Blair's Blog

Last day of October and it’s about 15 degrees out and we are sitting outside at our local coffee place enjoying mocha’s.

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Well at least we got out for a walk this morning. It was a beautiful day and we woke early and decided that we should get out for a walk before the kids were up and the day got away from us. Days do get away from us all too easily of late. Something about taking care of two houses, working, still dealing with moving and finding somewhere in the new house for all the junk treasured possessions. We still have lots to do before we will be considering ourselves to be settled into the new place.

However, for this morning, it was nice to just get out into the sunshine and explore the new neighbourhood. We went nearly 5 km, walking to the Glenmore Dam and back. It was a little cool at first, but once we were moving it was fine.

In case you are wondering, the map comes from a site called DaftLogic Distance Calculator, it’s pretty interesting.

Even though I grew up in this area, so much has changed since I was in high school, it all seems only partly familiar. Walking across the top of the dam was interesting – I still have faint memories of back when you could drive across it. Anyway, it was a nice morning and hopefully the first of many like it.

While I am here, I suppose a bit of an update on the house move would be good! I am still not really organized enough to have taken any pictures of the new place so here is the set of pictures that were on the MLS site. All the furniture is that of the previous owners:

And, for good measure, here are the pictures of the Chestermere house. These are also from the MLS listing (which is active now and you can see it here until we sell…) and show the place after all the work that we did to prep for listing:

In both sets of pictures, the realtor trickery is quite evident with the use of excessively wide-angle camera lenses. It is quite amazing how important form is over function in this. We hardly recognize the place – with new carpet throughout the main and upper floors, new paint (walls and trim) everywhere and all of the staged rooms without a shred of our own personal touches it really doesn’t look or feel like home any longer.

We have had quite a bit of interest, with a half-dozen second showings and two offers (both from the same couple!). We do hope that we can close a deal on the place fairly quickly, it would be good to just have one house to look after!

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Ok, what’s the deal with this weather? This is the view from my office window in downtown Calgary at 10:00 am on the first day of Spring.  
This just isn’t right. The forecast is for it to go on like this for the next few days. Not quite as conducive to moving house as we would like. At least we have overlap with the Chestermere and Calgary houses, so we can avoid the worst days. The bulk of the move will be on the 25th when we have movers taking the furniture across to the new place.
After that we will paint and stage the Chestermere place and be ready to list by mid April or so.  

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As of today at noon, we are the owners of a new place in southwest Calgary! Yep, after 15 years in Chestermere, we are moving into the city. There are a host of reasons for the move, but the bottom line really comes down to three things: time, community and education.

Time: Between Brenda and I, on a good week we are spending at least 30 hours behind the wheel getting to school, to work, shopping, kids activities, visiting friends and so on. A bad week can be closer to 50 hours. The cost is substantial financially (with gas at $1.20/L) as well as with respect to how tired we are at the end of the day.

Community: Chestermere never really matured into the vibrant town that we hoped for when we moved here. Despite growing from about 2000 people in 1998 when we moved in to somewhere around 17000 today, there is still only a limited commercial sector and essentially no business that isn’t retail. Basically every activity whether social, shopping, school, dentist, doctor, work or anything else involves a drive into Calgary. Chestermere is a bedroom suburb of Calgary and the constant line of SUVs and minivans between Calgary and Chestermere makes us think that we are not the only family in this situation.

Education: The kids have always attended school in Calgary, and as they get older we are finding that they are needing something different – an environment that will challenge them to not just learn the 3 R’s but to grow in independent thought and maturity. The educational choices are better in Calgary and living in the southwest will mean that the kids will be able to walk to school, rather than depending on us to drive them.

Beyond this, it will be nice to be a lot closer to family and it is giving us the perfect excuse to purge a bunch of junk treasured possessions that it would be nice to not have to take care of any longer.

It is tough to move after so long in a house that we have really made our own and enjoy, especially for the kids who haven’t known any other home. Really, if we could just move the house into the city, that would be good – but that’s not how it works!

Pictures to follow – it’s tough to handle the camera while hauling boxes of junk treasured possessions into the new place!

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