In 2005, anticipating our retirement in 2007, we bought a house – at the time, not certain of its age – that we now know was built well before 1903.

On a quiet lane, 25 metres from the TransCanada Trail and the Waterfowl Park, it was in pretty sad shape … and priced accordingly. We bought it while were were on vacation in Canada and for two years, rented it to students.

In April of 2007 we left India, spent a week in London as tourists in order to decompress and carried on to a cousin’s cottage on the Bay of Fundy where we relaxed between buying a car and picking up all of the goods and chattels we had left here and there during 14 years living outside of Canada but vacation back in Canada – usually camping with tent, air mattresses, Coleman stove, etc. – from a storage unit in Hamilton ON through relatives and friends holding various collections of books and stamp collections along the route back to the Maritimes.

A week before the lease was up, we toddled over to our house, disturbed our tenants and parked all of the various bits and pieces in the garage. Then, we left them alone, they moved out and on 01 May we “moved in” with an air mattress, sleeping bag and our suitcases and worked hard to clean the house prior to the arrival of anything more.

The next day our shipment of household furniture that had been in storage in Ottawa arrived – sadly missing many things including our couch. Seems there were 7 skids of our things in storage and we only got 6 skids back. The insurance claim was pages long and based on the inventory of what had gone in to storage in the first place.

The following Friday, we headed off to Moncton to meet up with Canada Customs, along with the inventory we had of what was in our shipment from India. Successfully clearing that, the movers arrived the following Monday with the shipping container. The only damage was a brass statue of a dancing Shiva where the welds had been damaged and broken due to salt water leaking in one corner of the container.

Having moved in, we then had an opportunity to take stock! And some stock it was! The house needed lots of repairs and the sooner they started the better. We soon found that this was a “before” house. It had “good bones” but “before you can do that you have to do this” became its theme….and the adventure of 10 years of renovations … and the travels in between not only personal travels but Habitat for Humanity builds and contract work that paid for all of the foregoing … began!

This blog then, is the story of all those adventures!