Life in a country town
Oct. 14th, 2007 01:50 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
pyesetzYesterday was the "open house" for the new dentist's office, next door to my house. The dentist comes from Vancouver. He says he designed his new building to look like my house, so it wouldn't stick out too badly in this older neighbourhood (which has several houses over a century old). His wife, the hygienist, hails from a city that's 30 km away, but she went to high school with the previous owner of my house (there is one high school that serves this entire county and also an adjacent one, perhaps 2500 km² total area).
The dentist's open house had a competitor for "village news of the day" yesterday: farmer Arnold's barn burned down. It was a sad day for Arnold's cows, who lost their home, but apparently the neighbouring farmers will be taking them in. Meanwhile, an entire barn engulfed in flames, being battled by the fire department, isn't something you see every day (unless you're![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
swift_fox), so lots of gawkers came by to see the show. The barn was adjecent to the part of Baden Creek that opens out into a pond, but the firemen ran a long hose out to the nearest hydrant rather than grabbing water from the creek (perhaps to avoid clogging their equipment).
It seemed to me that there were two groups of gawkers and they did not talk to each other. There were the "townies" who operate the farms and have lived here for 150 years, and also the "newcomers" who moved out from Waterloo to raise their families but continue to work and shop in the city. The population of the village of Baden has tripled in the last seven years! I sort of felt like I ought to be in the Townie group since I live in an old house and not one of the new developments, but really I'm even newer than the Newcomers who are mostly native-born Canadians and ethnic Mennonites like the Townies. So I didn't talk to anyone.
Tomorrow the electrician will be coming back for his third day of work upgrading the house to something decent. (This is the same guy that the previous owners had hired to replace their knob-and-tube with something insurable.) It's very hard to add external receptacles to this house, which has a double layer of bricks on the outside, large stones and mortar for a foundation, and several layers of plaster on the inside. He needed a 30-inch drill to get from the front porch to the basement! Also tomorrow, the plumber will come over to replace the rented hot-water heater with an owned one, remove lots of extraneous plumbing (the pipes double back on themselves several times because previous owners of the house changed their minds), and add a gas line for my new clothes dryer. A gas dryer costs only $70 more than an electric and should pay for itself in a year, but I forgot to include $200 to run a gas line over to it from the furnace! Everything is difficult in an old house because there have been so many upgrades already. Concepts like "electrification" and "central heating" and "indoor plumbing" were not part of the vernacular of rural Ontario in 1870.
Wireless Internet works better here than in my old house (which has drywall with corner mesh, so its walls have more metal in them than these lath-and-plaster jobs). Download speed is only half of what was advertised, but Rogers claims they'll be making a major upgrade to the Wilmot central office on October 15th (hey! that's tomorrow!) so we'll see if things improve. Still, I manage to find lots of things to do besides working. I think that, on an average day, I'm spending more than I'm making. That needs to change.
I signed a bill of sale for my old house as the movers were packing their truck. Two weeks later I called my agent to see how things were going. The buyers had backed out after signing and never gave their deposit. This is the third time the house has "almost" sold. I'm getting sick of this agent, but NJ real estate is a racket and no licenced realtor would talk to me if I walked away from this guy before his contract is up next month. Also, I hadn't planned to continue paying interest on that mortgage for many more months. After I finish opening up credit-card accounts in Canada (maybe next week), perhaps I'll ask the bank if I can just sign over the deed to them and walk away. At this point I've already sucked out of the line of credit all the value I expect to get from the property and am just selling it to pay off the mortgage. I'm still using my A+ credit rating in the States to gain credit in Canada, but that won't be needed for much longer. If I try to hold up two mortgages, one of which is just bleeding money, I'll either go bankrupt or end up in a hospital.
The dentist's open house had a competitor for "village news of the day" yesterday: farmer Arnold's barn burned down. It was a sad day for Arnold's cows, who lost their home, but apparently the neighbouring farmers will be taking them in. Meanwhile, an entire barn engulfed in flames, being battled by the fire department, isn't something you see every day (unless you're
swift_fox), so lots of gawkers came by to see the show. The barn was adjecent to the part of Baden Creek that opens out into a pond, but the firemen ran a long hose out to the nearest hydrant rather than grabbing water from the creek (perhaps to avoid clogging their equipment).It seemed to me that there were two groups of gawkers and they did not talk to each other. There were the "townies" who operate the farms and have lived here for 150 years, and also the "newcomers" who moved out from Waterloo to raise their families but continue to work and shop in the city. The population of the village of Baden has tripled in the last seven years! I sort of felt like I ought to be in the Townie group since I live in an old house and not one of the new developments, but really I'm even newer than the Newcomers who are mostly native-born Canadians and ethnic Mennonites like the Townies. So I didn't talk to anyone.
Tomorrow the electrician will be coming back for his third day of work upgrading the house to something decent. (This is the same guy that the previous owners had hired to replace their knob-and-tube with something insurable.) It's very hard to add external receptacles to this house, which has a double layer of bricks on the outside, large stones and mortar for a foundation, and several layers of plaster on the inside. He needed a 30-inch drill to get from the front porch to the basement! Also tomorrow, the plumber will come over to replace the rented hot-water heater with an owned one, remove lots of extraneous plumbing (the pipes double back on themselves several times because previous owners of the house changed their minds), and add a gas line for my new clothes dryer. A gas dryer costs only $70 more than an electric and should pay for itself in a year, but I forgot to include $200 to run a gas line over to it from the furnace! Everything is difficult in an old house because there have been so many upgrades already. Concepts like "electrification" and "central heating" and "indoor plumbing" were not part of the vernacular of rural Ontario in 1870.
Wireless Internet works better here than in my old house (which has drywall with corner mesh, so its walls have more metal in them than these lath-and-plaster jobs). Download speed is only half of what was advertised, but Rogers claims they'll be making a major upgrade to the Wilmot central office on October 15th (hey! that's tomorrow!) so we'll see if things improve. Still, I manage to find lots of things to do besides working. I think that, on an average day, I'm spending more than I'm making. That needs to change.
I signed a bill of sale for my old house as the movers were packing their truck. Two weeks later I called my agent to see how things were going. The buyers had backed out after signing and never gave their deposit. This is the third time the house has "almost" sold. I'm getting sick of this agent, but NJ real estate is a racket and no licenced realtor would talk to me if I walked away from this guy before his contract is up next month. Also, I hadn't planned to continue paying interest on that mortgage for many more months. After I finish opening up credit-card accounts in Canada (maybe next week), perhaps I'll ask the bank if I can just sign over the deed to them and walk away. At this point I've already sucked out of the line of credit all the value I expect to get from the property and am just selling it to pay off the mortgage. I'm still using my A+ credit rating in the States to gain credit in Canada, but that won't be needed for much longer. If I try to hold up two mortgages, one of which is just bleeding money, I'll either go bankrupt or end up in a hospital.
