I made my recent home move backwards. I sold my house and then had to decide where to move and find a place. Which wasn’t easy in the hot seller’s market of 2021!
While many people were busy staying home during the winter of 2020, the busy construction bees were knocking down trees and building roads. My quiet cul-de-sac of twenty years became a race track for the many tenants of the houses built at the end of this road. With many more places going to be built, my home went from being in a quiet and peaceful neighbourhood to living on a busy thoroughfare. I no longer knew my neighbours as they were in new, large multi-family dwellings with many tenants.
When real estate agents started knocking on my door and offering to buy my property as they wanted the land for development, I decided to test the market. In the spring of 2021, I listed my house for sale and had offers before the sign was even installed. One of the conditions of sale from the eventual buyer was that they wanted to see inside the house! No COVID protocol viewings for me; the house sold before there was even an open door.
Once my house sold, though, I had a dilemma. Where do I move to? With some excellent timing, my daughter was scheduled to finish high school. This gave us a little more time and flexibility to find something suitable, as we built a rent-back term into the sales contract. The Vancouver area is expensive and heavily developed. The main criteria I had for a new house was that it had to be quiet. I didn’t want my neighbours to be on top of me, and it needed to be affordable. The recent development in my old area really showed the importance of peace and quiet around my home. Something that the Vancouver area cannot ever be labelled. I didn’t want to take on the financial commitment and risk of a large mortgage. Which meant finding a place was challenging. Especially with the level of quietness and space, I was looking for.
After looking around the Vancouver area for some time, my family began to discuss other places we could consider. Our house had sold, and we needed to find somewhere quickly. We are familiar with the Central Okanagan region of British Columbia as my brother-in-law has lived here for several years. It’s also the wine capital of BC, and we had many good experiences here in pre-COVID times.
As the final clincher, we found an almost perfect house. Enough space, relatively affordable, and most importantly, in a neighbourhood surrounded by orchards and hills. The Prairie Valley region of Summerland. With no view of the Okanagan Lake, it is quieter, and the area is spread out enough to not feel on top of your neighbours. We jumped at it.
And then came the realization that it’s a long way from where I worked - in a hybrid work arrangement. I’ve read a lot of press about the /Great Resignation of 2021/. I could have added to one of those statistics. Remote work and flexibility are often cited as the top reasons for the large number of people looking for work or considering a change in employment.
Working from home taught me a lot about self-discipline, though I tended to a hybrid work approach, going into the office a few times a week for meetings, etc. It’s something else to consider a four-hour drive from the office and not practically available for in-person meetings.
One of the hardest things to do is announce that you are moving and putting your financial future in someone else’s hands. Luckily, the excellent leadership I worked with agreed to let me work entirely remotely. And the house I bought has a beautiful room for a home office, with double doors in front of my desk giving me a view of the valley and Giant’s Head Mountain in the background.
My new house is quiet and on a friendly street. My fabulous new neighbours recently gave me freshly laid eggs, raspberries, and even a couple of bottles of wine made from the grapes produced in their vineyard across the street.
The uncertainty I felt from selling a house and then deciding where to move is not something I could recommend, especially if one is stress-adverse. But now that I’ve made a move, it feels like the right thing. Small town living is lovely (so far).