Sound in the meantime!

Nothing

House/Moving/Repairs,

Jeff is done looking at all the listings.

And they are all crap.

He has some good stories of locked doors, basements you have to enter from outside, pee smells, lack of insulation, signs of basement flooding, extremely slanted floors, people putting laminate flooring over carpet, etc etc.

That one on Rankin Lake Rd turned out to have a weird 5 foot addition on the front and it wasn’t all insulated and there were a million doors everywhere with a bad layout. He hated it. It’s hard to pay the absolute top limit of what you can afford for a house you’d have to rip apart.

There was one house that was really nice inside, this one:

http://www.mls.ca/PropertyDetails.aspx?PropertyID=4556692

but it has a bad location, in a poor neighbourhood – although with the new hospital going in it could change, but… I don’t know.

Actually there was one that was okay, nice enough house, didn’t need that much work – this one:

http://www.mls.ca/PropertyDetails.aspx?PropertyID=4871253

which has dropped from $209K to $189K but it’s more than we can afford. Even if we could come up with that kind of money, we really don’t want to be house poor for the rest of our lives. And he also said it’s on bedrock and half the utility room is a big huge rock coming out of the floor!

He’s going to talk to his new boss down there tomorrow. He refuses to buy an expensive piece of crap. We might just take my house off the market and he’ll move in with me until the spring and then we’ll try again. His agent says real estate stays active there until November, and then it dies until spring.

Or we can look at Nova Scotia, but we both would like to go to Parry Sound.

So he’ll be driving back here tomorrow. He filled his camera’s card with 100+ photos and he took lots of notes.

Oh I’m anxious!

House/Moving/Repairs,

Jeff is meeting with his real estate agent at this hour and they have a full day of houses to see (probably only about 5 places).

By the end of the day I’ll have a better idea if we’re bailing and heading to Nova Scotia instead, or if we have a hope of staying in Ontario, or if we’ll be shackin’ up in Jeff’s little rented house here in the Sault for awhile.

I am liking that last listing I posted last night more and more. It needs some serious decorating work done, but it has a lot of potential and isn’t very old. Jeff is mostly concerned on how much it will cost to heat it because it’s quite big. But he recognizes that if we get in over our head, that basement would be easy to rent out as a separate apartment if need be. The current owner has a successful water bottling business using the well water. I wonder how much money selling water can bring in.

Anyway, send all your good wishes and good luck vibes through the airwaves to Jeff in Parry Sound. I can’t wait to hear how it goes!

Nova Scotia?

House/Moving/Repairs, ,

Jeff still has to wait until tomorrow to view the properties in Parry Sound, but the idea has come up that maybe we’ll move to Nova Scotia instead, where there are jobs for him, where he might have had to move eventually anyway, and where big houses are less than 100K and have big lots (multiple acres.)

I really would like to live in Parry Sound so I’m still close to Northern Ontario, and close to all my family, but buying a horrible pit of a property and having to pay most of our income to a mortgage for the rest of our lives for a house we hate isn’t so appealing…

I guess we’ll see how tomorrow goes.

In the meantime, here is an example of what we could get if he took a job in Yarmouth, Nova Scotia:

http://www.mls.ca/PropertyDetails.aspx?PropertyID=4279357

(8 acres, 4 bedrooms, $85,000)

Another thought is buying a lot and buying a modular home for it, but that idea may cost more than we have to spend.

First Call from Parry Sound

House/Moving/Repairs,

Jeff is down in Parry Sound now. I just got the first call from him. He doesn’t think he’ll be buying a house this week. Even the junk houses are WAY WAY WAY overpriced. There just isn’t anything there.

I’m glad I’m up here because I’d be so distraught down there. The ridiculous agent he has thought he wasn’t coming, even after he called her last week, so now he can’t go see anything until Wednesday.

What might happen is he’ll work part-time in Parry Sound and if/when my house sells, I’ll have to move into his rental house with him. It’s half the size of my house, but we have to do what we have to do.

Oh please real estate gods, can you list a house at an affordable price? And maybe through in a basement, garage, forced air heating, and just maybe can you make it more than a few feet off the TransCanada? And maybe within 15 minutes of Parry Sound?