The exercise:
Write about: shelter.
It's well beyond time that I fill you in on what's been happening behind the scenes.
Uh, fair warning: it got long. I guess that happens when you hold back like half a year's worth of news and try to fit it all into one post.
Mine:
It is not especially difficult to see that 2020 has been one hell of a year for all of us. We get hit over the head with it, seemingly no matter where we turn. Despite that, I'd like to toss another story onto the pile, if you care to read it.
As I mentioned almost a year ago, we moved half an hour up the road to Oliver because we were in desperate need of more space. Also a more central location was nice. So we found a place to rent and moved at the start of this year, before it became *this* year.
And then the pandemic arrived. I stayed away from work (and most everything and everybody else) from mid-March to mid-July, which I mentioned. What I didn't tell you at the time was that our house went up for sale in May.
The realtor told us they would advertise it as having good tenants who wanted to stay and that they would try to find a buyer who wanted to keep us on. Spoiler alert: they didn't.
The house sold in June, at which point we were given the choice to run out our lease and move in January, or leave by September 1st and get paid one month's rent to do so. I told them they could add in moving expenses as well and they agreed. We figured two and a half months to find another place was plenty.
Spoiler alert: nope.
We looked at two, maybe three places. None of them worked for us. So come September... we were back in Osoyoos. Except our cabin had been rented out. So we were actually back in Osoyoos, back in Kat's parents house.
So, like, all the way back to where we started when we first moved from Vancouver. Just, you know, with two kids and the vast majority of our stuff in a storage locker in Oliver. And we both had better jobs and had a bit of extra money from being paid to move out.
We decided pretty quick that we were done with the rental game and wanted to buy a house to call our own and give the boys some secure footing. So we pooled together money we'd earmarked for... like five different things, and started saving the money we'd have otherwise been putting toward rent and utilities and internet and... wherever else our money had been going.
In mid-October we got ourselves pre-approved for a mortgage so that we knew what our price range would be, then got ourselves a realtor. Our first day of actually looking at homes was the day before my birthday - spent mostly in Penticton as there wasn't much of anything that we could afford in Oliver - and we almost put in an offer that night on a townhouse... but then found out it was renters living there, not the owner. Which meant we couldn't move in until February 1st because they needed to be given notice - just like we were - and we wanted to move sooner than that (also didn't really want to do that to somebody else).
Spoiler alert: remember that home.
Over the next few weeks we looked at more places. A couple dumps, a few that just didn't work for us. We did actually put an offer in on one place but lost out to another buyer who went higher than we were willing to go. Then we ended up back in the same townhouse complex as the previously mentioned home, looking at a different unit that ended up not being what we wanted. Which was when Kat mentioned to our realtor that it was too bad the other unit hadn't worked out.
At which point our realtor mentioned that it hadn't sold yet. Which, by the way, was surprising because the housing market here has lost its god damned mind.
Anyway. We put an offer in that night. It was accepted the following afternoon. We spent the next two weeks or so jumping through all the hoops (mortgage going from pre-approval to approved, house inspection, etc). And we signed the papers that removed the subjects on the 21st of November.
So, we're officially home owners. We won't be living there until February - unless the tenant finds something sooner - but we own a home. In Penticton. It's a three bedroom, two bathroom townhouse in an older complex, which means there is a lot of green space for the boys to run around on - the requirement for green space in townhome developments was dropped at some point, sadly. We'll be a ten minute walk to the nearest beach.
And it's ours. Nobody can kick us out. We leave when we're ready to leave. A place for all four of us to call home, with confidence.
We can't wait.
3 comments:
Aha, so my guess a couple of weeks back about moving house wasn't that far off! I am really pleased that you're a homeowner now, that's fantastic news! The way you got there is obviously not the route you'd have chosen given the chance, but it seems to have worked out quite nicely in the end. I suppose I'll have to write about Sixticton a bit more now that you're back in Penticton :-p
House-hunting is always more work than you expect, and what people seem to think is acceptable for living in amazes me still. I suppose we're all blind to our own faults, but sometimes I think there's wilful blindness as well....
Still, congratulations on it all, and well done for postponing the move until February after the worst of winter has hit :)
Shelter
We looked inside before we dragged the chupacapra in, as there had been enough surprises for an entire year so far. The building was a long hall with stairs running up the sides at regular intervals. Walkways crossed between pairs of stairs, and at either end there were upstairs room with open windows (no glass) that looked out over the hall. The hall itself was filled with some kind of machinery. They looked like looms to me, but I'm no textile expert, and no matter what Ben claims he's not neither. High windows let sunlight in, and dust motes floated in the air.
"Factory?" Ben shrugged even as he asked the question; it didn't much matter to us what it had been, and taking a machine away was out of the question. The Elizabethtown folks might have looted this eventually, but probably for scrap.
"I think so," said Jimmy. He sniffed. "There's a faint smell of oil," he said, "but it's really faint."
Ben sniffed as well while I started hauling our corpse inside.
"Not oil," he said. "That's the paint-shop smell I smelled on that beast."
I stopped hauling. "We'd best look around and make sure there's none hiding in here then," I said flatly.
I would have liked to have split up, but no-one would have willing gone by themselves so we grouped as three. The machinery floor was empty, that was easy to determine. We did note that the machines themselves were odd proportions; they were a bit too high and wide for a human to manage things properly. Either the humans were strangely shaped, or there were at least two of them to a machine.
Upstairs it turned out to be even easier to check: each of the rooms at the end, with its large window, gave a very good view of the whole factory and it was clear that this was some kind of overseers room. It would have been a relief had we not immediately seen two dead Elizabethtown folk in the nearest room. Well, actually what we saw looked like one strangely shaped Elizabethtowner, but when we ventured in there and looked more closely we realised that it was two of them, torn apart and put back together, nailed or pinned to the wall somehow, in a geometric shape of some kind.
"It's like a crucifixion," I said slowly. "Only for something with a few more arms and legs than a human. It might be religious."
"These creatures are religious?" Ben sounded disgusted.
"Maybe," I said. "The little book did talk about priests, maybe these are those priests? It might not be the hooting beasts that did this after all. Maybe the priests are hiding somewhere as well, and they did this as a sacrifice to their gods?"
"This deserted city has a lot of people hiding in it," muttered Ben. I found myself inclining to agree with him.
"The bodies are pretty fresh," said Jimmy, who was closest to them. "They might have come from the boat."
"Not priests then," said Ben. "We would have see dead hooting monsters if there'd been two groups fighting down there over the Elizabethtowners."
I sighed. There were just more mysteries to be solved and I didn't want to be here trying to solve them.
"Let's search the bodies," I said. "Best not to overlook anything."
Ben handled that while Jimmy and I dragged the hooting monster in and, at Jimmy's suggestion, set it up at one of the machines further in to hide it better.
"Well, would you look at that?" I said, thoughtfully, standing back.
"What?"
"This machine is the right proportions for one of these creatures." I pointed, and Jimmy looked. "Looks like they were worked in these factories. Or these are their factories."
"Slaves" said Ben, who'd come down the stairs behind us and was looking at well. "I bet they were slaves and either rebelled or got free when the priests had their war."
"Makes sense. Did you find anything?"
"Yep," said Ben. He held up a key and a bit of paper, on which was a hand-drawn map and a large bloodstain.
Greg - thanks! And no, that wasn't how we would have planned it, but the end result matters most, I think. Really looking forward to getting settled into Sixticton. I mean Penticton.
Hmm, the factory is an interesting find. The bodies... a worrying one. And the key an exciting one, potentially. This one's got it all :)
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