“We found a beautiful undiscovered beach in El Paredon, a fishing village where fishermen still use harpoon spears to catch their lunch from the river.” (Photograph by Sarah Roe.)

I grew up in Guatemala. When I was in my late teens, I left home to backpack around Central America and surf on its beaches—I was always happiest when I was surfing, and wanted to see how waves in different places compared to each other. I learned how to make jewellery when I was a kid and funded my travels by selling hand-carved coconut pendant necklaces and macramé bracelets to locals and tourists. After travelling through Central America for a few years, I eventually settled in Costa Rica: it had great waves and lots of tourists who loved my jewellery. I travelled every few months in search of better waves, and on one trip to Nicaragua, I met my future wife, Sarah, a 20-year-old Canadian travelling around Central America on an archaeology trip. We clicked right away and started backpacking together from there.

For the next few months, we travelled across Central America. I taught Sarah to surf, and then we surfed together every day. It became a lifestyle for us as we progressed into our 20s: we surfed and gave surfing lessons in Central America all winter to help fund our travels, and then spent our summers in Canada, where I would run my jewellery business out of Toronto’s Kensington Market while Sarah worked as an archaeologist. I would surf every day for eight hours if I could, and I wanted to share that passion and lifestyle with others: surf in the mornings, cook together in the afternoon, and hang out by a fire at night. Eventually, Sarah and I came up with the idea of building a surf resort and a community where people could do just that.

We weren’t sure how to make this a reality, but we knew that the first step would be to find a beautiful location to build our dream. In 2010, when I was 25 and Sarah was 28, we put our plan into action. We rented a car and drove down the Pan-American Highway in Costa Rica to see if we could find an undiscovered quiet beach with great waves that could house a resort one day. We spent weeks veering off the main road for three hours at a time to remote oceanside villages, only to find that the huge waves broke directly on shore and weren’t surfable. Places that looked promising on the map turned out to be duds once we drove down. We looked throughout Costa Rica and Nicaragua before expanding our search to Guatemala.

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That’s when we got lucky. We found a beautiful undiscovered beach in El Paredon, a village where fishermen still use harpoon spears to catch their lunch from the river. The lot was a forgotten piece of land eight hours from the nearest city, where nobody surfed. And yet the wave was perfect, consistently rising and flowing onto the shoreline. In 2010, without any loans or financing, we dug into our savings and bought a 29,000-square-foot sandy lot on that beach, with the goal of one day building on it.

We had no investors—we wanted to build our dream business ourselves. So our plan was to raise money from our day jobs in Canada and come back for a few months every year to gradually build our resort. We started from scratch: we moved onto the lot to work out a site plan and gather materials. We had no running water or electricity, so we built a temporary tiny house for ourselves on the beach—a plastic tarp supported by bamboo—and we dug a hole in the ground next to it and made it our outhouse. Our neighbour cooked us meals three times a day for three months: five or six fried fish with tortillas, lemon and salt.

The construction was challenging. We were an eight-hour commute from the nearest city, and lugging traditional materials felt impossible. So we hired local builders to help us construct guest houses and communal buildings made of bamboo, which were inspired by a design we saw on a surf trip to Indonesia. It took seven years of surfing lessons and selling handmade jewellery to raise $40,000—enough to fully landscape, build the houses and construct the full resort. In 2017, we opened Hidden Wave to the public with two self-contained casitas—small houses for two people. It was exciting to break ground on a project we had worked on for so long. Business picked up quickly: we listed the resort on Airbnb as soon as we opened, and received a booking after just one week. We were also juggling parenthood. Sarah gave birth to our first son, Walter, in 2016, and she would carry our then one-year-old in her baby carrier as she managed the resort and greeted guests.

READ: The Move: A growing family upsizes in Winnipeg—at a fraction of Ontario’s prices

Since then, we’ve reinvested to grow the resort to five palm roof houses that hold 12 people and surround a large communal open-air kitchen and pool. We conceived it as a hybrid between full communal living and a solo vacation: everyone has their own room and porch so they can do their own thing but also have people around for meals and surf sessions. We have two staff members living there full time, and part-time staff from the area also lend a helping hand year-round.

Business has been so busy that we’ve spent most of our time in Guatemala, while travelling to and from Toronto during the summer. At the resort, we’ve hosted hundreds of people to date, and we welcome surfers of all skill levels, who either take classes that we offer or do their own thing. We caught a lucky break when a travel shuttle started driving between our beach and Antigua Guatemala, a popular city for tourists, cutting the eight-hour drive down to just two. It has made our resort sell out quickly; this year, we were completely booked from January to April, when tourists from Canada, the U.S. and Europe come to escape winter. We’ve been busy thinking about expanding our resort to create more rooms; last year we built a guest pool on the grounds. We want to continue sustaining and growing the resort, but the whole venture isn’t about the money. The satisfaction comes from having had a dream and a goal together, and having made it a reality. Now we get to wake up and surf every day just like we wanted: this work is an extension of our lives.

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That being said, Sarah loves her work as an archaeologist, and I love my jewellery shop in Kensington Market. Sarah’s been on maternity leave for two years, and we now have three kids, who are seven, three and two. But now that her leave is coming to an end, we’re trying to figure out how to balance our commitments in Canada with our new life here. We’re so busy at the resort during the winter months that I could not imagine spending them anywhere but Guatemala. It’s a good problem to have, because we love our jobs in Canada and we love our lives in Guatemala.

Every now and then, we’ll look at the resort and laugh because we think of what it looked like when it was just a beach with a plastic tarp and an outhouse. That’s why we’re so attached to it: we took this idea we loved, converted it into a way of life, and are sharing it with other people. It’s maybe the best decision we’ve ever made.

—As told to Alex Cyr

The post I moved from Toronto to Guatemala to start a surf resort with my family  appeared first on Macleans.ca.

Doug and Teri Johnson are now living a slower, calmer life in Cape Wolfe (photography by Stephen Harris)

The buyers:

Doug Johnson, a 58-year-old retired operations manager, and his wife, Teri, a 58-year-old retired medical lab technologist.

The budget:

$500,000

The backstory:

Doug and Teri spent their lives in St. Catharines, the southern Ontario city where they met in 1982 through friends. They raised their kids, Arlington and Olivia, in the same three-bedroom bungalow that Teri grew up in. Prior to the pandemic, the couple had been making plans for their retirement—which, they hoped, would include a prettier property with more land. “The bungalow wasn’t our dream home,” Doug says. “It was close to a busy road and our neighbours were right there.” Initially, the Johnsons were aiming to retire in 2024, but they reprioritized when Doug was diagnosed with prostate cancer in 2020. “That made me say, ‘It’s time to relax and enjoy life,’ ” Doug says.

A wall of windows looks out onto the Northumberland Strait

They briefly considered relocating within the province—north to Collingwood or southwest to Leamington—but they knew that the $500,000 they’d likely net from the sale of their bungalow wouldn’t stretch very far in Ontario’s pricey market. Instead, they looked east to Prince Edward Island, which they’d visited three times on vacation. Doug fondly recalls beach trips, the requisite heaps of seafood and checking out the local music scene. “People really didn’t seem to be in a hurry—they’d strike up a conversation or stop in to let you know a ceilidh, or party, is going on down the road,” he says. P.E.I. checked the Johnsons’ most important box: less stress.

The hunt:

In February of 2021, Doug and Teri reached out to a Charlottetown-based realtor with a few more wish-list items: three bedrooms, a waterfront view and access to medical care for Doug close by. (Like the rest of the country, P.E.I. is facing a serious shortage of doctors.) Quarantine was still mandatory for out-of-province travellers, so the Johnsons had their realtor forward local listings. Properties were selling much quicker than they expected. First, they missed out on a three-bedroom ranch-style bungalow in northwestern Gordon Cove, and later, a three-bedroom raised bungalow in Cape Bear. They realized bidding wars aren’t as common in P.E.I. as they are in Ontario. Sellers out east often accept the first offers that come in.

The dining room

By April, the Johnsons were revisiting listings they’d once overlooked. One was for a three-bedroom, two-bathroom bungalow in Cape Wolfe, listed for $459,000. It was an hour northwest of Summerside, the closest city, but just a 25-minute drive from a hospital. A video tour, posted on YouTube, revealed a charming V-shaped home clad in a mosaic of custom stonework, with a new addition built by the previous owners. The sunny main entrance gave way to a living room with a wood-burning fireplace, which led to a sunroom with clear views of the Northumberland Strait.

Doug and Teri submitted an offer of $450,000, conditional on a home inspection, which the sellers accepted. The Cape Wolfe property was theirs, and they’d never stepped foot inside. “Everybody thought we were crazy,” Doug says. The couple stayed in the St. Catharines house for a few months until December, when it sold for $505,000. It was a good thing they had a place to sleep, because securing movers was nearly impossible. “Many of the companies were too busy moving other people to the East Coast,” Doug says. Last January, he and Teri finally settled in for good.

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The Johnsons lost power for five days during Hurricane Fiona, but aside from some downed branches, the property remains mercifully intact. (Doug called it a good test for life in the Maritimes.) Packages are only delivered on Tuesdays and Wednesdays, and Doug is still on the waiting list for a new GP. But then they’re also a short drive from a sea-glass-speckled beach, cycling on the Confederation Trail and ceilidhs with new friends in town. Teri even bought a keyboard and is taking lessons online. “I’ve always wanted to play,” she says. “I just never had the time.”

The obligatory lighthouse keeps watch along the shoreline

The post The Move: After a cancer diagnosis, this Ontario couple headed to P.E.I. to retire (and relax) appeared first on Macleans.ca.

Kariouk and Gioventu spent more than a decade planning and building their modernist treehouse (Photography by Scott Norsworthy)

In 2007, architect Paul Kariouk set out to build a remote weekend getaway home. He and his husband, Antonio Gioventu, the executive director of a non-profit, lived in a loft-style studio apartment in Ottawa. They wanted their new home to be nearby, preferably somewhere quiet, so they acquired a 17-acre lakeside lot in La Pêche, Quebec. “In a world where everything is buzzing, beeping, humming and ringing, silence is the ultimate luxury,” Kariouk says.

He immediately began mapping out a compact, three-bedroom, 900-square-foot residence that could serve as both a refuge and a calling card to show clients what he could do with a limited budget. “I wanted to demonstrate that they could have something spectacular with a smaller footprint,” he says. To design his home, he looked upward, envisioning a stark, cantilevered cabin six storeys above the ground. Its towering height would fulfill the couple’s desire for solitude and allow their cabin to be built closer to Lac du Brochet. Kariouk also wanted to minimize any disturbance to the surrounding nature, so he kept the home’s eco-footprint as small as possible. Solar panels attached to the roof would generate almost all the energy needed, and the cabin would be heated by a high-efficiency wood stove.

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The project hit a stumbling block during the 2008 financial crisis, when new architectural work dried up at Kariouk’s firm, and he was forced to put his dream cabin on hold. When he could finally start construction in 2014, he took his time, sorting out the permits and clearing the site bit by bit over the years. The structure uses cross-laminated timber—large planks of wood that have been milled to exact specifications to avoid the usual waste a construction site would generate. “Every single screw, fastener and length of wood had to be modelled in computer software,” Kariouk explains. “It all fits together as precisely as dental work.” The house was finally ready to be assembled in 2019, and the interior work was wrapped up two years later.

Sitting flush with the treetops, the cabin rests atop a steel mast that juts out from a 12-foot-long foundation, roughly the size of a small car. The mast itself is home to several bat pods, which provide safe lodgings for the endangered brown bat population in the region. The narrow design is a practical consideration—a wider structure would require more than a single support beam—and an architectural marvel, executed by engineer Daniel Bonardi. Kariouk describes the structure as resembling a piece of paper folded in half. Two panels in a V-shape make up the underside, with a horizontal panel placed on top as a cabin floor for people to walk on.

Kariouk designed the interior to be indestructible, made up of the same wooden planks as the cabin’s shell and finished with durable linoleum floors. The couple also filled the place with colour; the kitchen is a vibrant blue, and their couch has been reupholstered with a yellow water- and mud-resistant material to accommodate their 160-pound dog, a Leonberger named Jethro, who loves to flop down after a long day of swimming.

RELATED: Habitat: A former New York Times journalist built this beachside fortress in P.E.I.

Flourishes of blue and yellow accent the home’s interior, providing a striking contrast to the surrounding nature

The rooms are packed with heirlooms inherited from parents and grandparents, including a Catholic bishop’s chair that came from Gioventu’s family and a treadle table Singer sewing machine from his grandmother. One bedroom is filled floor to ceiling with family photos and artwork by Kariouk’s father, an amateur painter. Even the name of the place itself—m.o.r.e Cabin—is an homage to family history: an acronym consisting of the first initial of each of Kariouk and Gioventu’s grandmothers: Marie, Olga, Rose and Elisabeth.

The couple spend every weekend at the cabin, an hour-long drive from their Ottawa apartment. Five kilometres off municipal Quebec roads, it’s totally off-grid, and when the streets aren’t plowed, they snowshoe up to their front door. They spent a year on a waiting list to install internet, but when they realized their evenings were better spent playing cards and reading together, they immediately cancelled the order.

According to Kariouk, living so high off the ground has its advantages. “The sunsets and moonrises are happening at your feet,” he says. “You see their reflection in the water.” Visits from acquaintances who are afraid of heights pose a challenge, but the couple has a simple solution. “If we have people like that over,” Kariouk says, “we seat them facing away from the view.”

The post An Ottawa couple built their dream treetop getaway in Quebec appeared first on Macleans.ca.

(Photography courtesy of Sacha Roy)

In 2016, freelance filmmaker Sacha Roy moved out of his Quebec City condo and bought a one-acre property on top of a cliff for $10,000, near the small village of Wakefield, Quebec. The lot was off the provincial power grid—hence the rock-bottom price—and there, Roy planned to build a wood cabin that could be his weekend getaway. There was just one problem: he was a communications major with no construction background. He didn’t even own any tools.

Upending his life for an unbuilt home in the countryside was a risky move, but it was also a well-earned break. He worked seven days a week, often travelling across the world to shoot video content for an array of clients. In one three-month stretch earlier that year, he’d visited 25 countries, including Peru and El Salvador. When he came home, he realized he was completely burned out. 

An outdoor enthusiast since birth, Roy saw the wood cabin as a chance to escape from his old lifestyle. He used Air Miles to buy his first-ever handsaw and collected advice on how to build a cabin from friends in the construction industry, from strangers at the Wakefield hardware store and, predominantly, from YouTube. “It was complete trial and error,” says Roy. He replaced his network of gutters once, reconfigured his water filtration system twice and has taken four stabs at the plumbing. “In fact, it still is trial and error. This cabin hasn’t stopped evolving since its conception.”  

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First, Roy laid concrete pads on his land and fashioned slabs of cedarwood onto them, creating a 556-square-foot shack with towering 18-foot ceilings. He added three sprawling windows to the south wall and insulated it all with mineral wool and Styrofoam. Inside, he built a partial second floor that holds a loft-style bedroom. The rest of the space became an open-concept living room with a sectional couch and a hammock that faces the windows. 

The living room flows into a quaint kitchen with a full-sized fridge, propane cooktop and wood stove, which helps heat the house along with eight solar panels scattered on his lot and a 3,500-watt generator. A corner of the main living space functions as an office, with satellite internet to ensure a strong Wi-Fi signal.

The building costs were higher than Roy anticipated. He estimates that he’s spent over $175,000, in part due to the provincial government forcing him to install his own septic system—which set him back $50,000—and his constant tinkering. Finding the proper waste system for the home was a challenge. At first, Roy had built a small outhouse, but later replaced it with an indoor composting toilet. He eventually parted ways with that too because he could not handle the smell. Instead, he installed a pedal toilet, which barely uses any water. “That’s a good example of how I’ve done things,” he says. “I start quite humble and slowly upgrade.”

Over the last seven years, he has also upgraded his solar panels, installed a rain catchment system, rebuilt his bedroom three times and redesigned the living room. “At first, I imagined a little shack in the woods where I could relax on weekends,” he says. “And then I fell in love with it and couldn’t stop trying to make it better.”

MORE: This vintage Ontario home combines retro space-age glamour with 21st-century perks

Roy made the cabin his permanent home in 2017, and he’s embraced the rugged lifestyle that comes with it. During most months of the year, he chops his own wood at the foot of the cliff, carries it up a hill on a 90-foot material elevator he built himself, and tosses it into the fire twice per day. In the winter, he clears the roads, shovels snow away from the solar panels and monitors water levels. 

Supplying the cabin with enough water is a constant challenge. A system of gutters captures rainwater and funnels it through a six-litre vat in a small shed a few metres away from the house. From there, a 12-volt pump shoots the water through a UV filter, which purifies it and makes it ready to drink. Roy had originally installed his filtration system on his home’s second floor, but relocated it outside after a rainstorm caused it to overflow inside, making a mess of water and tree debris. The water supply occasionally runs low in the winter when rain turns to snow, so Roy limits himself to three showers per week and outsources his laundry to a friend’s house. Recently, he replaced his rusting metal bathtub with a cast-iron-foot tub—a longtime dream of his.

In 2019, Roy started dating his partner, Anna, a conflict resolution worker, and she moved in with him soon after. “It was a huge leap of faith to start living together so early and in a space like this,” he says. “In the early days, we were still pooping outside.” He couldn’t leave the place for more than a week at a time because the water tank would fill and snow would pile onto the property. Now, the couple live there year-round. Roy still works as a filmmaker, and Anna takes over the daily chores when he leaves for his long video shoots.

Even then, he doesn’t like being gone for extended periods of time: seven years of fine-tuning has left him attached to his abode—so much so that he would never consider moving out. “Way too much work went into this for me to sell,” Roy says. “It’s a source of pride, and working on it keeps my stress levels down. It’s my baby.”

The post A filmmaker built this wood cabin from scratch on a cliff in Quebec appeared first on Macleans.ca.

(Photography by Renaud Lafrenière)

In 2019, Martin Dumas, a graphic designer, and Maude Beaupré, a TV associate producer, felt cramped in their Montreal apartment. They had been renting a three-bedroom place in the Little Burgundy neighbourhood for the past 12 years, paying $865. After their daughter, Simone, was born in 2012 and began to grow up, the couple realized they needed more space in their home. They started imagining a change—preferably to a leafier, pastoral setting.

Dumas and Beaupré hoped to find a rambling old house in the countryside filled with vintage character, as opposed to a cookie-cutter new build in a suburb. That September, Dumas sketched a crude illustration of an A-frame cottage with a squat addition on a pink Post-it note. He joked to Beaupré that he had just drawn the house of his dreams. A day later, their realtor sent over a listing for a small home with a stucco exterior that bore a strange resemblance to his illustration. “My boyfriend doesn’t believe in the idea that the universe sent it to us, but we were in shock,” says Beaupré.

She runs an Instagram account, @stalker.fever, where she collects images of quirky interiors she finds on real estate listings. The house fit right in, but it was further from Montreal than they liked in the rural Rawdon township, which is an hour’s drive north. The couple still agreed to see it, and as soon as they toured the place, they were sold.

RELATED: Habitat: This vintage Ontario home combines retro space-age glamour with 21st-century perks

Built in 1968, their home looks like a tiny bungalow from the outside and a 1970s fever dream on the inside. The decor emphasizes a retro brown and orange colour scheme, which fits well with the mid-century aesthetic Dumas and Beaupré had already cultivated in their Montreal apartment. They moved in most of their old furniture, and the rest, including the orange couch with chrome detailing in the living room, was left over from the previous owners.

“It feels great to be in this groovy yet soothing space, surrounded by trees and tranquility,” Beaupré says. The main bathroom features an avocado green toilet, bathtub and sink, and the abundance of wood detailing in the kitchen adds warmth—especially when the day approaches sunset. Light floods the expansive living room, which is elongated with cathedral ceilings and a split-level layout. Floor-to-ceiling windows frame a panoramic view of the backyard, and a black fireplace is set against a red-and-white brick wall.

There are also practical considerations to make when it comes to modern life in a vintage build. Dumas, who is six-foot-one, often hits his head on the alcove above the stove in the kitchen. The house is not as energy efficient as newer places, so the monthly hydro bills are high. If something breaks, service workers are often hesitant about doing repairs out of concern they will damage the house. “One of my worst fears is that something will happen to the plumbing, and I will have to rip up one of the bathrooms,” Beaupré says. “I keep thinking: ‘Just hold on for one more year!’”

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Certain retro design choices were also initially off-putting. The kitchen’s striking decor included bright orange tiling and wooden walls, a built-in Jenn-Air grill and a supposedly soundproof padded ceiling that, according to Beaupré, resembles “cooked spaghetti.” But over time, the couple saw how these features fit in with their place’s overall aesthetic, and they decided to run with it. The home’s unique design has even become an object of fascination for others. After Beaupré joined a location scouting group on Facebook, it was featured in several Québécois artists’ music videos and a fashion campaign for the glasses brand BonLook.

“There’s something very sexy about this home,” says Beaupré. The primary bedroom has a mirrored ceiling, but the crown jewel is the Jacuzzi room, which is furnished with a built-in sauna, beige carpeting and textured walls. Whenever guests visit, she always tells them to bring a bathing suit. One day, she also hopes to invite over one of the original owner to swap stories about what these walls have witnessed in the copacetic 70s. “It’s pretty rare that you see vintage houses for sale that are in pristine condition,” Beaupré says. “I like to imagine the parties that were thrown here.”

The post This small-town Quebec home is a retro lover’s paradise appeared first on Macleans.ca.

“The dents, the imperfections, they tell a story.” (Photography by Sarah Burtscher)

In early 2021, Lee and Rebecca Loewen were expecting their first child. They rented a 550-square-foot apartment above a store in downtown Toronto that Lee, an industrial designer, had fashioned into a loft. It was an upgrade from their previous 320-square-foot shoebox in the city, but the couple hoped to build a place they could own. “It was the pandemic, and we had time to be creative,” says Rebecca, who works for a not-for-profit. “We wanted to throw ourselves into a project.”

Around that time, Lee’s friend Payam Shalchian approached him with a business idea: they could construct compact, wooden, permit-free cabins and sell them as temporary alternative living spaces. Given Canada’s exorbitant housing prices and the increasing popularity of sustainable living, the pair figured that an cost-effective home with a small footprint could be a popular product. They founded the company Instead Tiny Homes, and Lee agreed to spearhead the prototype development on one condition: that he could move into it with Rebecca and their baby when it was finished. “We thought: ‘If we’re bringing this concept to life, let’s live in one and test it out for ourselves.’”

Buying land and building in Toronto was too expensive, so the Loewens left their condo and moved 200 kilometres east to Prince Edward County, where they stayed in a short-term rental. “It felt strange to have so much change happening at once,” says Rebecca. “Any time I developed a sense of routine, I was thrown a curveball, but I tried to embrace the adventure of it all.”

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Once in the country, Lee got to work with Shalchian to execute their vision. Over nine months, they assembled sheets of plywood into a sturdy 32-by-8.5-foot rectangular cabin, built with wheels on a trailer chassis. It was painted black with 13-foot ceilings and expansive windows, and it has a heat-recovery ventilator to ensure good air exchange. “The idea was to make it an RV and spend the money we would have shelled out on a mortgage to travel the country,” says Rebecca.

The couple attached their new abode to a tow truck and lugged it 30 kilometres to their friends’ quarter-acre lakeside lot in Prince Edward County. After Rebecca gave birth to their son, Max, five weeks early, the young family moved into their new place, which still needed some finishing touches. “For the first two weeks, we were essentially glamping and feeding Max at midnight by lantern, cooking over a fire pit and borrowing showers at friends’ homes,” says Lee. To squeeze into their 260-square-foot home, they had to part ways with items they no longer miss, like extra cabinets from IKEA, bags of clothing and miscellaneous clutter.

Meanwhile, Lee and Payam built a small outdoor utility shed to store solar batteries and a 2,000-gallon water tank, tacked 12 solar panels onto the shed’s roof and installed a propane furnace. They furnished the family room, turned the primary bedroom into a loft and wrapped up work on the main-floor bathroom and kitchen, which they outfitted with a stainless-steel countertop and granite sink.

MORE: The Move: Kelowna, B.C. to Nova Scotia for a breath of fresh air

Total building costs ran to $145,000, not including Lee and Payam’s labour The Loewens pay barely $3,000 per year in utilities, and their home needs minimal light and heat. The surrounding windows keep the interior bright from sunrise to sundown, and it stays toasty on the coldest days with airtight rockwool insulation, ZIP System R-sheathing, a furnace and the occasional power generator boost. “We’ve now spent two winters in the place, and it’s warm even on -27 degree days,” says Lee.

Moving off grid, however, has its challenges: most weekdays, they have to drive 25 minutes to a work-share space to access a strong Wi-Fi signal. They also have yet to take their rolling home on the road—for the time being, it remains on their friend’s property. “We realized it was built more like a high-performance house than an RV, so it’s heavy to drag along,” says Lee. “Unhooking it from our solar and water lines can get complicated.”

Raising a kid in an enclosed space also tests the couple’s patience. “Max occasionally likes to pick up heavy objects and slam them against the walls,” says Lee. His playtime has affected Instead Tiny Homes’s design choices. “We were a bit more focused on aesthetics than durability,” Lee explains. “Now I wouldn’t recommend the plywood floors to a client because they dent easily.”

For now, the Loewens are going to stay in Prince Edward County. Not only is it the best move for business—they’re a short drive away from the company’s warehouse—but moving back to Toronto would require them to own the land on which they park, which Lee says can be pricey. In the meantime, Instead Tiny Homes plans to expand its line of alternative, energy-efficient homes, and Lee is working with Shalchian to create their first two-bedroom, 520-square-foot home, which they will place on a permanent foundation by November.

“The dents, the imperfections, they tell a story,” says Rebecca. “I feel a sense of pride about the space we’re in—it feels like home.”

The post A Toronto couple ditched their condo for a 260-square-foot custom RV appeared first on Macleans.ca.

The Tynedals outside their home in Winnipeg (photography by Jessica Lee)

The buyers:

Evan Tynedal, a 34-year-old self-employed sales representative; Vanessa Tynedal, a 38-year-old account executive; and their kids: Chloe, who’s eight, Jace, who’s five and Avigail, who’s two.

The budget:

$450,000

The backstory:

One phrase that perfectly describes Vanessa and Evan’s love story and real estate journey: long-distance. In 2010, Vanessa was living in Winnipeg and Evan in Kelowna, but they met in Malibu during a work trip for top-performing employees hosted by the sales and marketing firm where they both worked. Both were in relationships at the time, but they kept in touch as friends. As fate would have it, just a few months later, their company moved them both to Ontario to handle different campaigns—Vanessa to Hamilton and Evan to Oshawa. One night, they decided to meet in the middle. “When we found out we were both single, we immediately started flirting,” says Vanessa. They dated for a few years, then got married in 2014. Chloe came along shortly afterwards.

Avigail (centre) was born just weeks after the Tynedals moved into their new home in Winnipeg’s Garden City neighbourhood

The Tynedals’ journey to becoming homeowners was less serendipitous. By the time Chloe reached toddlerhood, the couple were living in an apartment on the top level of a detached house in Oshawa. “Our parents were kind of pushing us to find a place,” says Evan, recalling that Chloe had entered a less-than-ideal climbing phase. In 2016, they began looking for their own property in earnest, but found themselves outflanked in bidding wars on the first two houses. “We gave up looking, then our realtor called us with another option a few months later,” Evan says.

The property in question was a 1,050-square foot brick bungalow with three bedrooms and two bathrooms, a typical starter home for the area. The couple won over the owners—“just barely,” Evan says—with a bid of $416,000. In order to afford their mortgage, the Tynedals realized they’d need to renovate and rent out the basement. They spent another $25,000 installing a kitchen and two downstairs bedrooms and took on two tenants, both long-time friends and coworkers. “Initially, I thought the neighbourhood was kind of sketchy,” Evan says, “but when we moved there, it was pretty peaceful.” That peace lasted for the Tynedals (and their basement tenants) for a while, even after little Jace came along in 2018 and Evan’s sister moved in following her divorce. Then 2020 happened.

All five of the bedrooms are located on the same floor, which makes for easy supervision of their three kids. (Chloe and Jace are pictured above.)

Vanessa was three months pregnant with Avigail at the onset of the pandemic. Despite having just set up a house of their own, the couple realized they wanted to be closer to family. Vanessa and Evan moved their whole brood to Calgary for four months, crashing with relatives. “We thought: What are we doing in Ontario?” Vanessa says. “All of us are happy out west.” By July, they were eyeing Winnipeg, where Vanessa’s dad had retired and was available to help with childcare. A call with a realtor friend set a move in motion. “He was like, ‘You guys need to get back to Ontario and sell your house—now,” Evan says. The pandemic real estate frenzy had just kicked off, and the Tynedals discovered they could sell their bungalow for $570,000— more than $150,000 above what they paid for it. The family high-tailed it back to Oshawa, spent two weeks prepping the home for sale, and put it on the market. It sold at asking within a few days.

RELATED: The Move: Two working parents trek from B.C. to N.B. in search of affordable childcare

The hunt:

That summer, the Tynedals moved in with Vanessa’s parents in Winnipeg while house-hunting. Friends suggested they narrow their search down to Linden Woods and River Heights, two of the city’s wealthier suburban enclaves. Linden Woods (average price: $460,000) had a mix of cookie-cutter homes built in the ’80s and newer condos, while River Heights (average price: $420,000) had more palatial homes and old-growth trees. Both areas had no shortage of schools, but neither of the neighbourhoods were compelling to the Tynedals, who found the homes in Linden Woods too small and River Heights too busy.

The Tynedals initially bid $450,000 for the 2,600-square-foot home. Its 30-year-old furnace secured them an extra $5,000 discount.

A move-in ready, 2,600-square foot home in Garden City—a 10-minute drive from Vanessa’s parents’ home in the Maples neighbourhood—captured their hearts. The five-bedroom, five-bathroom property had been listed even before the Tynedals sold their Oshawa home, but it was still on the market after they made their big move. Unlike the out-of-control Ontario market, Winnipeg’s homes weren’t selling like hotcakes at the time. “When we saw the place again, it was listed for $450,000, or $30,000 less,” Vanessa says. Another big bonus? Plentiful sidewalks. “A lot of neighbourhoods in the south end of the city have none,” Evan says. “If you have kids, where are you going to walk? On the road?”

The Tynedals initially placed a bid of $450,000, but after an inspection revealed a 30-year-old furnace, they knocked $5,000 off of their offer. They weren’t worried about competition, so Vanessa and Evan waited a week to have their mortgage approved. When they failed the stress test with their long-time bank due to Evan’s self-employment (and Vanessa’s unemployment), they were forced to apply for a mortgage at a credit union in Niverville, a town just south of Winnipeg. They got the all clear, and also heard from the Garden City sellers, who offered to lower the property’s price by another $5,000 to expedite the sale. “I was pregnant, so I was very antsy,” Vanessa says. The Tynedals closed on the house in late August. Avigail was born a few weeks later.

MORE:  The Move: This Ontario family found space and affordability in Calgary

The Tynedals don’t miss much about their old life in Oshawa, except for their friends. They occasionally socialize with their new neighbours in Winnipeg, who generously dropped off homemade challah bread as a welcome present. But Vanessa and Evan are enjoying their newfound privacy and the freedom to be as loud as they want—a necessity when you have three kids under 10. The biggest upgrade is their lower cost of living. The bills are a bit higher without tenants, but they’ve made up for it in square footage. Even their gas costs have been halved: the couple used to spend an average of $1,000 a month filling up their cars to travel to clients in Toronto. Plus, driving to visit extended family in Calgary takes now 12 hours, not 35. “I think it’s a good idea for people to move to areas that cost less and upgrade their life,” Evan says. “I feel badly for all the people stuck in big cities, paying massive bills for not a lot of space. That used to be us.”

Avigail, Vanessa, Evan, Jace and Chloe are enjoying their new life without tenants. The kids can now be as loud as they want.

The post The Move: A growing family upsizes in Winnipeg—at a fraction of Ontario’s prices appeared first on Macleans.ca.

(Photo by iStock, Illustration by Maclean’s)

In the summer of 2020, I was living in a three-bedroom house in Coquitlam, B.C., with my parents, my brother and my partner, Curtis. The rent was $3,000 a month, and split between all of us, it was affordable: Curtis and I only paid $250 each. It was nice living with family, but by that point, we’d done it for three years and were nearing the end of our 20s. In August, Curtis and I started to think about buying a place of our own. We wanted to start a family and adopt a dog, which we couldn’t do as renters.

We started saving up for a down payment, with a goal of setting aside $50,000. Curtis is a heavy-duty mechanic and I work as a coordinator at a university. Together, we earn a combined $165,000—a solid income for a young couple. Luckily, Curtis had been putting away money in his RRSPs for about a decade—a total of $40,000—which gave us a good head start.

In January of 2021, we started house-hunting in suburbs east of Vancouver. Our budget was around $550,000 and our bank approved us for a $700,000 mortgage. We were looking for a spacious apartment or townhouse between Burnaby and Langley where Curtis and I work, respectively. We hoped the extra bedrooms could be used to host family and guests, and one day, serve as our kids’ bedrooms.

In August 2021, after seeing more than 20 homes, we bought a three-bed, three-bath townhouse in Pitt Meadows for $631,000. We could either go with a variable mortgage at 1.35 per cent or a fixed mortgage at 2.1 per cent. Our mortgage broker and financial adviser both suggested we go with the variable rate. They were convinced that interest rates would stay low: they hadn’t spiked in 25 years, and Tiff Macklem, the governor of the Bank of Canada, said himself that interest rates would stay low for “a long time.” We decided on a variable mortgage at 1.35 per cent, which started at $2,421 a month.

READ: My mortgage payments rose almost $2,000 in a year

Things started off well for us. To save money, we did home renovations ourselves: we replaced carpets with vinyl; painted the ceilings, stairs, window frames, doors and cabinets; replaced the lights; installed new baseboards, fire detectors and a kitchen backsplash. The renovations cost us less than $10,000—Curtis got a discount on paint and other supplies through work. When it came to daily spending, we didn’t track our expenses or set a budget. We ate out a couple of times a week. We took our family out to the movies once a month, which usually cost $150, between dinner, tickets and snacks. Curtis and I both played in a spring hockey league, paying $500 each, and Curtis regularly brewed beer, spending about $50 a month on supplies.

In June of 2022, Curtis and I took a trip to Greece, where he proposed. It felt like our lives were moving in the right direction, but back home, interest rates were rising. We were told by our financial adviser that rates would go up by 0.25 per cent, but the jumps were much higher—by June, rates were already up by one per cent. We were frustrated with our advisers and terrified that our mortgage would spiral out of control.

By October, our payments rose to $3,229 a month. Curtis and I worried about our financial future. We travelled a lot in our 20s, backpacking in Europe, attending a wedding in Australia, watching Cirque du Soleil in Vegas. But now we had to question whether we could even afford to travel, given how much of our paycheque was going toward the mortgage. What if this gets out of control and we lose the house? We were on our own—our family couldn’t afford to bail us out if we needed it. We started wondering what our lives would be like as house-poor parents, unable to afford sports or extracurriculars for future kids. We wanted to start a family, but spending an extra $800 a month—or $9,600 a year—on mortgage payments was pretty much obliterating those plans. It was a tough pill to swallow.

I wasn’t eating or sleeping properly. I constantly checked the mortgage rates, read financial news and listened to podcasts on Canadian economics. It was all I could talk about with friends and family. Curtis was a lot more laid-back than me. If it came down to it, he figured he could use his handyman skills—operating heavy-duty machinery or painting homes—to earn some extra cash.

In December, Curtis and I decided to switch to a fixed rate, at 5.14 per cent, for about $3,340 a month for the next five years. We needed to put a stop to the anxiousness we felt, even if rates began to drop the next day. In early 2022, the Bank of Canada held the interest rate steady at 4.5 per cent, pretty much right after we switched to a fixed rate. Either way, we were happy to have a bit of stability.

RELATED: My mortgage is about to go up by at least $1,000 a month

We’ve had to curb our spending significantly. We buy our groceries wholesale and often in bulk, and try to buy used clothes and furniture. I used to drive to work three days a week but it was costing me $500 a month on gas and insurance, so now I take two buses and a Skytrain. A friend moved into one of our extra bedrooms and pays us $550 a month. We’re much stricter about our budgeting. At the start of the month, we use our first paycheques to pay off our property tax, internet, electricity and other bills along with half of our mortgage. Our second paycheques go toward the rest of the mortgage, savings and a little bit of personal spending. We each spend about $150 a month, which I normally put toward home appliances, gifts or leisure activities. Before, we spent between $300 and $400 a month each on ourselves. Instead of jetting off to Greece, we’ll be doing a lot more camping in B.C., at sites like Cultus Lake and Porteau Cove, this year. My father renovated an old sailboat, which we’ll take over to Victoria and up around Vancouver Island this summer.

Our goal is to save $20,000 before starting a family, to supplement my maternity leave and Curtis’s paternity leave. But because so much of our money goes toward our mortgage, we’ve only saved about $5,000. It’ll take another year of saving to get to our mark. We wanted to get married in 2024, but those plans have been pushed back indefinitely.

It feels like we did everything right—saved up for a down payment, pursued stable careers, purchased a home, did the renovations ourselves. And yet we can barely afford to start a family. Our lives completely revolve around our mortgage.

—As told to Mathew Silver

The post Our mortgage payments went up to more than $3,300 a month appeared first on Macleans.ca.

(Photography by David Nikolic)

When a 130-year-old church in Princeton, Ontario, went up for sale in 2018, Jonathon Harmer couldn’t shake the idea that the place would make a beautiful family home. An iron-and-woodworker by trade, Harmer had driven by the building with white front doors and an emerald steeple countless times while growing up in the nearby town of Drumbo. He was visiting a friend in B.C. when the church went on the market, so he enlisted his partner, Lynn Perreault, who lived nearby, to scope out the place.

Perreault stood in front of the 26-foot-tall building that had been largely untouched for a decade. It needed sweeping repairs: the ceilings and walls were due for a paint job, the scaffolding was coming apart and the floors needed to be sanded. But the pair were already considering buying their first home together, so where others saw a derelict church, they saw an opportunity. “Jonathon is a woodworker who tears down barns for a living, I build furniture and do interior design, and we’re both welder-fitters,” says Perreault. “So when this popped up, it felt like the perfect renovation challenge. We told each other: ‘Let’s transform this place into a home.’”

The couple bought the church in the fall of 2018 for approximately $300,000. By next April, Perreault and Harmer had sold their respective residences, Harmer had come back to Ontario, and the pair moved into a 300-square-foot trailer on the church’s half-acre property. With a team of friends and family, including Perreault’s 15-year-old son and Harmer’s 83-year-old father, they went to work from 6 a.m. to sundown, seven days a week, all led by Jean-Marc, Perreault’s contractor brother.

RELATED: This vintage Ontario home combines retro space-age glamour with 21st-century perks

Immediately, the project proved more complicated than expected: securing a mortgage to fund their renovations took weeks because local banks were hesitant to back such an unusual and lofty build. Then the construction got off to a rough start. The building team had to dig up the entire yard to install a new sewage system, redo all the electrical wiring and connect the building to the Princeton power grid before even starting renovations. “There was a point when we wondered if we’d bitten off a bit more than we could chew,” says Perreault.

After those hiccups came months of intensive construction. To store materials for the project, the team had to build a workshed outside. Then they constructed a front porch for the church made of timber, and erected cedar walls inside to separate the rooms in their new layout, which included a kitchen, a bedroom, a bathroom and a grand room with brown and black arches. The second floor, meanwhile, was fashioned into a loft.

The team spent eight days removing carpets, and they also retiled and repainted the entire ceiling on 20-foot-tall scaffolds, only for Perreault to do it all again by herself when the couple realized they wanted a whiter paint. They toned down the church’s more religious features by removing the mosaic glass windows and donating most of the church pews to the Princeton congregation. As a nod to the building’s past, they kept the church bell and even rang it regularly during pandemic lockdowns to brighten the community’s mood.

Renovation costs had already surpassed half a million dollars, so Harmer and Perreault made it their goal to beautify the church on a budget. “I’ve always loved looking around for reclaimed materials in my design projects,” says Perreault. “It’s a real money saver and an adventure.” To build the staircase, they bought local cedar and sourced rebar and spindles from a nearby auction. The kitchen island used to be a 13-foot counter from a local hair salon, and the bench in the foyer was an old church pew. They flipped another pew on its side, hung it on the kitchen wall and fashioned it into a frame that holds the hood fan above the stove. Harmer and Perreault also bought vintage bathroom sinks and kept the classic hanging church lights to brighten up the place.

After seven months, the team finally wrapped up their project. “Our family made this possible, and easily the coolest part of living in this big space was having the ability to host them for meals and evenings together,” Harmer says. In time, people far beyond their family trees also began to admire the couple’s creation. When their realtor, Brian Ellis, posted a video of the finished church on TikTok, viewers from Sweden, Greece and Thailand asked Perreault and Harmer about their building process. The renovation garnered so much attention that they sold Chippy Church T-shirts and mugs, named after their home’s classic white doors that are painted in a naturally aged, chipped style. 

After living in the church for two years, Perreault and Harmer realized that although they were proud of their home, they also wanted a more remote lifestyle. In 2021, they sold the property for $1.2 million and moved two hours’ drive north to Burk’s Falls, Ontario. Still craving a challenge, the couple bought a second church, this time with the goal of converting it into a duplex. “We loved the first build so much that we want to do it somewhere else,” says Perreault. “We’re calling it the Chippy Church Journey 2.0.”

The post An Ontario couple converted this 130-year-old church into a charming family home appeared first on Macleans.ca.

The owners spotted the home while visiting friends who lived nearby (Photograph by Revelateur Studio)

In 2013, Tina Fetner and her husband, Lane Dunlop, were visiting a friend in the leafy Westdale neighbourhood of Hamilton, Ontario, when they stumbled across a for-sale sign on the lawn of a space-age-looking mid-century stucco bungalow. Hambly House—named for its first owner—was built in 1939, one of four remaining art moderne buildings in the Hamilton area attributed to designer Edward Glass. (Art moderne, a cousin of art deco, is known for its curves and horizontal lines.) Fetner, a sociology professor at McMaster University, and Dunlop, a retired music executive, discovered that the house had been sitting empty for a year in a state of shambolic disrepair. But its whimsical character attracted them, even though they weren’t looking for a new home. “The house just fits our personality,” says Fetner. “It’s a little bit sassy, just like us.”

The previous owner had attempted to preserve the home’s character during the restoration process, but their commitment to using historically accurate building methods had left the home unlivable. Single-glazed windows let in a draft, and the ivy and shrubs encasing the house had caused extensive water damage to the outside walls. The roots of the maple tree in the backyard were invading the foundation, and according to Dunlop, “If you pressed your finger against the basement wall, water would seep out.” Given the home’s condition, Fetner and Dunlop were able to purchase the architectural gem in 2013 for the bargain-basement price of $375,000.

The kitchen appliances in Hambly House are a whimsical shade of robin’s-egg blue (Photograph by Scott Annandale)

With a footprint of less than 1,000 square feet, the three-bedroom home needed to be updated for modern living. The kitchen was small and cramped, like the galley of a ship, with jutting, angled cupboards. The original pale-green tiles and fixtures in the bathroom had been overtaken by rust and needed to be replaced. To honour the home’s character, Fetner and Dunlop hired architect and family friend David Premi from DPAI Architecture, embarking on a two-year renovation aimed at bringing the house into the modern era while painstakingly preserving its vintage character.

The staircase was designed to flood the first floor with natural light (Photograph by Revelateur Studio)

Fetner and Dunlop ensured that some of the house’s original details remain intact. There’s a plaster ceiling in the downstairs living room that resembles pressed tin, with rose-and-thorn detailing. Built-in bookshelves line the room’s walls, where the couple display their art collection, which includes a piece by Vancouver artist Christine Breakell-Lee. They’ve even restored the basement to its original state, designed to look like a log cabin with faux wood knots and trompe l’oeil bird’s nests built into the moulded plaster walls.

RELATED:  Habitat: A B.C. construction worker sold his country house to build this eco-friendly floating home

Renovations revealed a porthole window in the hall closet (Photograph by Scott Annandale)

In the front entryway, Fetner and Dunlop took out a hall closet to reveal a circular porthole window that would have been hidden by coats. They also removed several walls to transform the kitchen and living room into an open-concept space that stretches from the front hallway to the back of the house, where they added a 150-square-foot dining room with floor-to-ceiling windows. The mid-century-style appliances by Elmira Stove Works are a kitschy robin’s-egg blue, giving the kitchen a bright and playful air. 

The newly added second floor has expansive windows (Photograph by Revelateur Studio)

The home was originally a bungalow, but the couple added a second storey in the form of an atrium with curved glass that had to be specially manufactured in Pennsylvania and crane-lifted atop the home. “We could see the concerned, quizzical look on our neighbours’ faces wondering what we were doing,” says Dunlop. The extra floor, which is flooded with natural light, has a new primary bedroom, an upstairs living room and an outdoor terrace. 

The living room still has a rose-and-thorn plaster ceiling (Photograph by Revelateur Studio)

“When you’re outside on the deck, it’s like being on the upper deck of a small boat,” says Dunlop. He can usually be found relaxing in a nook by the curved glass, where the sightline from the terrace rests directly on top of the trees. From there, he can mark what time of day it is by the passage of regular dog walkers or joggers. “Even though you’re inside, you really feel like part of the neighbourhood.”

This article appears in print in the April 2023 issue of Maclean’s magazine. Buy the issue for $9.99 or better yet, subscribe to the monthly print magazine for just $39.99.

The post Habitat: This vintage Ontario home combines retro space-age glamour with 21st-century perks appeared first on Macleans.ca.

(Photos courtesy Sotheby’s)

In October 2016, industrial designer Robert Iantorno dreamed up this low-maintenance, high-efficiency property as a home where he and his wife, Maria, could live and eventually retire. By July 2017, the Iantornos purchased a five-acre plot of land in Singhampton, 90 minutes north of Toronto, surrounded by sumac, wild raspberries, wildflower meadows and cedar forests.

Iantorno teamed up with architect Andy Thompson to complete the 3,163-square-foot home. Construction began in October 2017 and the Iantornos moved into their new property in October 2018, but two years later, the couple decided to RV through the southern U.S., so they rented the property out on Airbnb and to seasonal tenants. They now have plans to relocate to Nova Scotia and put their home on the market for $2,395,000.

The semicircular arch structure and corrugated steel were chosen for their strength. The home is attached to a six-foot-deep foundation. Then, on top of the steel, there are six inches of spray foam, a drainage layer and galvanized-steel roofing.

Just past the front door, there are guest bedrooms on either side. The barn doors are made of rough-sawn white pine and the flooring is diamond-polished concrete.

The original plan was for the Iantorno’s to live in the home well into their senior years. For accessibility, they installed a full bathroom on the ground floor with a walk-in shower. There’s an in-floor drain, teal glazed tiles from Spain (meant to invoke Mediterranean waters) and quarried limestone tiles on the walls, also from Spain. The walnut vanity cabinets are custom made, and there’s built-in lighting in the mirror. Just across from the main-floor bathroom, there’s also a mechanical room, with a washer and a dryer, plus a pantry with open-wire restaurant shelving.

The main hallway leads to an open kitchen, living and dining area. The ceilings here are 20 feet high.

READ: Habitat: A mid-century sanctuary by Ontario’s Chandos Lake  

In the kitchen, there’s a 14-foot island—a Mennonite-made maple butcher block—that seats four people.

The south end of the living room has a wall of triple-glazed, argon gas-filled windows. The main source of warmth is in-floor hydronic heating, but there’s also a cozy wood-burning fireplace in the living room

Iantorno and Thompson designed a second-floor mezzanine for the home’s primary suite. To reach it, there are open-tread stairs made of rough-sawn white pine

The upper level has white pine hardwood flooring. The primary bedroom space is an open loft, but it’s designed so that the bed itself isn’t visible from the lower level.

The primary ensuite has a separate water closet with a wall-hung Toto washlet bidet, a two-person soaker tub with a large chrome brass filler, an enclosed glass shower with the same Spanish glazed tiles as the main-floor bathroom, and a separate vanity area. LED lights illuminate the “flutes” of the arches, which Iantorno says is meant to evoke Art Deco style.

RELATED: Habitat: A B.C. construction worker sold his country house to build this eco-friendly floating home

This mezzanine space overlooks the great room.

Iantorno, a sports car and motorcycle enthusiast, calls this 1,200-square-foot shop his “garage mahal.” It has two garage doors on either side, which Iantorno will open in the summer when he’s hanging out inside.

In the summer of 2022, Iantorno added a wood-burning cedar barrel sauna and a cold plunge pool to appeal to short-term renters. The region is especially popular with winter sports enthusiasts—the property is a 10-minute drive to Devil’s Glen, a private ski club.

The post For $2.4 million, you can buy this net-zero corrugated-steel home in Ontario appeared first on Macleans.ca.

(Photography by Greg van Riel)

In the spring of 2007, Michael Cherney noticed a small lump on his tongue. After a biopsy, his family doctor delivered the diagnosis: mouth cancer. Within six weeks, Michael, a financial adviser, underwent surgery to remove the tumour. To recuperate, he headed to a quiet place with his wife, Shari: their 1960s cedar log cabin–style cottage on Chandos Lake, which they’d purchased the year before. “Being by the water brings me a sense of peace,” says Michael. During their stay, the couple’s affection for the cottage grew, and they spent every summer at Chandos Lake from then on. 

RELATED: Habitat: A B.C. construction worker sold his country house to build this eco-friendly floating home

The cottage, perched on a ledge with 100 wooden steps leading down to the lake, was in a state of disrepair when the Cherneys bought it. By 2016, mice were overrunning the property, mould bloomed in the basement and unsealed windows let in cold drafts. “We were hoping we could renovate it, but it was like putting lipstick on a pig,” says Michael. “It made sense to start from scratch.”

With the help of architect Cathy Garrido at Altius, the couple came up with a vision for a mid-century-modern sanctuary. “The words we kept using were ‘quiet’ and ‘calm,’” says Shari, who works as a nursing professor. The finished product, completed in 2019, is heavily influenced by Michael’s childhood home in Peterborough, which had been designed by legendary Canadian architect Eb Zeidler, the mastermind behind Ontario Place and the Eaton Centre. The new 3,200-square-foot cottage is decorated in earthy tones, with floor-to-ceiling windows that reveal the cerulean blue of the lake and a thicket of treetops. 

READ: Habitat: A former New York Times journalist built this beachside fortress in P.E.I.

The interior is sparsely furnished so as to not detract from the natural beauty enveloping their property. “We don’t have side tables or coffee tables yet,” says Shari. The open-concept space consists of five split levels, and the ceiling and kitchen are all built from Douglas fir imported from B.C.

Typically, the best lake view is reserved for a cottage’s primary bedroom, but Shari didn’t want to waste it on a room where they’d spend most of their time sleeping. Instead, Michael’s office is there, and he works at the same mid-century-modern children’s desk that used to be in his childhood bedroom. “It’s a wonder he gets anything done,” says Shari. The view has turned Michael into an amateur birdwatcher. “My first was a yellow-rumped warbler,” he says. “Then a pileated woodpecker.”

For the Cherneys, their cottage is much more than a summer getaway. When the pandemic struck, the couple expected to stay for 10 days and ended up living there for two and a half years. “Chandos is a beautiful community,” says Shari, who does yoga at a studio nearby and goes on regular walks with neighbours. Even after her arthritis diagnosis, she and Michael plan to enjoy the breezy lakeside pace of life and serene vista for as long as they can. “We always say we’ll carry each other down to the lake, if need be.” 

The post Habitat: A mid-century sanctuary by Ontario’s Chandos Lake  appeared first on Macleans.ca.

Jay Blackmore went from a 3,000-acre property to a life on the water (photographs courtesy of Blackmore)

Jay Blackmore felt like he had too much house and yard. In 2015, he lived in a four-bedroom country house on a five-acre lot in Nelson, B.C. After spending most of his spare time landscaping, plowing the driveway and mowing the lawn, the $1,700 monthly mortgage and constant maintenance costs were weighing on him. One day, while sailing in Vancouver, he stumbled on a network of floating homes—small houses built on barges—moored on the docks of the Squamish First Nation’s Mosquito Creek Marina. Blackmore, a construction worker, wondered if he could build one of his own. “I had a choice: remain chained to a mortgage, or take on this new challenge.”

READ: Habitat: A former New York Times journalist built this beachside fortress in P.E.I.

After a year of strategizing, he started construction on his own floating home on Kootenay Lake, just a 10-minute drive from his house. He did much of the work himself, first crafting a 16-by-40-foot barge out of fibreglass and locally harvested cedar. On top of that he built a two-storey, three-bedroom, 700-square-foot wood-panelled home with an open-concept kitchen and a wraparound deck covered in flower beds. “I designed it to evoke the big sternwheelers from back in the 1890s,” he says. “You could almost imagine a paddlewheel in the back of it.”

Blackmore winterproofed the house with adhesive spray foam, which insulates the house and prevents it from breaking down under the force of waves. He also installed solar panels on the roof and brought in a pellet stove to heat the interior. It cost him about $150,000 to build the house and barge, and it costs roughly $1,200 per month to maintain it. To occupy his 640 square feet of lake-bottom land, he also pays docking fees, insurance, bi-monthly cleaning fees and property tax of a few thousand dollars per year.

Blackmore permanently moved into his floating home in 2020. Living on the water comes with a unique set of trials. Storms rock the house for hours at a time, and he’s constantly carrying groceries, wood pellets and garbage to and from Nelson’s community centre, which is a 10-minute walk away. The greatest challenge, however, is one that Blackmore has set for himself: ensuring his lifestyle is eco-friendly. “I don’t want to pollute this lake. I’ve taken great measures to ensure that no waste gets dumped,” he says.

To that end, he created a sophisticated, two-way water filtration system that pulls water from the lake and funnels it into a five-stage reverse-osmosis process. The water goes back into the lake cleaner than when it left: Blackmore has a 40-gallon sump under the floor, which collects the house’s grey water and sends it through a series of filters, including an ultraviolet filter that breaks down any remaining pathogens. He even makes his own fertilizer with grease and food waste, which drain through the sink, land in a container, mix with maple wood chips and charcoal to expedite breakdown and then travel upward through a piping system to fill the flower beds. “It costs me about $40 per month,” he says. “It’s worth it.”

This summer, he plans to sail the coast of B.C. and leave his abode for five months. His children, who are 21 and 19, usually house-sit for him, but he reached out on Instagram to see if anybody would want to rent his home for the duration. After receiving more than 50 inquiries, he was gratified by the interest but remains most proud of what his home means for his kids. “My goal was to show them that you can have a great quality of life by managing your footprint and keeping it affordable, even if it’s not in a traditional way,” Blackmore says. “I think I’ve accomplished that.”

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Brie Koniczek has lived at Four Sisters for over 20 years. (Photography by Duncan Wildwood)

In the mid-’90s, when Brie Koniczek was 18, she moved from Victoria to Vancouver for a change of scenery. She and a roommate settled in a three-bedroom loft above a pub in West Point Grey—a fairly expensive neighbourhood. Other tenants came and went; Koniczek and her roommate often split the $1,700 rent when they didn’t have a third tenant to chip in.

In 2002, when Koniczek enrolled in an arts program at Langara College, she wasn’t able to afford her share of rent anymore, so she and her roommate went hunting for a cheaper two-bedroom apartment. A friend of a friend lived in a housing co-op called Four Sisters in the downtown neighbourhood of Gastown, and there happened to be an opening. “I didn’t know what a housing co-op was at the time. I imagined a group of hippies living together,” says Koniczek.

Here’s how it actually works. At Four Sisters, residents or members collectively own shares in the co-op and pay “housing charges”—rent, essentially—for their units. Collectively, these charges cover the building’s expenses, which might include utility costs or the building’s mortgage or lease payments. Despite those expenses, housing charges are often significantly cheaper than market rent in the same neighbourhood. Some co-ops own the land that they’re on, while others, like Four Sisters and many other Vancouver co-ops, lease the land from the city. Residents are also involved in building upkeep: they volunteer for maintenance tasks, called roster duties, which include handling garbage and cleaning entrances and hallways. A board at Four Sisters handles all governance-related matters, such as managing the budget and approving new members; residents can also volunteer as a board director for a term of four years.

READ: I live with my parents, in-laws and kid in a home specifically designed for multi-generational living

In 2002, Koniczek filled out an application and moved in with her roommate shortly after. The co-op consisted of three buildings joined by a central courtyard. One of the buildings had a rooftop deck with a barbecue and a breathtaking view of the North Shore. Koniczek’s two-bedroom suite was much smaller than the old loft she shared with her roommate, but they were paying considerably less than market rent each month. Their roster duty was initially limited to vacuuming the hallway on their floor, but Koniczek quickly became more involved, joining the board within a year. She eventually transferred into film school at her college—a move she couldn’t have made if she was paying market rent. She eventually found work as a senior arts administrator for the Vancouver International Film Festival.

In 2008, she married Lawrence Leong, and in 2010, the couple moved into a bigger three-bedroom in the co-op. Their son, Nico, was born in 2012, and they’ve lived there ever since. The couple currently pays $1,400 a month in rent. A comparable apartment nearby would run them at least $4,500 a month—almost triple what they pay.

Koniczek and Leong use the money they save on rent to enroll Nico in all sorts of extracurricular activities, like performance art and swimming classes. Leong is Chinese, so she says it was important for them that Nico connected with his heritage by taking martial arts classes and attending Chinese language classes on Saturdays. That financial wiggle room also allows them to contribute to RRSPs and an RESP for Nico’s education. 

Over the years, more families have joined the community at Four Sisters. Every Halloween, residents transform the co-op into one big haunted house where kids trick-or-treat and show off their costumes. There are also seniors living in Four Sisters, who appreciate having neighbours who will visit and check in on them. This community was especially important during the pandemic, when neighbours safely socialized on the rooftop patio. “At a time filled with so much fear and uncertainty, it was a saving grace,” says Koniczek.

MORE: Why I gave up my condo and moved in with my best friend and her family

More than 20 years after Koniczek first moved in, Four Sisters is largely unchanged, but the Vancouver housing market has completely transformed. The main appeal of a co-op used to be its sense of community, but as the city becomes more expensive, affordability is now its main draw.

“Getting a spot in a Vancouver co-op is like winning the lottery,” she says. Four Sisters only takes applications twice a year—in January and July—and receives about 50 to 70 applications each window. After applicants pass a pre-interview, they’re added to a wait list, which is currently 200 applicants long. The longest wait lists are for the co-op’s bachelor and one-bedroom apartments, which cost $710 and $932 a month respectively.

“We need more co-ops in Vancouver and in Canada,” says Koniczek. “It’s an easy way to create affordable housing, and if they’re supported at the government level, co-ops are self-sustainable. Rather than building social housing that lumps poor people together, co-ops allow people from all walks of life to interact and create their own unique community.”

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(Photographs courtesy of Angie Bryant)

Annapolis Royal is a rustic Nova Scotia town with a population of just 460 people. Back in the 1920s, it was home to Edwin Stanton Fickes, a steel industrialist based in Pittsburgh, who commissioned the construction of a home in 1929. The building, which took six years to complete, sits on a 383-acre estate near the Annapolis River. Over the years, the old-fashioned five-bedroom property has received some contemporary upgrades and is currently on the market for $4.8 million.

The current owner of the home is former bookseller Nicholas Hoare and his wife, Margot, who call the place This Old Hoare House. The couple purchased the home in 2006 and retired to Annapolis Royal in 2013, with the intention of restoring the estate to its previous grandeur. The place was in shambles—there were leaky chimneys, moisture and mould on the walls, a waterlogged basement and 1930s circuitry. The restoration took seven years to complete.

The owners wanted to modernize the property while respecting the home’s foundation and unique art-deco design elements. The original slate and oak floors were repolished and refinished, stucco walls—which Fickes had commissioned from a Swiss artisan— were resurfaced. Most importantly to Hoare, the wall-to-wall custom-built bookshelves were kept intact: for the past decade, they’ve housed Hoare’s 18,000 books (mostly first editions).

The second-floor primary bedroom includes a sitting room, a dressing room and an electric Dimplex fireplace.

The updated main bathroom features a custom-fitted Thomas Crapper toilet imported from the U.K .and underfloor heating.

The property includes an apple orchard.

A butler’s pantry connects the kitchen and the dining room. New lighting was added during the house-wide electrical restoration. It took three kilometres of cable and eight electricians to rewire the house for 21st-century use.

In the kitchen are more built-in bookshelves. The living room features a Belgian STUV fireplace insert, Nova Scotia’s first. It took two painters 18 months and 60 unique colours to dress each of the 21 distinct rooms.

The second-floor media room used to be the servants’ quarters. It features exposed-wood crossbeams, century-old brick and the original servants’ staircase. There’s a 65-inch TV behind a secret panel.

Speaking of staircases: the main foyer has a spiralling gem that winds its way to the third floor, home to an attic bedroom for kids outfitted with a bunk bed and a walk-in cedar cabinet.

The fortress-like property is a one-of-a-kind build in Nova Scotia, featuring a copper roof weighing several tonnes and 18-inch-thick walls. Fickes was a steel magnate, so bridge-strength Pittsburgh steel supports the foundation.

The estate was also designed to be an impenetrable bunker. Fickes, who saw the possibility of World War Two looming, ordered his contractors to build 50,000-gallon cisterns underground, powered by two enormous boilers.

Outside the home, there’s an inscription above what was likely once the servants’ entrance. It reads: “Old Age, Good Health and Cheer, Bless All the Good Folk Here.” The contractors repointed the stone pillars during the restoration and relaid original slate slab on the front door walkway and side entrance.

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“We were seeing houses listed for $200,000 that were 100 times nicer than ours—and on beaches!” (Photograph courtesy of Hingley)

The buyers

Billie Jean Hingley, a 39-year-old registered nurse; K.C. Hingley, a 43-year-old musician; and their kids: Asher, who’s five, and Ember, who’s three.

The budget

$400,000

The backstory

Until recently, Billie Jean and K.C. had only ever called British Columbia home—she’s originally from the Sunshine Coast and he hails from Vancouver Island. In 2018, when Billie Jean got pregnant with Asher, the couple’s first child, they moved out of the two-bedroom townhouse they shared in Courtenay and bought a four-bedroom split-level detached model located on a family-friendly suburban cul de sac, an ideal spot for their growing brood. (They banked on having at least one more kid.)

READ: The Move: From Toronto’s rental grind to a quaint corner store in Quebec

The Hingley household was dual-income: Billie Jean worked as a registered nurse at a hospital in Comox Valley, while K.C. managed a local music store and toured a few weeks a year with PIGS, a Pink Floyd tribute band. But after their daughter, Ember, was born in 2019, the couple began to feel the financial pinch of B.C.’s steep daycare costs. Full-time spots for two kids set the Hingleys back $2,300 every month, and by September of 2021, the expense had landed them deep in debt. “We were living in overdraft,” Billie Jean says. “We felt pretty hopeless.”

The couple considered downsizing back into a townhouse, but B.C.’s housing market had gone berserk in the time since they’d had their kids. Factoring in moving costs, they realized they wouldn’t be much better off. K.C. had his own reservations. “A townhouse isn’t ideal for playing music and lugging gear in and out,” Billie Jean says. “Some of his equipment is temperature-sensitive, so even if we had a garage, we wouldn’t have been able to store it there.” 

An out-of-province move seemed like the only affordable option, so the Hingleys started sifting through listings in Alberta, Saskatchewan and as far as the East Coast. “We were seeing houses listed for $200,000 that were 100 times nicer than ours—and on beaches!” Billie Jean says. For the artsy couple, Nova Scotia, with its world-renowned music scene and vibrant kitchen parties, emerged as the market to beat. And for a family used to astronomical childcare costs, the fact that the province offered free pre-primary school only added to its appeal.

The hunt

That fall, the Hingleys connected with a realtor in Truro, Nova Scotia. They figured they could sell their Courtenay house for upward of $700,000 and set themselves a budget of $400,000, which would give them a low-enough mortgage to live comfortably. Their new place needed to have at least three bedrooms—on the same floor, to keep their kids close—and be located near a hospital where Billie Jean could find work. K.C.’s major requirement was an outbuilding that he could turn into a music studio. The Hingleys toured through local listings via FaceTime, from B.C., but faced a ton of competition from like-minded out-of-province buyers. They were regularly outbid by $30,000 to $50,000.

RELATED: The Move: Burned out in B.C.

Months went by before the Hingleys video-toured an attractive property just outside of Amherst, listed for $325,000. The house was painted a charming blue and sat on a property with rolling hills and a two-storey barn-style garage, ideal for K.C.’s music-mixing needs. They put in an offer that was conditional on a home inspection—which, unfortunately, revealed a number of issues. “There was a crack right down the centre of the roof,” Billie Jean says. “You could see into the attic.” The septic system was also leaking into a ditch in front of the home. Because of how the pipes were routed, fixing it would require putting in a new driveway. When the Hingleys asked the seller to knock $10,000 off the list price, negotiations ground to a halt.

Shortly afterward, the Hingleys’ realtor floated a three-bedroom home in Sackville, just over the border into New Brunswick. It was located in a picturesque neighbourhood near Mount Allison University, and solar panels provided 80 per cent of the home’s power, which the Hingleys loved. The design choices, not so much: there were sinks in every bedroom (“a bad idea if you have young children”) and an in-ground pool had decomposed into what Billie Jean calls “a very scary pond.” That listing might’ve been a dud, but it was a stepping stone to the Hingleys’ final destination: a six-bedroom, two-bathroom home in nearby Point de Bute.

MORE: The Move: This Ontario family found space and affordability in Calgary

The $320,000 property had three bedrooms on its upper level, plus three more on the main floor for guests. Built in 1860, it retained many of its original features, including a stained-glass window, rustic hardwood floors and a clawfoot tub. Elsewhere on the property was a fully electrified and insulated barn that could house K.C.’s studio, after some minor renovations. The Hingleys’ realtor had sold the house to another couple (from Ontario) in 2021, so she was able to reassure them that its bones were good. The Hingleys submitted a bid of $310,000—slightly below asking—on the same day as their viewing, pending a home inspection. When it revealed a leaky basement, they were able to knock another $10,000 off the price. The sellers agreed to the discount and a June 2022 possession date.

The Hingleys were able to offload their Courtenay property for a tidy $750,000 and a May closing. With weeks to kill until their New Brunswick move-in date, they decided to embark on a 40-day cross-Canada trip with Asher and Ember. (Aside from some minor mishaps, like out-of-order bathroom facilities at remote Yoho National Park, Billie Jean says the trip was memorable in a good way.) Upon arrival in New Brunswick, Billie Jean says the couple felt overwhelmingly validated in their decision to uproot their young children for a life yet-unseen. A friendly neighbour had been diligently collecting their mail, which had been piling up for weeks; another gave the Hingleys carte blanche to pick vegetables from their garden whenever they wanted. 

Real life resumed quickly: Billie Jean landed work as a home-care nurse in Cumberland County, Nova Scotia, and K.C. got to work on his sound studio, wrapping renovations last November. (When he’s not working away on production projects, he works as an administrator in Mount Allison University’s department of music.) As for the kids, Asher currently attends kindergarten at a school located an 11-minute drive from the Hingley home. And Ember’s new daycare, also 11 minutes away by car, costs mom and dad a wallet-friendly $325 a month. With the savings, Billie Jean says they’ve been able to enroll the kids in basketball and dance classes, which would have been well outside their budget in B.C.

The Hingleys miss their relatives back home, but they’re slowly building a new, extended social network out east. They’ve started lending out their abundance of ground-floor bedrooms to participants of Workaway, a home-stay program that offers free lodging and food in exchange for work. Recently, a woman from France pitched in with cooking and childcare. And in May, the Hingleys will host a family from Switzerland, who will help them build a backyard path to K.C.’s studio. With more than enough breathing room for their own family, they’re now welcoming others.

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“Hard-working, middle-class people should be able to buy homes in their own country without cutting back their lifestyles to the bone,” says Ontario homeowner Mezba Mahtab (Photos by Yasin Osman)

In 1997, when I was 17, my family emigrated from the United Arab Emirates to Canada. We lived for a while in Montreal and Ottawa, but ultimately settled in Scarborough, in suburban Toronto. I married my wife, Sana, in 2008, through a family member—she’s originally from India, but lived in the Emirates, which is how our families knew each other. She moved to Canada after we married. 

In 2012, we had our first son, Yusuf, while living in a one-bedroom apartment in Scarborough. When we had our second son, Sulaiman, in 2015, we moved to a two-bedroom, rent-controlled condo nearby, paying $1,750 a month. It was great having the extra bedroom, and the building even had a pool and a gym. But in 2015, knowing we were going to need more space soon, we started saving up for a down payment on a home. 

RELATED: My mortgage is about to go up by at least $1,000 a month

By 2019, our rent had gone up to about $2,000 a month, but life was still pretty affordable overall. We were a dual-income family, earning $110,000 a year. I was a software developer and my wife worked as a customer support technician. We ate out at restaurants at least twice a week. Yusuf and Sulaiman played soccer and took tae kwon do. We travelled a lot, taking the boys to Disneyland or to visit family in Calgary. Sana and I went to Europe, hitting London, Paris and Rome. But the boys were getting bigger—Yusuf was nine and Sulaiman was six—and the apartment was starting to feel small. 

Then the pandemic hit, and with everyone stuck at home, our 1,300-square-foot condo was feeling really cramped. More space for the kids—and for us—became an urgent need. Most days, we all sat around the dining room table, with the boys doing remote schooling, and my wife and I juggling emails and work calls. 

In the summer of 2020, with about $80,000 saved up, we officially started house hunting. We were eligible for an $800,000 mortgage—not a lot in the Greater Toronto Area, where home prices were high and skyrocketing like never before. We wanted at least three bedrooms and two bathrooms, which led us all the way out to Whitby, a small city about half an hour’s drive east of Toronto. (It was very frustrating that my wife and I earned close to the median household income in Toronto, yet to buy a home, we had to go far outside of town just to afford anything suitable.)

READ: See who made the 2023 Maclean’s Power List

Still, we were thrilled when, in April of 2021—after losing out on a couple of bidding wars—we found a three-bedroom, two-bathroom townhouse in Whitby. It had a big backyard where the kids could run around in the summer, plus a finished basement where I could set up a home office. It was close to schools, parks and the beach at Lake Ontario. 

At that point, a fixed-rate mortgage was running around 4 per cent. We asked around, looking for advice on what to choose—a variable or a fixed rate. Variable looked like the way to go, with banks offering rates around 2.5 per cent. And the summer before, Tiff Macklem, the governor of the Bank of Canada, reassured Canadians that interest rates would definitely stay low for a long time to come—it looked like a safe bet. Our realtor and a couple of banks, TD and CIBC, recommended going variable, suggesting it would probably peak at 4 or 4.5 per cent at most.

So in May, we pulled the trigger, buying the place for $790,000, with a variable mortgage at 2.45 per cent and a monthly payment of $3,410 a month (including property taxes). Things were great. The boys each had their own rooms. Sana and I did a little gardening in the backyard. We had very little financial stress and settled into a modest, comfortable home for our growing family. 

That picture started to change last March, when the first interest rate hike happened, bringing the Bank of Canada’s overnight rate to 0.5 per cent. That brought our mortgage rate to 2.7 per cent and our monthly payment to about $3,500 a month. 

I had a feeling that more hikes were on the horizon, and decided to switch jobs: Okay, there might be some financial pain up ahead, I thought. I need to make more money. I ended up in a job with a better role and higher pay—but then the rate hikes started getting out of control. 

By September, the overnight rate hit 3.25 per cent, and our mortgage rate was 5.45 per cent, with payments of $4,300 a month. We had to start cutting back. I renegotiated our Rogers plan, stripping down to only internet and basic channels. I went for a higher deductible on our insurance, lowering the monthly payment. We started shopping for groceries on discount days, looking for deals on milk and eggs. But it didn’t stop. Now, after eight rate hikes, our mortgage rate is 6.45 per cent, and we’re paying $5,200 a month—a spike of $1,800 monthly, more than $20,000 more every year. 

My wife recently switched to a project management role with her employer, increasing our combined household income to $150,000 a year. But even with that bump, we’re struggling to keep our heads above water. More than 40 per cent of our pre-tax income goes straight to our house, and we know it might get worse. With recent increases in gas and food prices, the hit has been even harder. We rarely eat out; extracurriculars for the kids, like soccer and tae kwon do, are on hold. Travel is completely out of the question. If my wife hadn’t also found another job, I’m not sure we would have been able to hang on to the house.

MORE: My Prediction: Rent-to-own will transform how Canadians buy and sell homes

We feel helpless and angry. If we lived way beyond our means, that would be one thing. But it’s not like we did something radical. We wanted a family home, we made some sacrifices and we got a decent-sized place in a decent neighbourhood. Hard-working, middle-class people should be able to buy homes in their own country without cutting back their lifestyles to the bone.

Recently, the Bank of Canada announced that interest rates would stay at 4.5 per cent, the first time it has held steady in more than a year. It’s a bit of a relief. But down in the U.S., the Fed just raised rates again, which makes me wonder how long it will be before Canada does the same. That’s always in the back of my mind. 

With our current budget, we could likely make it through one or two more small hikes. If there are two more rate hikes, though, our payment will rise by another $300 a month. That will mean tough decisions. We would probably have to sell our place and go back to renting, which seems barely better, if at all. Rental prices are high, too. Shortly after we left our Scarborough condo, which cost $1,900 a month, rent controls were lifted, and the price shot up to $3,200 a month. 

We feel like we’ve done nothing wrong, having relied on the advice of the government and financial institutions. Sana and I will continue doing what we can, working hard to support our family, but there’s only so many things we can control. We’re hoping the worst is over.

—As told to Mathew Silver

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(Photos courtesy Mint Content/Lloyoll)

Ian Urbina, a longtime New York Times reporter, spent 17 years abroad reporting on human rights and the environment in Cuba, Mexico and Spain, but his travels rarely brought him to Canada. Before last year, Urbina’s only link to the Great White North was a colleague who couldn’t stop musing about his summer property on Prince Edward Island. Urbina was based in Washington, D.C., but he was enraptured by his co-worker’s tales. “He would tell me about this magical island with miles of beaches that his kids loved,” Urbina says.

By 2022, Urbina had left the Times to found The Outlaw Ocean, a non-profit organization that produces investigative journalism about human rights, labour and environmental concerns at sea. He longed for a peaceful place near a body of water to think and work, and P.E.I.’s North Shore—battered in September by Hurricane Fiona but normally quiet and serene—appeared to fit the bill. So he gave into his curiosity and, despite never having set foot on the island, started shopping online for properties.

He found a 10-acre piece of land on the water near the eastern hamlet of Naufrage. From his research on Google Maps, he could tell the area would be quiet—a two-kilometre-long driveway separated his plot from the island’s network of paved roads that extended for 75 kilometres before reaching Charlottetown. The privacy appealed to him so much that he bought the land sight unseen, with plans to build a vacation home. 

Urbina needed a contractor who could build something modern and compact with a view of the ocean. He was a carpenter in his younger days and, armed with his craftsmanship and aesthetic preferences, he found his match in Lloyoll, a Nova Scotia–based construction and design firm that specializes in minimalistic fortresses made mostly of wood and glass. Urbina chose the Skali High Cuboid model: a two-bedroom, 768-square-foot glass and weathering steel box with 11-foot cedar ceilings and sprawling windows, all for a base price of $345,000. He loved how the home’s copper-coloured façade matched the earth. “It melded perfectly with the surrounding soil because of its reddish colour, and stood out starkly from the shoreline because of its futuristic shape,” says Urbina.

The developers transported the box to Urbina’s lot in early December, and he visited the province for the first time three days later. He was taken aback by the frigid temperature: five below with a brisk breeze. “The winter had not even really started, but it was cold like nothing I had experienced. The wind on that North Shore was no joke,” he says. But his early brush with Maritime weather did little to dampen his enthusiasm about his new place, which came winter-proof and fitted with a wood-burning fireplace, an air-source heat pump and electric heaters behind the cabinetry—all wrapped in high-density insulation. 

Urbina loves the thoughtful details that went into his new house. The windows and doors are custom designed, the Douglas fir panels are made by Lloyoll, and the black and copper fixtures give the place a Scandinavian look. The home is also highly functional: the kitchen comes with Bosch appliances, the bathrooms have heated floors and spotlights line the cabinetry to make the place glow at night. The building’s outer skeleton of hardwood, glass and stone is not equipped to support a television, so the developers built Urbina a hideaway stand that folds down from the ceiling. 

Last summer was Urbina’s first on P.E.I. He marvelled at the island’s resounding calm, the quaintness of Charlottetown and sunsets unencumbered by city lights. “What captivated me most was how few people there are,” he said. “It creates a deep quiet that makes it so easy to write and relax.” 

His next trip to Canada from D.C. will be in April, when he will show off his new home to a few of his friends. Around that time, he plans to build a back deck and prepare the place for summer getaways with his wife, son, step-daughter and grandson. “I think I lucked out: first by choosing P.E.I. as a place to build, and second by picking the perfect contractor,” Urbina says. “I feel like I won the lottery twice.”

The post Habitat: A former New York Times journalist built this beachside fortress in P.E.I. appeared first on Macleans.ca.

(Photos courtesy Sotheby’s/Ross Halloran)

Just a stone’s throw across Lake Simcoe from Victoria Point and the town of Orillia lies Grape Island, home to roughly 40 cottage properties—including this secluded, water-access getaway, which is on the market for $1.89 million. 

Located just 90 minutes from  Toronto—including the three minutes from dock to dock crossing Simcoe from Orillia’s Victoria Point—the property is a rare double lot dotted with shipping containers that have been turned into three cozy sleeping quarters. There’s also a modern, custom-designed, two-storey lake house, plus the main home.

Imported Malaysian hardwood walkways connect the five buildings, including this children’s bunkie and a laundry and gym building nestled on the back of the property under the shady treeline. 

The property’s unusual design is inspired by the owner’s travels to the Caribbean. There are ready-to-lounge-on daybeds on walk-out patio decks, a western red cedar barrel sauna from Northern Lights Cedar Tubs and Saunas in Winnipeg that fits six, and a sleek and elegant outdoor concrete-topped Acadia wood-legged dining table from Seven Continents in Manhattan that seats a dozen people next to two outdoor fire pits. 

What else does the $1,895,000 price tag come with? Five bedrooms, four bathrooms, 3,000 total square feet, 200 feet of unobstructed waterfront views and all the trappings of a refined summer home: screened-in porch in the main dwelling, custom-built touch cabinets, sliding glass doors and a deep, square, white cedar Japanese soaker tub in the main bathroom.

A safari-inspired glamping tent custom-built on-site comes with an open-air standing shower.

If having a roof is more your speed, the boathouse offers a loft-style sleeping space with a full bathroom and unparalleled morning panoramas.

A retractable dock and vessel storage comes with the property, so owning a boat is a must to get the most out of this island home. Have multiple family members or friends en route for the weekend? Several residents operate a water taxi to ferry additional guests and residents back and forth (or “scoots,” hovercraft-like vehicles that navigate through the channel in inclement winter weather).

You can’t drive on the island. A walking path provides access to a shared public dock and connects residential property lines. Some owners have lived full time on Grape Island since the ’50s, so you’d be joining a close-knit community.

The post For $1.9 million you can buy a luxury container compound in Ontario appeared first on Macleans.ca.

Husmates co-founder Lesli Gaynor (photo courtesy Gaynor)

Since becoming a real estate agent in 2015, Lesli Gaynor has specialized in co-ownership. She sees it as a model of housing that addresses the problems of affordability, lack of density and social isolation. Co-purchasers are often family members or friends, but that doesn’t have to be the case. She and her business partner, Parimal Gosai, started talking about how they could help and, in 2021, they launched Husmates: a real estate platform that works like a dating app by matching buyers looking to purchase property together. Sharing a mortgage with a stranger may sound like a risky proposition, but Gaynor says it’s all about doing the right work in advance. Here, she talks about why it’s a good idea to keep kitchens and bathrooms separate and what happens if your co-owner lands their dream job in Timbuktu.

RELATED: My mortgage is about to go up by at least $1,000 a month

Husmates sounds like Tinder for real estate. Where did the idea come from?

Co-ownership is the reason I got into real estate. I purchased a property with two friends back in the ’90s and I saw a lot of potential in the model, both as a way for people to break into the market and as a force for positive social change. That’s been my focus since I became a real estate agent in 2015. I’ve been helping prospective owners co-purchase properties since then. In 2019, I met my business partner, Parimal. He was the listing agent on a deal I was doing and we got to talking and realized we were both passionate about co-ownership. During the pandemic, we kept getting calls from potential clients who wanted to co-purchase and had their finances in order, but didn’t have someone to buy with. Parimal and I started talking about how we could help these clients, and that’s when this idea of a real estate dating app came up. Tinder for real estate is our elevator pitch, but you shouldn’t meet someone online and jump into a purchase any more than you would go on one Tinder date and agree to get married.

How exactly do people match on Husmates? And what happens then?

You create a profile and fill in details about everything from your finances to your location preferences to your social life and diet. (If you’re vegan, you probably don’t want to be with someone who barbecues every weekend.) Currently we have about 450 users on the app, which is focused on properties in Toronto and the GTHA. A match is when you “like” someone’s profile for any reason: maybe you’re both based in the area where you’re looking to purchase, or maybe you might both love dogs. It’s not always two people: we sometimes have groups of three or more who connect on the app. If parties are interested in meeting, they can do that with our help or arrange it on their own. After that initial match, the hard work starts to make sure everyone is on the same page and, if it gets to that point, to create the terms of an agreement: What happens if I want to exit? How will we value the property? Who will we use for mediation if we hit a snag? These are the conversations that anyone buying real estate together should be having—whether it’s with a spouse, a friend, a family member—but they often don’t. We have a lawyer to help draft those agreements.

READ: The Move: From Toronto’s rental grind to a quaint corner store in Quebec

Do you discuss common pressure points like playing loud music, parties, pets, smoking weed indoors?

That’s what we refer to as the culture of the house, and those questions definitely come up. At the same time, these issues aren’t unique to co-ownership. If you live in a condo or rent in a multi-unit property, you’re going to have to follow some rules. Co-ownership also doesn’t necessarily mean cohabitation. For the most part, we advocate for hybrid spaces where you have separate living spaces with maybe a shared backyard or living room. We had two families co-purchase a detached three-storey home with two separate units in the west end of Toronto, and they left a finished basement as a shared social space. I matched two women in a single home outside the city, and now they’re renovating to create two separate units. I recently started working with a group of four women in their 60s who met on Husmates. They all own their own homes, but they’re starting to have conversations about aging in place and how they might be able to do that together in one property.

So you don’t get a lot of people wanting to co-own a single home?

We’ve had some people looking into that, but our advice is “Don’t do it.” Shared spaces are hard. Sharing kitchens and bathrooms are especially hard, even with people you love. You end up having conflicts because one person thinks the kitchen should be spotless and the other piles dishes in the sink.

MORE: The Move: Why two pilots willing to put down roots anywhere in Canada landed in Calgary

Ontario’s Bill 23, a provincial act that loosens existing rules to allow for more residential development, will make it easier to get approval for laneway homes, auxiliary apartments and multi-unit properties. What will that do for co-ownership?

We worked with a client who bought a larger lot with a single home so he could build a laneway home and live in it, while the original owners lived in the main house. We’re seeing more interest in that kind of set-up. I have other issues with Bill 23 because it favours developers—if it costs $350 a square foot to develop a laneway home, that’s not going to be affordable for most people. We need to get creative about how these things can be financed. One idea is that we have separate mortgages on the same property or we mortgage pre-construction.

What about people who are interested in co-purchasing an investment property?

We aren’t in the business of turning clients away, but investment properties aren’t our focus. Co-ownership is a way for people to buy property in an increasingly unaffordable housing market, but it’s also a socially progressive approach to real estate. Before I became a real estate agent, I was a social worker focused on health policy. I know how important it is to have secure housing. I’m not saying co-ownership is going to solve our housing crisis—you have to have money to co-own. But I do think it’s a way to address a number of social concerns: isolation has been a big issue since the pandemic, and we can build neighbourhoods the way they were meant to be built, so both elderly and young people are part of a community. White picket fences were ideal at one point, but they have a way of keeping people apart.

It seems no one can afford to buy property anymore, at least in Toronto. Is there a specific demographic you’re dealing with?

With the Husmates app, it’s mostly millennials—people in their 30s who are starting to realize that this may be their only way into the market. So maybe there will be two or three people buying property together or just two co-owners along with a silent investor, a.k.a Mom or Dad. I’ve had scenarios with three buyers who are going to live in the property, and then you have a fourth silent investor—someone’s parents—putting down a big chunk of the down payment. In that case, we set up an equalization agreement, so that the silent party is eventually paid out. It’s not complicated, but if you don’t have those terms in place, it can be a nightmare.

What are some other common pitfalls you can avoid via the right paperwork?

We’ve had cases where two people co-purchase a home and then one of them gets into a relationship and their partner moves in. If you live in separate units, that’s not a problem, except when you’re dealing with a matrimonial property situation where the new partner can claim ownership. Maybe both buyers are single when I meet them, but thinking about the future is my job. What if one person gets their dream job in Timbuktu that starts tomorrow? When both parties sign a document stipulating what happens in different circumstances before buying property together, it’s less hassle for everyone involved.

What happens if your co-owner moves to Timbuktu?

You would decide in advance who pays the penalties if the mortgage is broken. Sharing a mortgage is probably the biggest pressure point in co-ownership: you’re going into debt with another person, and both of you are equally responsible. You may have paid your share, but if the full mortgage payment isn’t in on the due date, the bank doesn’t care who owes it. I always advise people to have employment insurance and also a slush fund that covers three months of payments. We call it the anti-tsunami clause.

Have you ever met with prospective co-owners and told them they were not a good match?

Definitely. It’s happened a few times. It’s what you would think: one person is saying how much they appreciate the quiet, and the other person wants to make sure there’s enough room to host parties.

So there’s no “opposites attract” in co-ownership?

I think there can be, but that’s when you really want to make sure people have their own space.

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The post This realtor created a Tinder for property co-ownership appeared first on Macleans.ca.

The buyers:

Tatjana Heuer-Carrigan, 31, and Hamza Tariq, 37

The budget:

$1.5 million 

The backstory:

Throughout his late teens and early 20s, Hamza worked part time at his father’s corner stores, first in Kingston, Ontario, then in Winnipeg. He didn’t mind the work, which included stocking shelves, paperwork and manning the counter—he just couldn’t imagine making a life of it. After finishing his undergraduate degree at the University of Winnipeg, Hamza moved to Toronto, where, three years ago, he met Tatjana on Tinder. It was a whirlwind romance, and the couple married after less than a year of dating. At that point, they both had steady jobs in marketing—him for American Express, her for the Toronto Star—and they were thinking about buying a home together. 

READ: The Move: Why two pilots willing to put down roots anywhere in Canada landed in Calgary

To save money, the couple moved in with Hamza’s parents, who were then living in a four-bedroom home in Brampton. Hamza and Tatjana were grateful for the helping hand, but space was tight: Hamza’s sister and brother-in-law were also crashing at the house, and Hamza’s brother often stayed over. In early 2021, after six months of cohabiting in cramped quarters, the couple started looking for their dream property.  House prices had skyrocketed during the pandemic, which limited their options. But Hamza and Tatjana weren’t interested in a starter home. They wanted a place with several bedrooms—they were planning for kids—as well as office space. A $1.5-million budget wouldn’t stretch far in Toronto, so they focused their search on Etobicoke, Oakville and Mississauga. They visited roughly 30 properties in their price range, all small townhouses and semi-detached properties that needed extensive aesthetic or structural upgrades. None appealed to them, and they called off their search without ever entering a bid.

In May of 2021, Hamza and Tatjana decided to sign a year-long lease on a two-bedroom condo in Toronto’s Regent Park neighbourhood and wait for house prices to settle. “Seeing what we could afford made us feel so discouraged,” says Tatjana. “We also started to think that our corporate lives in Toronto weren’t going to allow us the work-life balance we wanted. The ability to  spend more time at home with a child or two was important to me.” Conversations with Hamza’s parents further expanded their thinking. The Tariqs’ corner-store business brought in more money than Hamza and Tatjana’s salaries combined—plus they set their own hours. Hamza, now a long way from his part-time days at his father’s shops, realized that buying their own store might be the solution he and Tatjana were looking for. 

The hunt:

The couple resumed their real estate search, this time in Quebec, where Tatjana was born. There, they could buy a corner store—known as a dépanneur, or “dep,” in La Belle Province—for a third of the price of an Ontario store. Job security was another upside: independent dépanneurs are fixtures of Québécois culture and occupy a solid niche in a market saturated with bigger convenience chains. Tatjana was also excited by the idea of returning to the province of her birth. “Even though I grew up in Vancouver,” she says, “I felt connected to Quebec. I often visited my dad’s family in Montreal.”

RELATED: The Move: This Ontario family found space and affordability in Calgary

Over a series of weekends in the late winter and early spring of 2022, Hamza drove thousands of kilometres to scope out dozens of existing businesses for sale across southern and central Quebec. Sometimes Tatjana came with; other times, his parents came along for the ride. The couple came close to closing on a dépanneur located in Sherbrooke, but ultimately decided it was too big (and busy) a site for their first venture. It was on a solo trip a 90-minute drive northeast of Montreal that Hamza found “the one”: Dépanneur Joblo, in the 2,400-person town of Maskinongé. Joblo was previously owned by a couple in their 60s, and the business was already profitable. It sold convenience-store mainstays like chips, chocolate, milk, bread, beer and cigarettes, and even had its own coffee counter. In Maskinongé, whose entire commercial centre consisted of a gas station, a pharmacy, a gym and a bank, the dep was an established hub.

The 130-year-old building sat on just under an acre of land, next to a Catholic church and across from the Maskinongé River. Along with the main-floor store came two second-floor apartments. Hamza and Tatjana knew right away that they would move into the larger, three-bedroom space and set up the other one for visiting family and friends. Best of all, they could get the entire 2,400-square-foot complex for $450,000—less than a third of their Toronto budget. “It added up in so many ways,” says Hamza. “Plus, Maskinongé is halfway between Montreal and Quebec City, so we had easy access to big cities.” They were sold.

Hamza and Tatjana were initially a bit worried about what their neighbours would think of them. For starters, neither spoke French. Tatjana had taken classes in school but was far from being able to communicate at workplace-level fluency. They also had concerns about what it would be like for Hamza—who immigrated from Pakistan as a child—to be a brown, non-French-speaking person in a small, white town, a wildly different reality from Toronto. Determined to steer public opinion in their favour, the couple went on a charm offensive. Last July, a week or so after they moved in, they threw a “get to know us” party, setting up a tent in the dep’s parking lot and passing out donuts, muffins and coffee. They even printed 100 T-shirts emblazoned with “J’ai choisi Maski” (“I chose Maski”), a heart and a fleur-de-lis on the front, and “Dépanneur Joblo” on the back. “It was the talk of the town,” Hamza says. “People came into the store afterwards asking if we had any more shirts.”

MORE: The Move: Why one family left Toronto for Vancouver Island… and 14 goats

Settling into their new living quarters didn’t go quite as smoothly. After renting a modern condo in Toronto, life in an old building took some getting used to. The floors weren’t level and the apartment rattled with each passing train. Joblo’s previous owners were heavy smokers, which meant replacing all the light fixtures and window treatments, and washing the walls multiple times. In the end, the couple hired a local guy to repaint the interior, twice. Banishing the smoky smell cost them upwards of $5,000. Still, Hamza and Tatjana loved being able to spread out across 1,300 square feet in their unit, a pleasure after being cooped up first in a condo, and then with family. And there was no denying the convenience of living right above their new workplace.

Finding their groove as store owners took time, though. Before putting down an offer on Joblo’s, Hamza and Tatjana had decided not to make any immediate changes to the dep itself. They wanted the staff to feel as comfortable as possible before switching things up, especially given the language barrier. Tatjana’s grandmother—who speaks French—came to stay for a few days to help them get acclimated. “There’s only so much we can do with Google Translate,” says Tatjana. Shortly after, Hamza’s dad sent one of his bilingual employees from Ontario to spend three weeks at Joblo.

Despite Hamza and Tatjana’s best efforts, three of Joblo’s four existing staff members quit within two months of their arrival. Finding replacements during a labour shortage was difficult, but the dep was back up to three employees by December and by that point, everyone was gelling. Tatjana now deals with the dep’s day-to-day operations (like customer service and stock) while Hamza tends to back-end tasks (like accounting). In February, Joblo expanded its small coffee counter into a more elaborate takeout service called Chez Mama Sam, complete with a menu of South Asian dishes developed by Hamza’s mom (plus poutine). “At no point did I imagine we’d be living in the middle of Quebec, and that my mom would be teaching a cook named Steve how to make Pakistani food,” says Hamza, laughing. “Actually, he’s the brother of the guy who repainted our place. It really is a small town!”

Despite the initial challenges, Tatjana and Hamza’s gamble has paid off. They’re already looking to buy a second dep in the area and planning to rebrand their properties from gas station–style pit stops to a more “general store” feel. The couple also adopted an English cocker spaniel puppy named Monty, with whom they take long walks on the trails of Pointe-Yamachiche nature reserve. For now, at least, the quiet life in Quebec suits them. “I love that there’s no traffic here,” Hamza says. “And there are only ever six people at the gym.”

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In July 2019, my husband Brad and I moved with our three kids from Sooke, a small town 45 minutes’ drive west of Victoria, into the city itself. We wanted to be closer to our jobs—Brad is an electrician and I’m an education assistant—and we also wanted more opportunities for our kids, who are now 17, 15 and 11. The city had better schools and more extracurricular activities, and we also wanted to live in a community with more people close by. And that’s exactly what we got. Our new house was located on a quiet cul-de-sac in a nice suburban neighbourhood, near the beach, parks, schools and great walking trails. There are lots of families nearby with kids the same age as ours, and some of them have become very close, like family. 

The house cost $759,000, but that gave us about 3,000 square feet, with four bedrooms and an unfinished basement. We saved up for a renovation, and completed it bit by bit, adding a fifth bedroom, a media room and a bathroom down there. Each of my kids now has their own bedroom, and we have an extra room for guests. But all that extra space has come at a cost we didn’t anticipate at first. 

READ: The Move: Why two pilots willing to put down roots anywhere in Canada landed in Calgary

When we bought the house in July 2019, interest rates were nearly at all-time lows. We took out a $520,000 mortgage, and our first term was a fixed-rate, four-year term at a rate of 3.04 per cent. The monthly mortgage payment was about $2,400. That didn’t leave much left over after the usual bills, insurance, gas, food and property taxes, plus extracurriculars for the kids—one is in band, another is in swimming. But we’d been homeowners since 2014, we hadn’t seen rates change much, and the consensus was that rates would stay low for a long time to come. 

That was wrong, as everyone knows now. In the spring of 2022, rates started to rise, and I started to worry about just how high they’d go by the time we renewed the mortgage for a new term in July 2023. I reached out to my mortgage lender—one of the big Canadian banks—to find out if we could break the mortgage early, to lock in the then-current rates for a longer period. They wanted $12,000 to break it early, which we just couldn’t afford.

So we waited and watched. By fall, rates had hit five per cent. That would mean $850 more per month—$3,250 a month, almost $40,000 a year, just to keep the roof over our head. And rates were still rising. I called the bank again. Now they said the penalty to break the mortgage would be equivalent to three months’ interest, about $3,400. I’d have done that in spring if possible, but now the representative on the phone told me it would be foolish to do so—she said I was being irrational and overreacting, that rates wouldn’t keep going up like this, and I should just wait until July to refinance, as planned. Her rudeness alone made me not want to re-sign with the bank.

RELATED: My Prediction: Rent-to-own will transform how Canadians buy and sell homes

I reached out to our mortgage broker, and he was frank: “There’s not much you can do. Hold out and we’ll hopefully find you a better rate in July.” So we’ve been exploring options. One alternative lender, a subsidiary of a big bank, said they could maybe get me 4.5 per cent. But our mortgage broker said that wasn’t possible because our mortgage isn’t insured—we paid more than 20 per cent down when we bought the house, which seemed responsible at the time. But because mortgages with higher down payments aren’t required to be insured, we didn’t get it, and now we don’t qualify for the lower rate. It’s been really frustrating to learn on the fly how this all works, when so much is on the line.

Mortgage rates are now around six per cent, and while the Bank of Canada has tentatively paused further hikes, there could even be more to come this year. Even as it stands, when we renew in July, our mortgage payments will go up around $1,000 per month, overnight. 

We already live frugally, not a lot of frills, no holidays, rarely eating out or splurging. $1,000 a month will push us to the edge. If someone gets sick or hurt and can’t work, there’s nothing to fall back on—and we need more income to avoid losing the house. Brad’s employer doesn’t allow side gigs, so I’ve already taken two extra jobs. I’m taking over some caregiver responsibilities for a neighbour’s family member, and last summer, when school was out, I started doing wedding decorating. The latter eats up 15 to 30 hours per week in the summer, but brings in more money than not working at all for two months, which is the case for education assistants. I’ll do it again this summer. 

In September, we’re also going to host an international student in our house. That’ll bring in $975 a month, but it’ll also mean more work and expenses—providing food and transportation, ensuring they have a good experience in Canada. In the end, it’ll probably mean a couple hundred dollars extra to cover some monthly expenses. 

All in all, we’ll be working basically all the time—but at least we’ll get to stay in our home.

MORE: My Prediction: Rent-to-own will transform how Canadians buy and sell homes

I’ve heard people ask: why don’t you just downsize? The answer is that the market has changed so drastically that it wouldn’t be much more affordable. With the costs of selling and moving, we’d probably end up paying a similar amount for a smaller house, and we’d have to uproot our lives for it. Some friends have moved to Alberta, where it’s cheaper, and we considered it. Brad’s from southern Alberta, and my dad lives in Edmonton. Last September, we looked at house prices in Lethbridge, which is even cheaper than the large cities there, and we realized we could sell our house here and be mortgage-free there. 

We were days from listing our home, but we started to do the math and realized that it wasn’t as good as it looked. Selling and relocating would end up costing us around $100,000—lawyers’ fees, movers, commission to the realtor (which we hadn’t thought of). Some regular costs, especially home heating, would be way higher. In Victoria, we don’t have to drive everywhere; we would in Lethbridge, adding more costs. Salaries in my field are lower in Alberta, and there are no jobs available anyway, so we’d be living off one income. Brad’s pay as an electrician would have gone down too. We would have ended up in the same position: barely enough to get by, while freezing on top of it!

And the kids didn’t want to move. There were tears. We all love it here, we’re happy here, but we felt desperate, out of options.

I’m grateful that I own my house. I know people who are renting and have even less stability. The cost of everything is rising: housing, gas, food, insurance. I estimate our spending has gone up by a minimum of $500 a month just from inflation, but wages are standing still. Right now, I’m hoping for a miracle. I’ve told people I’d take a shady mortgage, if there were such a thing. I just need to not pay $3,500 just to live. We recently decided we’ll take the risk and get a variable-rate mortgage when we renew—we run the risk of rates going even higher, but there’s a better chance they’ll fall, hopefully within a year. We think it will mean having a high rate for a shorter period of time compared to a very high fixed rate for four or five years. We’ll shop around and wait until the last minute to get the best rate. 

My biggest fear is that we’ll be forced to sell the house. But we’re hoping these side gigs will get us by, and that rates will drop soon. At this point, we’ll do anything to make it work.

— As told to Andrea Yu

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The post My mortgage is about to go up by at least $1,000 a month appeared first on Macleans.ca.

There are approximately 400 wineries in B.C., many of them concentrated in the Okanagan Valley—and one of them is currently on the market.

Priced at just under $10 million, this nearly 10-acre property comes with a modern five-bedroom residence and an operational 6.5-acre vineyard capable of producing 15 tons of wine each year. 

The owners, a Calgary couple, had always loved visiting Okanagan and dreamed of having their own vineyard there. In 2007, they bought a tract of hillside near the village of Naramata, situated on the eastern shore of Okanagan Lake. They commissioned Robert Mackenzie, a local architect who specializes in wineries, to build them a summer home on the property. In 2011, construction was completed. After 12 years, the owners plan to spend more time in their Calgary hometown, so they’re bidding farewell to their vineyard estate. 

To compensate for strong winds on the hillside, the two-storey home was built with a durable exposed steel frame, concrete and rough-cut natural stone. To accent those materials, locally sourced veneer panelling and reclaimed timber were also used during construction. 

Mackenzie emphasized extreme angular shapes in his designs, including the massive triangular roof. Its largest portion juts out over the living area, which has 20-foot floor-to-ceiling windows. 

The home was designed with sustainability in mind: the owners installed solar panelling and a geothermal system that efficiently provides radiant heating as well as air-conditioning while maintaining a minimal carbon footprint. 

On the first level, you can find the master bedroom, two guest bedrooms and a wine cellar. Upstairs, there’s an added guest room, as well as that main living space. In the back, there’s a patio with an infinity pool overlooking the lake.  

Maintained by a local management company, the vineyard is capable of yielding 15 tons of Cabernet Franc, Gewürztraminer, Merlot, and Pinot Gris annually. The harvest is sold to two local wineries. 

The property backs onto the Kettle Valley Rail Trail, which offers both biking and hiking routes on a continuous 650-kilometre stretch of decommissioned railway that extends from Hope to Castlegar. The lake is great for rainbow trout and kokanee salmon fishing enthusiasts, and the Naramata Marina is only a nine-minute drive away. And, of course, there’s also wineries aplenty nearby.

The post For $9.9 million you can buy this B.C. estate that comes with its own vineyard appeared first on Macleans.ca.

The buyers:

Sylvie Bouffard, a 25-year-old regional-airline pilot, and Riley Dewar, a 27-year-old corporate-jet pilot.

The budget:

$500,000

The backstory:

Sylvie and Riley are originally from opposite sides of the country—her from Ottawa and him from Squamish, British Columbia. In 2020, they met somewhere close to the middle, while working as air-ambulance pilots in La Ronge, a remote community in northern Saskatchewan. They were used to airlifting victims of ATV and snowmobile accidents to hospitals, but during the pandemic, they serviced more and more patients afflicted with COVID. “It was nice to be in the same field at that time,” Sylvie says. “When we needed to rant after a long day, we each had someone who could understand us.”

RELATED: The Move: This Ontario family found space and affordability in Calgary

In November of 2020, the couple moved in together, renting a three-bedroom, 1,000-square-foot house in La Ronge for $1,200 a month. It was an older property, but it had a large porch overlooking the backyard, where they often enjoyed meals when the weather permitted. Sylvie and Riley shared a love of the outdoors, which they satisfied by camping, hiking and paddleboarding in the wilds of La Ronge. Still, neither of them were too keen on staying there for long. Aside from the abundance of outdoor recreation, there wasn’t a whole lot to do in town, an area known for having high crime rates. (“I wouldn’t walk alone at night,” Sylvie says.) Plus, their MedEvac jobs often meant working 12-hour shifts, on-call and for low pay.Sylvie and Riley both hoped to find better-salaried work as commercial pilots. They were willing to live anywhere in Canada, so long as their future home was located in a safe community and was roomy enough to house the family they eventually hoped to start. Affordability was also a priority, which ruled out Toronto and Vancouver. Calgary, on the other hand, seemed reasonable. The idea of being close to the mountains scratched their adventurous itch, and Riley’s dad was located in Kelowna, a six-hour drive away. 

READ: The Move: Kelowna, B.C. to Nova Scotia for a breath of fresh air

By March of 2021, Riley had secured a job as a corporate-jet pilot for a private charter company in Calgary and took over the basement of his friend’s mom (for free) who had an apartment in Airdrie, a suburb just north of the Calgary International Airport. Sylvie found work with another local airline and moved into Riley’s bachelor pad that July. A week after her arrival, the search for their dream home finally began.

The hunt:

Sylvie and Riley’s ideal property had to fit a few key criteria: detached, with two or three bedrooms (for overnight visitors), a decently sized yard (for Lou, Sylvie’s newly adopted Labradoodle), a price tag close to $500,000 and located in a quiet neighbourhood, preferably near the airport (for obvious reasons). Riley, who describes himself as “not a city person,” wasn’t keen on living right downtown. Instead, the couple started looking in a friendly, known area with lots of green space: Airdrie.

Right off the bat, they viewed five houses. Among them was an older, six-bedroom house on a corner lot, which Sylvie and Riley nicknamed the “murder house” for its peeling wallpaper, musty cigarette smell and creepy basement, complete with a dark, narrow hallway. There was also the “museum house,” a three-bedroom split-level bungalow that was newly renovated and listed for $415,000. “It was too sterile,” Sylvie says. “It was very white and very staged. It didn’t feel homey at all.” 

The top contender was a three-bedroom, two-and-a-half-bathroom detached property on a cul-de-sac in Airdrie’s Reunion-Williamstown neighbourhood, just “90 steps” from their basement apartment. It had an open-concept living room and kitchen on the main floor, three bedrooms on the upper level and an unfinished basement that was ripe for renovation. The house itself sat on a large, pie-shaped lot with a narrow front yard and a fully fenced backyard—ideal for Lou, and ideal for enjoying private outdoor meals in the summer months. “It was miles nicer than anything else we’d seen,” says Riley.

MORE: The Move: Why one family left Toronto for Vancouver Island…and 14 goats

The home was listed at $500,000—the very top end of the couple’s budget—but their agent thought they could get it for $490,000. Sylvie and Riley had scheduled another batch of viewings for the next day, so they figured they’d hold off on making an offer. But on the way home, their agent called to let them know another prospective buyer had put in a bid. “Our stomachs were in knots,” Sylvie says. “I think that’s when we realized how much we loved the house. We thought: We can’t lose it.” 

They decided to submit an offer of $490,000, based on their realtor’s advice, but soon found out the other bidder had offered the asking price—with no conditions. Sylvie and Riley decided to match the $500,000, retaining their conditions (including a home inspection). They also threw in a heartstring-plucking letter for the current owner, expressing their love for the neighbourhood, where they could imagine walking their dog and sending their future children to school. That sealed the deal.

They didn’t have long to celebrate. Sylvie and Riley agreed to a quick closing date of early August, and just two weeks later, Sylvie left for job training in Vancouver. Riley moved their shared belongings out of storage and into their new digs by himself. In fact, they only spent a total of six days together in their first two months of home ownership, thanks to their staggered work schedules. “We had just come off of doing long distance, so it was very bizarre,” Sylvie says.

They devoted any and all shared time to making their house a home: sourcing and refurbishing second-hand furniture from Kijiji and Facebook Marketplace, transforming their third bedroom into a craft area for Sylvie (she crochets and sews), and enjoying meals for two in their backyard oasis—three if you include Lou. At times, they miss their lakeside dwelling in La Ronge, but Sylvie and Riley are making do, suburb-style. There’s a pond located a couple streets’ north, which draws hockey-loving kids during the winter freeze and hosts concerts over the holidays. “There’s a strong sense of community here,” says Sylvie, happily. For all their scheduling conflicts, the couple has grown closer, too. Last Christmas Eve, Riley proposed.

The post The Move: Why two pilots willing to put down roots anywhere in Canada landed in Calgary. appeared first on Macleans.ca.

When Nicolas Sauve was a child, his parents would take him and his sister to a rented cabin by Lac-Saint-Joseph near Quebec City, where he learned to windsurf and practised soccer, taking free kicks against the cabin’s cement wall. Eventually, his passion for outdoor sports became a career. He criss-crossed the globe as a professional snowboarder for 12 years, clinching two medals at the 2011 Winter X Games. Now he works as the general manager at Sentiers du Moulin, an outdoors centre in Lac-Beauport, developing a recreational trail network in the Quebec hinterlands with enough snappy turns and steep inclines to attract mountain bikers from across the country. 

(Photo by Citizen North)

In 2018, he got word that a private developer who owned more than 900 acres of property on nearby Mont Tourbillon wanted to subdivide his land into 80 parcels. The developer offered Sauve the opportunity to purchase his pick of the lots for $60,000. (Similar lots now sell for close to $350,000.) Sauve chose a 10-acre forested property close to the top of the mountain, surrounded by trees and a series of cliffs that look like a giant staircase. But first, the town of Lac-Beauport had to approve the deal. In the end, it was agreed that each owner would open up part of their land to public recreational use.

Sauve rents out the space on Airbnb. He loves hearing from guests, who tell him all about their outdoor adventures. (Photo by Etienne Dionne)

The lot is a five-minute drive from the four-bedroom home Sauve shares with his wife, Geneviève Gaumond, an ER doctor, and their two daughters, aged three and four. The family enlisted the help of a contractor friend to help them build their dream chalet, where they could return from mountain biking or snowshoeing and warm up under sunset skies while overlooking endless vistas of boreal forest. Land-use regulations usually prohibit residential builds in the area, but Sauve’s family got an exemption when they agreed to allow recreational use on their property. The catch: their chalet’s footprint had to be no bigger than 24 square metres, which is roughly equivalent to three mid-size cars side by side.

(Photo by Nick Dignard)

Inspired by their mutual love of Québécois architect Pierre Thibault, Sauve and Gaumond envisioned a tiny two-floor retreat that used only three materials—bleached wood, grey aluminum and white tile—to minimize visual noise. The build cost roughly $400,000. “We wanted the design, textures and colours of the chalet to be linear, sober and clean, so the house kind of fades away and lets you connect with the surrounding nature,” says Sauve.

The family also had to figure out how to make the chalet feel bigger than it was. There are some much-needed space-saving hacks: the stove is only 60 centimetres wide, and the main floor connects to the upper by a small steel ladder instead of a staircase. With their indoor layout so limited, they took advantage of the outdoor space with a 30-metre patio and large glass windows. In the winter, the doors stay closed and the family enjoy a panoramic view of the snow-capped forest by the outdoor wood-burning stove. Come summer, the doors open back up, and they grill moose steaks on the barbecue.

Micro-chalet is the name and space-saving is the game. Each room was designed to balance aesthetics with compact functionality. (Photo by Citizen North)

Every time Sauve walks around the property, his mind quiets down. “You can look outside and not see a living soul for hundreds of kilometres,” he says. They get their drinking water from a well, drilled 91 metres into the earth,  which yields crystalline water that tastes remarkably crisp. The unit, which rents for $400 per night on Airbnb, is now so popular that if Sauve and his family want to spend the weekend there, they need to block off the dates months in advance. (If snowfall leads to difficult road conditions in the winter, they’ll head up the mountain on a snowmobile instead of a car.)

They’ve received a number of offers for the property, but Sauve has no intention of selling. He sees himself living there full time once his children are grown. “I can see my family paring things down to the more essential stuff.”

Sauve’s family takes part in winter sports on the surrounding land. (Photo by Citizen North)

This article appears in print in the March 2023 issue of Maclean’s magazine. Buy the issue for $9.99 or better yet, subscribe to the monthly print magazine for just $29.99.

The post This former pro snowboarder built a dream chalet outside Quebec City appeared first on Macleans.ca.

This colossus of concrete is an enduring monument to the era of brutalist architecture—and a standout among the classical mansions on Toronto’s prestigious Bridle Path neighbourhood.

Built in the 1970s and currently on the market for $28 million, the mansion was commissioned by the Billes family—the founders of Canadian Tire—and designed by renowned Canadian architect John Parkin. Often credited with introducing Canada to the International Style of modern architecture—think boxlike structures and an abundance of concrete and glass—Parkin also designed Pearson International Airport’s old Terminal One and Toronto’s Yorkdale Shopping Centre.

For this project, Parkin was given the task of creating one of the largest concrete residential homes ever built, says Jane Zhang, one of the listing agents, who adds that concrete is what makes the place unique—even within Bridle Path. While most homes in the neighbourhood are built with wooden frames, a completely concrete home like this is an anomaly in Canada, let alone Toronto. During construction, the concrete was mixed with pink and white quartz. The advantage: all that quartz makes the concrete whiter and stronger with the passage of time.

The Billes family have since sold the 26,000-square-foot property, but the current owners have largely preserved the 1970s-era interior. 

To balance the intimidating abundance of concrete inside and out, there’s warm wooden accents in the walls and ceilings. 

Each of the mansion’s 3.5 levels are at least 14 feet high, which add to the spacious and airy feel in each of the eight bedrooms and 12 bathrooms. 

To accentuate that spaciousness, wall-to-wall windows throughout the mansion let in lots of natural light. But what really stands out is the massive atrium. Four large light shafts flood the space with sunlight year-round. 

Being stuck indoors in the cold winter months doesn’t sound too bad when you can start your day in the windowed breakfast nook overlooking the atrium. 

The Billes family was also very big on wellness. The atrium contains a 12-foot-deep indoor pool and a meditation garden. Just off the atrium, there’s a spa, gym and hot tub. 

The mansion is close to downtown Toronto—not to mention illustrious neighbours like Drake just up the road—but the Billes family also chose the location for its privacy. Compared to many other Bridle Path homes, this property avoids a lot of the traffic that goes through the neighbourhood every day. 

Surrounded by more than two acres of towering trees, the house is barely visible from the street. To take advantage of all that nature, there are multiple terraces and decks, as well as a putting green and an outdoor pool.

As is usually the case with luxury properties, there’s a long list of high-end perks here: the place comes with an elevator and a seven-car heated garage, as well as fully automated and customizable lighting, sound and security systems. 

On the main level, there’s a self-contained two-bedroom guest apartment that can also work as a housekeeper’s suite. 

The place is also great for parties. The main level has a wet bar, and downstairs, there’s a 1,700-square-foot rec room with a billiards table. A specially designed catering kitchen is close by—one of three kitchens in the home.

The post For $28 million you can buy this concrete palace built by the founder of Canadian Tire appeared first on Macleans.ca.

As a young boy in the mid-’70s, Steven Lord heard stories about his grandfather’s cottage. His father, Guy, would muse about the small wooden shack perched on New Brunswick’s Green River, 15 kilometres deep into the Atlantic Canadian wilderness and flanking the boundary of Quebec. By 2020, the cottage had long been torn down, and Lord, then a 50-year-old maintenance millwright, dreamed of rebuilding on the deserted family lot for weekend getaways with his wife, Paryse.

While perusing Facebook one night in his family home in Rivière-Verte, in northwest New Brunswick, Lord came across a post from someone in the United States who had built a cottage from a farm-grade metal grain silo. Lord wondered if he could create something similar. “I shared the idea with my wife, but she grew up on a farm where silos were mainly used for storing grain,” he said. “So she thought I was crazy.” 

The idea stuck with Lord: he thought that a rounded steel cottage would make for an imaginative replacement for the campsite he and his wife frequented on weekends in their Wildcat RV. He browsed local buy-and-sell websites like Facebook Marketplace and Kijiji for second-hand silos, and eventually found one in the nearby 200-person town of Siegas. The farmer selling it told Lord, “If you promise me that you will find a way to live in this old piece of metal, you can have it for free.” 

From there, Lord took the silo apart, packed its 50 pieces and 100 bolts into a trailer, drove it north to the 50-acre family lot, and got to work. “I had no blueprint and was totally in the dark,” he said. 

He began by hiring someone to lay a 20-by-32-foot slab of cement. From there, he sealed the silo’s rim to the ground with cement to keep the water out, and grounded the tin structure to protect it from lightning strikes. He winterproofed it by installing a heat pump and $6,000 worth of urethane insulation, dug a well, and used underground wiring to connect the shack to the provincial power grid.

Then came the indoor finishes in the main-floor living area and upstairs bedroom, which Lord called the most challenging step because of the silo’s rounded shape. To use as much of the space as possible, he lined the silo’s circular walls with cupboards and used curved flooring tiles as wall panelling. Then he procured wood from a local mill and crafted it into rounded cupboards. 

Instead of hiring construction workers, Lord kept the project in the family. He recruited his son Raphael and good friend Red as right-hand men. His 76-year-old mother painted the ladders to the upstairs bedroom, and his 84-year-old father, a retired mill worker, built the front gazebo. “My father had wanted to build something on this lot ever since we tore down my grandfather’s cottage,” said Lord, “so it was important to me that he contributed.” 

Despite his wife’s skepticism over the new DIY project, Lord was convinced he would win her over once his masterpiece made the jump from functional to stylish. He sealed the dome with a glass window to let in sunlight, then installed a satellite dish and propped a TV three quarters of the way up the south wall to create a home theatre. He tied a second TV to the north wall and connected it to an outside camera that faces the river to mimic a kitchen window. Then he punctuated the place with rustic accents: moose antlers on the wall, clocks made from motorcycle wheels and a full bear skin dangling from the top floor’s railing.

Lord finished renovating the silo in October of 2021, with building costs reaching $50,000. “The goal, apart from impressing my wife, was to create something relatively cheap and low-maintenance,” he said, adding that he kept expenses down by purchasing the doors, windowsills and ladders second-hand.  

He accomplished at least one of his goals: after spending a few weekends in their new cabin, Lord and his wife liked their new abode so much that they sold the camper and campsite in Rivière Verte. They’ve frequented the silo on most weekends since that fall: snowshoeing in the winter, canoeing in the nearby river in the summer, and sitting around bonfires year-round. The lot, 10 kilometres down a rolling dirt road that forks away from northern New Brunswick’s main highway, has no neighbours within earshot.

“We hear absolutely nothing and are completely immersed in nature like no place I’ve ever seen,” he said. “My parents enjoy the place just as much as we do, and I’m really proud of that.”

Acquaintances and occasional passers-by have asked Lord if he would build another silo home and rent it out. For now, he said, a second metal home isn’t in the works. 

“It’s funny that people are interested, but it’s not really something I want to profit from and scale,” he said. “This feels much more like a family passion project than a business opportunity.”

The post This N.B. family built a wilderness getaway out of a reclaimed grain silo appeared first on Macleans.ca.

A growing number of Canadians have fallen victim to a crime called total title fraud, in which scammers impersonate homeowners and sell their houses to unsuspecting buyers, then disappear with the profits. According to veteran insurance investigator Brian King, president and CEO of King International Advisory Group in Richmond Hill, Ontario, the problem has gotten particularly severe in the Greater Toronto Area, where skyrocketing home prices have juiced the incentives for fraudsters. In the past 18 months, King estimates that at least 30 homes in the GTA have been sold using this kind of scam. 

Despite an uptick in attention from media and law enforcement, King believes the total title fraudsters are nowhere near calling it quits. Here, he unpacks how the method moves from scammers’ imaginations to sales, and what Canadian homeowners can do to protect what’s rightfully theirs.

There have been lots of news reports in the past couple of months warning homeowners about total title fraud. How does it work?

There are two main types of total title fraud. The most common one is when a fraudster uses a fake ID to pose as a homeowner. They find the owner’s name through land title searches and use that along with a photo of themselves. Then the fraudster hires a legitimate real estate agent to list the property. Buyers typically only deal with the agent, so from their perspective, everything seems to be on the up and up. Once the sale closes and the funds are deposited into a bank account—which is also created using fake IDs—the fraudsters empty the account. The second, and more rare, type of total title fraud occurs when both the homeowners and buyers are imposters.

RELATED: A Homeowner’s Worst Nightmare

So the buyer uses a fake ID, too?

Yes. Let’s say a house is worth $2 million and it’s mortgaged by the fake buyer for $1.5 million. The fake homeowner will then claim that the buyer is a friend or relative, and that they’ve decided to forgive the remaining $500,000 owing. The bank or private lender loaning the money doesn’t care as long as the mortgage looks good on paper. The two fraudsters then split the $1.5 million, and never truly take possession of the home. They just vanish with the money.

Is this a new kind of scam?

Total title fraud has been around for a long time. I’ve been investigating real estate fraud since 1979, and every once in a while I’d have a new case of it pop up. But there’s been a substantial uptick since late 2021. I’ve investigated five total title fraud cases since then; in the past few weeks alone, I’ve been hired on two additional cases.

READ: How fraud artists are exploiting Canada’s international education boom

What explains the surge?

It partly has to do with virtual real estate transactions becoming more commonplace due to COVID—it’s harder to spot an imposter homeowner if you never meet them in person. The main contributing factor, though, is that home prices have risen considerably in the past few years. There’s more money to be made now. As one Toronto police officer told me, total title fraud is one of the frauds with the lowest risks and the highest rewards.

So how do scammers pick their victims?

They typically target houses that aren’t occupied by the homeowners—like vacant investment properties, or ones that owners are away from for an extended period of time. That way, several months can pass before the homeowners even notice a sale has occurred. In one of my current cases, a young Etobicoke couple temporarily moved to England for a two-year job opportunity. Scammers sold their home while they were overseas, and it took six months for them to figure out someone else was living in their place. By that time, the new  buyers had renovated the place to such an extent that the legitimate owners didn’t even recognize it when I showed them the photographs. To make matters worse, the scammers had sold all the former owners’ possessions, so the home wouldn’t appear lived-in when the new buyers moved in.

Who would do such a thing?

Typically, the people who pose as the homeowners are not the ringleaders. Once a house is targeted, the fraudsters thoroughly research the current owners. They can dig up details like the homeowner’s date of birth. A stand-in who is roughly the same age will usually be chosen to impersonate them. These stand-ins are paid anywhere from $5,000 to $10,000 for their time, and most work for four or five different organized crime groups operating within the GTA. In each of the cases I’ve worked on, the stand-in has been able to easily fool real estate lawyers. If we were giving out awards for acting, these people would win multiple Emmys.

And the so-called ringleaders?

They’re intimately familiar with the real estate world. They usually have a mortgage broker, real estate lawyer or agent guiding and coaching them. There could be anywhere between five to 10 people working on these scams.

How often do they get caught?

All the time. Right now, my firm is investigating a mortgage broker who we suspect is involved in about 20 fraudulent mortgages. Several lawyers have been disbarred and even charged for their roles in these scams. A few of the ringleaders are before the courts right now.

What’s your role in investigating these cases?

I’m typically hired by a title insurer or the scammed homeowner’s law firm to do document examination. I first try to eliminate the possibility of the homeowners being involved. Then I work to identify and interview other potentially responsible parties. I identify red flags to figure out who the guilty parties are.

What are the red flags?

One is that the cell phone numbers and email addresses fraudsters use are never the ones used by the legitimate homeowners. Whenever real estate professionals secure a new listing, I recommend that they search for their clients online to make sure they’re dealing with the right people. The real problem arises when those agents are involved in the scam themselves—they’re  intimately aware of the weaknesses in the system and can exploit them very well.

MORE: How three sisters (and their mom) tried to swindle the CRA out of millions

How can we begin to address that sort of complicity?

If I could answer that question, we’d be able to stop these scams completely. I do think the recent publicity around these cases will help homeowners to be on the lookout. 

What can homeowners do to protect themselves?

The most important thing they can do is get title insurance. It’s a policy that protects homeowners against losses incurred due to total title fraud, or other losses related to their property’s title or ownership. A lot of people who have owned their homes for years don’t have it, but it’s very cheap to buy. It typically runs owners between $800 and $1200, and it’s a one-time fee. When a legitimate homeowner has been scammed out of their home, they do eventually get it back—even if a new buyer has already moved in. However, the court process to prove they were victims of fraud is a long one. If you don’t have title insurance, you’re the one footing the bill for that legal process. Homeowners should also watch out for any strange correspondence. If you get any unusual letters or emails, you should contact your real estate lawyer and have your title checked.

If you’re planning on vacating your house for a while, does it help to take a cue from Macaulay Culkin in Home Alone and make it seem as though your house is occupied?

It does! Measures like hiring house-sitters or leaving your vehicle parked in the driveway can keep your home off a scammer’s radar.

What about tips for buyers? You mentioned that they usually don’t meet the sellers, so it’s hard to tell if something is amiss. 

I always tell buyers to watch out for properties that aren’t listed on MLS or don’t have for-sale signs. Fraudsters are also typically in a huge rush to close a deal. If you find a house going for under market value by a motivated seller who accepts your first offer, your suspicion that the deal is too good to be true is likely accurate. Once total title fraudsters receive a half-decent offer, they’re generally going to take it and get out—before anyone catches on. 

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The post In the latest real estate scam, homes are being sold behind owners’ backs. Here’s how. appeared first on Macleans.ca.

The buyers:

Julie Gauthier, a 57-year-old retired flight attendant and her husband, Adrian Sampson, a 56-year-old personal trainer.

The budget:

$250,000

The backstory:

Julie and Adrian had been renting the same one-bedroom apartment in Toronto’s Davisville neighbourhood since 2011. Julie, a flight attendant for Air Canada, regularly took transit to work, while Adrian had his own personal-training business and visited clients at their homes for workouts. When the pandemic began, Adrian began running virtual training sessions three to five times a day—live from the living room of the couple’s 650-square-foot condo. “I had to be out of view when I was home,” Julie says. “I’d make sure my phone was fully charged and, for a couple of hours, I’d go do laundry in the basement. We knew that wouldn’t work long term.”

An apartment upgrade wasn’t financially feasible, either. At the time, the couple paid just $1,650 a month for their Davisville pad thanks to rent control. But change was in the air: Julie was eligible for retirement as of December 2020, and after 30-odd years of shift work, she was ready to leave her high-flying job. The couple started entertaining a move out of Ontario—somewhere they’d be able to afford a spare bedroom or a finished basement for Adrian’s exercise equipment. First, they thought of Gaspé, in Quebec—where Julie’s family is from—but homes were in short supply and it seemed too remote. Quebec City was briefly in contention, but Adrian’s French wasn’t up to it. Then, Julie thought of Moncton, New Brunswick, where she’d attended university for two years before quitting school and taking to the skies. “I knew it had a good balance,” she says. “It has all the necessities and services of a city, but it feels more like country life.”

MORE: Why one family left Toronto for Vancouver Island… and 14 goats

The hunt:

In November of 2020, the couple connected with a Moncton-based real estate agent and set a budget of $250,000. Initially, they’d planned to rent an Airbnb and scope out available three-bedroom listings in person, but, as with Adrian’s business, COVID restrictions shifted their search online. “Everything I saw had offers in or was already sold,” Julie says. “I’d send listings to my realtor and he’d be like, ‘It‘s sold. It’s gone.’” Later in the month, they had a Moncton agent tour a three-bedroom semi in the nearby town of Shediac, also known as the Lobster Capital of the World. It was listed for $186,000 (a steal), but it needed major work. “The agent said the upstairs floors were a bit off,” Adrian remembers. “You could put a ball down and it would quickly start rolling away.” Tilt aside, they entered a lowball offer of $170,000, but ended up losing out to a higher bid.

A few days later, Julie got a mid-morning call from her realtor about a listing that was back on the market after financing had fallen through—twice. It was another three-bed, three-bath semi, this time located in Dieppe, a city of 28,000 a five-minute drive from Moncton. More than half of Dieppe’s citizens are native French-speakers, but many are bilingual, which was good news for Adrian and also meant Julie could practise her mother tongue. “I didn’t use French much in Toronto,” she says. “My vocabulary was suffering.”

The house, which measured 1,800 square feet, sat on a quiet court close to grocery stores and a shopping mall. It had an open-concept main floor with a living room, dining room and a large kitchen with ample counter space for meal prep. (Julie was a pandemic-inspired bread baker.) There was also a walkout to a deck and backyard with two storage sheds. The second floor had three bedrooms with room for guests, and there was a finished basement with space for Adrian’s fitness classes. The realtor showed it all to them over FaceTime. “The call cut out a lot,” Julie says, “but he kept saying, ‘It’s a good house. It’s got good bones, and you should go for it.’ So we did.” After a brief back-and-forth, the house was theirs for $186,000 and they set a move-in date for early December.

READ: Kelowna to Nova Scotia for a breath of fresh air

Julie and Adrian spent their last urban Christmas in true Toronto fashion: cramped. They enjoyed a traditional turkey dinner at their apartment with a close friend in their COVID bubble. Boxes were everywhere, but chaos was minimal. Julie, a self-proclaimed organization queen, had already numbered each one. Adrian had already secured space for their stuff on an 18-wheeler that was transporting several families’ belongings to the east coast, and they packed everything they’d need for the first few weeks in Moncton into their VW Golf: folding chairs, frozen meals, mats, weights and exercise balls. They drove east for two beautiful, sunny days, stopping for one night in Québec City. “It’s a bit weird to buy a house sight-unseen,” Julie says. “On one hand, you’re excited about the new adventure. But you also have that feeling of: I hope this place is as good as I think it is.”

So far, the Dieppe house has exceeded expectations. During the couple’s first summer in Moncton, family and friends came to visit, and Julie and Adrian spent their unoccupied time visiting local parks and beaches. Julie still cooks up lots of bread and tends to the garden, and Adrian busts out his mountain bike (with snow tires in the winter months). “There’s even a pheasant that sits on our deck,” Julie says. “That didn’t happen in Toronto.” Occasionally, they miss city life, but they’re grateful they made the move before the East Coast boom set in. Houses like theirs are now selling for $100,000 more than they did just a couple of years ago—a reminder of Toronto. They feel settled now, but Julie, who spent most of her career in transit, hints that another move might be on the horizon. “Do we ever say forever, Adrian?” she jokes.

The post The Move: Why this cramped Toronto couple made the move to Moncton appeared first on Macleans.ca.

Ashleigh Trahan and Elyse Wellhauser met on Hinge in December of 2020. At the time, Wellhauser was working in oncology research and lived with her cat, Neema, in a 1,500-square-foot Kitchener apartment. Trahan, an HR rep, owned a four-bedroom house in Kincardine, Ontario, which she’d previously shared with an ex. She was ready to downsize, but thanks to pandemic price surges, she knew she’d have to pay more for a rental condo than her current mortgage. She soon fell down a rabbit hole of tiny-home videos on YouTube. “It seemed like an interesting way to live,” Trahan says. She ran the idea past Wellhauser, whom she’d only been seeing for a few weeks. “I said, ‘That sounds like a great idea for you!’ ” Wellhauser recalls. Neither had any idea that, within nine months, they’d be cohabitating within 360 square feet. 

Trahan got in touch with Heather and Kevin Fritz, the Alberta-based husband-and-wife design team behind Fritz Tiny Homes. The Fritzes’ own stint living in a converted city bus inspired them to launch their business, which specializes in luxury custom dwellings under 400 square feet—most of them on wheels. Trahan came with a $200,000 budget and a list of must-haves: space to ride her Peloton bike, ceilings high enough to clear her five-foot-ten frame, a workspace, and room for another person—one day. For inspiration, she gave the Fritzes photos of mid-century mansions and A-frame cabins, which she admits was entirely impractical. As the build progressed, Wellhauser began weighing in on Trahan’s design choices, and the home started to feel like theirs. Wellhauser decided to jump in. “We’re both 35,” she says, “and I thought Ashleigh was the one worth taking the chance on.”

This emerald Article sofa stores even more seating (like stools and chairs) underneath

The first leg of the couple’s adventure was foiled by Ontario’s complex bylaws. Only a handful of municipalities allow tiny homes, and most RV parks aren’t zoned for them. Trahan and Wellhauser’s move-out dates were fast approaching, and they had nowhere to go. On a whim, Trahan put in an application at an RV-slash-tiny-home community near Victoria, B.C. They secured a spot for $700 a month and sold most of their belongings. Wellhauser had to find a new home for Neema. “It was like doing an archaeological dig of our lives,” says Trahan. “We were like, ‘How are we going to live without all this stuff?’ Now I don’t remember what we were worried about.”  

READ: How a N.S. physician turned artist put down new roots on family land

The bathroom maxes out at 34 square feet, enough to comfortably fit two people—“if one is showering,” Wellhauser says

By October of 2021, Wellhauser and Trahan were in the finished space, which came in just under budget. It’s a treasure chest of space-saving hacks. An Article sofa sits atop custom storage drawers that hold a table they unpack for dinner parties. (They can comfortably host four, but 15 people once crammed in for a housewarming.) Every riser in the narrow staircase hides a drawer where they keep kitchen gear. A walnut cabinet, which pulls out to reveal a mini coat closet, conceals the wheel well. And the ceiling in Trahan’s microgym is coffered to accommodate her full height when she’s standing on her Peloton. Douglas fir panels and giant angular windows channel the A-frame of Trahan’s dreams.

Each of the tiny staircase’s risers contains a compartment packed with kitchen gear

There are some annoyances to tiny-home life. A single 20-pound propane tank fuels the stove, warms the water and heats the floors. If the tank runs out on a chilly night, either Trahan or Wellhauser has to schlep outside to change it. There’s also very little privacy, a fact they quickly learned when they both attempted to work from home. After a brief sabbatical, Wellhauser returned to oncology and now commutes; Trahan works less than she did back in Ontario, in part because her workstation doubles as the dinner-prep area. But for all their space constraints, life for the couple feels more expansive than ever before.

MORE:  How a B.C. couple turned a shipping container into their dream home

Trahan and Wellhauser’s bed is level with the loft’s windows, giving them an enviably cozy view of sunrises and stars

Encircled by cedar trees, Trahan and Wellhauser feel much more connected to nature

This article appears in print in the February 2023 issue of Maclean’s magazine. Buy the issue for $9.99 or better yet, subscribe to the monthly print magazine for just $39.99.

This article contains affiliate links, so we may earn a small commission when you make a purchase through links on our site at no additional cost to you.

The post How one Ontario couple downsized into a tiny home on Vancouver Island appeared first on Macleans.ca.

The buyers: Lisa Moreland, a 41-year-old licensed practical nurse; her husband, Rob, a 47-year-old electrician; and sons Connor, who’s 13, and Caleb, who’s 11.

The budget: $600,000

The backstory: The Morelands had lived in the same three-bedroom house in Brantford, Ontario, since they bought it for $295,000 in 2010. They were a relatably busy family: Rob worked as an electrician at a steel factory in Hamilton, while Lisa was employed as a nurse at Brantford General Hospital. Twelve-hour shifts were the norm. The couple spent most of their free time shuttling Connor and Caleb between rep hockey practices and games across the province.

RELATED: The Move: Priced out of Vancouver

Every summer, the outdoorsy Morelands invested in a hard-earned vacation, whether hiking in Lake Placid or camping up near scenic Collingwood. In the summer of 2021, when the pandemic put the kibosh on their plans to visit North Dakota, the Morelands instead rented an Airbnb in Canmore, Alberta. “I fell in love with the mountains,” Lisa says. The boys were sweet on the Rockies, too. “They were constantly taking pictures on their phones and asking, ‘When can we go on another hike?’” By day three, that question changed to: What if we just lived here?

Rob, who spent much of the vacation capturing drone shots of nearby elk—and who had worked in restaurant kitchens in Calgary during his 20s—was easily sold on the idea. Once the Morelands were back in Brantford, Rob started researching real estate prices in Alberta, as well as how much they could get for their current property. Lisa, whose hospital unit was consistently short-staffed, kept hearing about colleagues who moved out of province for work, where the pay and conditions seemed better. “I wanted a fresh start,” she says.

In August of 2021, the couple reconnected with their old realtor, who estimated they could net $1,200,000 for their Brantford home, a huge appreciation courtesy of Ontario’s out-of-control market. In Alberta, they could get a decent-sized home for roughly half that. The prospect of living mortgage-free was also enticing. “Instead of living paycheque to paycheque,” Lisa says, “we could go on more trips with the kids. We could give them a better life.”

READ: The Move: Why one family left Toronto for Vancouver Island…and 14 goats

The hunt: The Morelands were eyeing properties close to their beloved mountains but also Calgary, where it’s easier to find jobs. Canmore, often hopping with holidayers, was too expensive. Instead, they zeroed in on Cochrane, a close-knit community of 35,000 known for its Western-themed main drag (and located a 45-minute drive from Cowtown). “We never actually saw Cochrane when we were in Alberta,” Lisa says. “But I knew it had that small-town feel that I love.” 

The couple’s list of property-specific must-haves included three bedrooms and bathrooms, a backyard big enough for a hot tub and a two-car garage with space for a workshop for Rob. “I love tinkering,” he says. “I have a lot of tools for woodworking and electrical and I often just take apart things to fix them, like my wife’s hair straightener.” Connor and Caleb were just middle schoolers at that point, but Lisa and Rob made sure their new home would be close to good high schools.

MORE: This Ontario family found space and affordability in Calgary

That summer, the couple video-toured their way through eight properties: one needed a deep reno and another wouldn’t accommodate Lisa’s hot tub dream. They put in an offer of $425,000 on a privately listed property with a massive open-concept kitchen but lost out to a higher bid. By October, their realtor suggested changing tack: an enclave of new homes was being built by a Cochrane developer, and there were pre-builds available. “The model home was almost exactly what we were looking for,” Lisa says. It had a much-desired open-concept kitchen with wall ovens and an island; a two-car garage for Rob to tinker in; three bedrooms plus a bonus room for a den; and a big, hot tub–friendly back lot. 

The starting price for the property was $419,000, but Rob and Lisa decided to throw in an extra $6,000 to extend the back of the house by two feet. “Secondary and tertiary bedrooms in Alberta are quite small,” Lisa said. “The kids like to spend time in their rooms—they’ll be teenagers soon—so we wanted to give them that little bit of extra space.” The home’s completion date was set for July of 2022. “We were like, ‘Holy crap. We just bought a house in a town we haven’t been to,’” Lisa says. “It took me a moment to be like, ‘Oh my gosh, we’re moving away!’”

Last March, the Morelands sold their Brantford house for $1,025,000—above the list price of $988,000 but a disappointing drop from the $1,200,000 figure their realtor had ballparked the summer before. (The wider Ontario market had slowed to a medium roar by that point.) Still, the profit was extra money in the bank, and regular photo and video progress reports from their Alberta realtor lifted their spirits. Connor and Caleb finished out their school year, their parents split their belongings between U-Haul crates and their two cars, and the family made the three-day drive to Alberta. When they pulled up to their property on possession day, Rob says there were deer in the backyard.

The couple took time off before looking for work, but Rob quickly landed a role as an electrician with a small Alberta company that services cranes. Lisa got a nursing job on the pulmonary-thoracic floor of a hospital in Calgary that September, right after the kids started school. “I don’t dread going into work because I know that we’ll always be fully staffed,” Lisa says. “I haven’t yet worked a shift where we’re short. The patients even seem friendlier.”

True to form, the Morelands also enrolled their sons in a local hockey league, with Rob assuming the role of head coach for Caleb’s team. The Morelands regularly attend potlucks with other hockey families, and Lisa has recently connected with other area moms through a local Facebook group. She’s noticed that many of the members are Ontario transplants, just like her.

The post The Move: This burnt-out Ontario nurse found a breath of fresh air in Alberta appeared first on Macleans.ca.

This 10,500-square-foot St. Catharines home, situated on the southwestern banks of Lake Ontario, looks like a 19th-century English manor. But the mansion only dates back to 2000, when local businessman David Tausendfreund and his wife Lanelle built it from scratch. 

David first bought the property—and the dilapidated 1930s cottage that came with it—in 1990. He always planned to eventually replace the original cottage. It had an unremarkable stucco exterior and a cramped floor plan. Worse, it was falling apart. After renting it out for a few years, the couple finally tore down the cottage to build their dream home. 

They aimed to replicate the sort of turn-of-the-century red-brick houses once common in the nearby shipping community of Port Dalhousie, and loved the abundance of colour and blend of architectural elements from both the 18th and 19th centuries captured in the Queen Anne Revival–style homes that were all the rage in the Gilded Age. The Tausendfreunds designed the exterior with a corner turret, covered wraparound porches, red brick and elaborate white woodwork throughout. “Think Victorian, but with much more colour and intricate panelling and trim,” says David. 

The six-bed, five-bath mansion was the couple’s home for the next 20 years, as well as the setting for their wedding in 2002. During the pandemic, they relocated to Lanelle’s native Texas and listed their dream home for $6.3 million.

David, who owns a window and door company called Tradewood, says the first step in building the home was figuring out the windows. “They’re usually an afterthought in the construction process, but we designed our home around our windows,” he says. David drew up patterns of brightly coloured small glass squares to outline the windows.

For the interior, the couple envisioned an old English manor filled with oak panelling, cherry floors and leather tub chairs. In the study, David installed mahogany built-in shelving and an early 1900s tin ceiling; a similar one can be found in the basement’s billiards room. 

The pool table, a restored Brunswick Billiards original from 1890, is one of only six remaining in the world and is worth about $100,000. Unfortunately, the table’s not for sale: the Taseundfreunds are  holding onto it.

To take advantage of the majestic lakefront views, David’s company manufactured a custom floor-to-ceiling window with curved ends for a specially designed viewing room. The window, which weighed some 900 kilos, was built from hurricane-proof glass. It was so large and cumbersome it had to be craned over the completed home to be installed in its place. “Even in high winds and bad storms, we could sit by the window without any worries and watch Mother Nature do her thing,” says David.

Out in the back, David designed the glass conservatory overlooking the lake, which is where he and Lanelle exchanged their wedding vows. More recently, the conservatory was the couple’s favourite spot to watch sunsets. 

In 2010, the couple did an extensive remodel, adding an elevator to span the mansion’s four levels and doubling the size of the kitchen. The Tausendfreunds also updated the kitchen with modern appliances and a French Lacanche range cooker. 

Upstairs in the primary bedroom, David surprised Lanelle with a brand-new walk-in wardrobe. The cinematic inspiration: a closet that Mr. Big gave to Carrie in the big-screen adaptation of Sex and the City, which the couple had watched together earlier that year. “I personally think my design is superior,” says David, who added glass compartments and an elaborate chandelier.

The Tausendfreunds designed the mansion to last them a lifetime, so they’re bittersweet about letting go of the home and all their shared history there. “We always used to tell each other that we’d be buried together here,” says David. “But we’ve moved on to our next chapter, and whomever ends up buying this home will create their own memories.”

The post This Ontario dream home for sale was designed by the seller, a window manufacturer appeared first on Macleans.ca.

Jonah Samson grew up on a wild stretch of seaside in southern Cape Breton, Nova Scotia. For many generations, his family lived in Louisdale, a tiny, working-class fishing village. His great-grandfather was a lighthouse keeper, and his grandfather, an electrician, kept a sprawling garden that Samson would help tend in the summer, watching in wonder as seeds sprouted into plants. 

This memory tugged at Samson 30-odd years later. He’d bounced around Europe and lived in Halifax and Toronto before settling down in 2004 as a successful family physician and artist in Vancouver. By then, Samson’s father had divided the Cape Breton land between his four children. “My brother had already built a house right next to my parents, and then my sister built a house right next to him,” says Samson. “We essentially have a family commune all the way down the road.” He’d been living in a 600-square-foot condo and dreaming of more space to garden. In 2013, he moved to Nova Scotia, becoming the fourth Samson to build a house on the family land, and worked at a community health centre in L’Ardoise, a village about a 30-minute drive away. 

Samson’s home is the black sheep of the bunch—and an austere twist on the area’s gabled fishing shacks. To design it, he approached Omar Gandhi who, at the time, had only a few homes in his portfolio. He has since become one of the country’s buzziest architects, earning a Governor General’s Medal in 2018 and designing high-profile projects like the proposed Art Gallery of Nova Scotia. Still, says Gandhi, “Of all the work we’ve ever done, Jonah’s house is the one that I hear most often that people wish was theirs. Maybe it’s because of the scale, and that people can imagine affording it.” The budget was just $300,000 for two buildings—a main house and an artist’s studio—and the footprint had to be a slim 1,200 square feet to fit the one-acre plot. 

Samson built privacy into the design: the house’s black exterior is windowless on one side

Because of the intimate nature of Samson’s work as a family doctor and the fact that he is, as he puts it, “related to absolutely everybody” in Louisdale, he wanted a private sanctuary. (He’s joked that he asked Gandhi for a house that tells strangers to “fuck off.”) And so the side of the house that faces the road is almost entirely windowless, a black boundary illuminated at night only by a slot in the bathroom that stares out like an ominous eye. “It’s like you stumble upon this perfect black composition of objects in an environment that’s completely whited out by snow,” says Gandhi, who named the residence Black Gables. To handle the punishing Atlantic winters, black metal covers the pitched roof. Samson and Gandhi loved seeing the contrast between this mysterious duo of boxes and the rest of the buildings in the community.  

The flip side of the house, however, is an expanse of welcoming windows that looks out to the water and a cluster of diminutive islands in Seal Cove. In summer, stone paths snake through tangles of bright blooms and a fledgling orchard of apple, plum, peach, cherry, pear and apricot trees that Samson planted. “In Europe, you’ll walk down the street and see huge stone walls with giant doors, but behind them are gorgeous courtyards. I like that there’s a beautiful, private surprise once you get past the front door,” he says.

Inside, a gallery wall stretches the length of the home to showcase pieces from his art collection, which contains several thousand vintage photographs. His current obsession is the work of Bob Mizer, a mid-century photographer whose playful images of loincloth-clad men influenced the work of Robert Mapplethorpe and David Hockney. “Mizer is one of the most underrated gay artists of the 20th century, who never got his due,” Samson says, who might curate a book about him in the future. 

Samson also creates his own work in the 450-square-foot studio and darkroom, often repurposing found photographs into cheeky and surreal pieces that make you see old images anew. At the moment, he’s developing silver gelatin photo prints with found negatives and, through chemical processing, erasing parts of the original images. He was inspired by the French philosopher Jean Baudrillard, who examines the disappearance of traditional photography as it’s replaced by its digital counterpart. “What happens when physical things disappear?” Samson says. “It’s this idea of vanishing.” 

When he’s not squirrelled away in his ​studio, Samson spends his time with his French bulldog, Arlo; his greyhound, Beans; and his 10 nieces and nephews—in true commune style, childcare is a shared duty. Samson isn’t a big cook (his kitchen is tiny), but he shares many meals with his siblings. Don’t let the black exterior fool you. “We very much live together,” he says.

The post How a N.S. physician turned artist put down new roots on family land  appeared first on Macleans.ca.

Next to the B.C.-Washington border, in the shadow of the Selkirk Mountains, sits a snow-white castle that looks like a Brothers Grimm backdrop. The keepers of the property aren’t a grizzled king or a giant dragon, but owners Harmen and Dawn van Hoogevest, a musician-slash–clinical counsellor and an artist who purchased the 22-acre plot in 1971 for $7,000. Now 82 and 74 respectively, the couple are looking to downsize: they’ve listed their enchanted castle for $1.65 million, ready to pass along their custom-built kingdom to another equally imaginative owner. 

The van Hoogevests first lived in Vancouver in the 1960s, inhabiting a series of unconventional living quarters—from a leaky old fisheries-inspection boat to a school bus to a plywood box located in an orchard. Dawn, who was working as a waitress at the time, came up with the idea of pooling their pennies and buying a property where the couple could, as she put it, “really be free.” The duo dreamed of a home where they could grow their own food and nurture their creative spirits. They first laid eyes on their future castle grounds, located in Christina Lake, B.C., through an ad in the Vancouver Sun. They paid the site a visit in wintertime, tromping through five feet of snow, before putting in an offer. Immediately, Dawn and Harmen looked at one another and said, “We’re home.” 

At the time, the property’s only standing structure was a rickety log cabin with no windows—which, until then, had served as an illicit party spot for local teens. Unfazed by the squalor, Dawn and Harmen quickly covered the open windows with building plastic so they could move in. Without running water, they boiled water from a nearby creek to bathe in. For eight years, they lived on the property with no electricity, walking down the mountain every week to do laundry and buy groceries. They took work at the local sawmill to fund the construction of their dream home.

The home slowly took shape—in the form of a castle. They didn’t plan it out. “It just came out of us,” says Dawn. Carl Jung, whose theory of the collective unconscious Harmen cites as an explanation for their impulse, was an influence. The legendary psychiatrist once built his own castle-shaped home in Bollingen, Switzerland.

READ: This $3.8-million Ontario home was made from five reclaimed barns

When Harmen was growing up in Holland, he worked alongside his father, a master builder, who taught him his plastering techniques. To build the castle, the couple hand-mixed concrete in a wheelbarrow, layering it over wire mesh, insulation and paper barriers to create walls that are 18 inches thick in some places. The ultimate goal was longevity. “It can’t burn, it can’t rot and it can’t be eaten by insects,” says Harmen. “This is a house you could pass on to your great-great-great-grandchildren.”

The house’s fluid, undulating shape was inspired by the architecture of Antoni Gaudí, as well as traditional building structures, like igloos. “My dad doesn’t believe that people were meant to live in boxes,” says the couple’s son, Eric van Hoogevest.

The main portion of the three-bedroom house is a gothic arch, which encompasses the kitchen and living room. The result is a warm living space that might just be the ultimate cottagecore fantasy come to life. In some places, the ceilings are 22 feet high to create a feeling of spaciousness; in the kitchen, they top out at eight feet. 

The couple started building the house’s turret in the late 1970s. It contains three bedrooms, each with their own ensuite. A hand-built spiral staircase stretches from the main floor all the way up to the lookout. “If there’s a forest fire, you could surely see it from there,” says Dawn.

The entire house is heated by a wood-burning fireplace, but the couple recently installed a heat pump to provide extra heat in the winter and air conditioning in the summer. A 30,000-gallon underground cistern pipes water into the house from a nearby creek.

Adjacent to the main building is a “meditation pod”; a small dome built from concrete; a pool filled with lily pads (and a colony of turtles); and a studio where Dawn makes stained glass and sculptures, as well as a 1,450-square-foot workshop where Harmen practises cello and builds furniture. There’s also a greenhouse, fruit trees and plenty of garden space to grow vegetables. 

MORE: How a B.C. couple turned a shipping container into their dream home

The van Hoogevests feel bittersweet about selling the castle, but neither have any regrets about the ending—a happy one. “This has been a wonderful life and I would do it all over again if I had to,” Harmen says. Plus, he adds, “It’s a really fun place to live.”

The post This snow-white castle in B.C. could be yours for $1.65 million appeared first on Macleans.ca.

For over a century, Crystal Beach, a community in Fort Erie, Ontario, was known for its beachside amusement park, which attracted droves of Canadians and upstate New Yorkers. But after the park closed in 1989, it was a ghost town. The area had lost its biggest employer and attraction, and many local businesses shuttered. The once-bustling centre of town became strangely quiet. Phil Smith, who grew up in Fort Erie, had just earned his realtor’s licence when the park closed. “The main streets were desolate,” Smith says.

At that time, in the mid-90s, Smith’s main business was selling cottages; he’d promise owners he’d cut their grass for free if they listed with him. “I think half of Crystal Beach was hiring me to be the realtor just so I would cut their grass.” In 2008, his gaze shifted to commercial buildings, many of which were still abandoned or in decay. His first purchase, the South Coast Cookhouse, remains a local favourite today. “The uglier and worse it was, the more I wanted to fix it up.”

In recent years, the town has undergone a resurgence tied to its beautiful beach. Restaurants, mom-and-pop shops and a few trendy boutiques have popped up in Crystal Beach. “People come for the beach and say, ‘Wow, this is cool, we should stay,’ he says. “But there’s nowhere for them to stay.”

Crystal Beach’s Ontario Hotel was once been booming, but it was derelict by the time it came on the market in 2017. Smith saw an opportunity to salvage the hotel and create an all-seasons destination. He borrowed whatever he could and dipped into his savings to purchase the property for $1 million. After five years of extensive renovations—and some Crystal Beach–themed decorating—Smith re-branded the place Hotel Philco and recently opened its doors to guests.

Here’s a look inside:

Hotel Philco has seven rooms, each with its own theme. The biggest is the colourful Crystal Beach Room, which overlooks the spot where the amusement park once stood. The room is filled with memorabilia—everything from a funhouse mirror to a car from one of the original roller coasters, The Wild Mouse. The floors are made of salvaged wood from the park’s rides and games. There are old tickets, maps, uniforms and pictures of rides. “Crystal Beach was also well-known for three food items: sugar waffles, a Crystal Beach Sucker and a drink called Loganberry,” Smith says. “When you check in, I have two sugar waffles there and a sucker there for you.” 

Smith devoted only one room to the old amusement park. The rest have their own themes, each equally outrageous. 

The Brewery Room is a tribute to Ontario and Niagara craft breweries, with furniture and a bathroom vanity made out of beer kegs, a beer tap holding toilet paper, bottle opener beer taps. The Bike Room, meanwhile, is covered in bike parts. Vintage bicycles hang from the wall, as do bicycle-themed 1950s Wheaties licence plates from every state and province. 

The nautical-themed Captain’s Room pays tribute to the sailing community of Fort Erie and its regattas and boat clubs. It’s filled with old anchors and ship parts, buoys and life preservers. There are captain’s hats for people to take selfies. Everything is blue. As in all the other rooms, it’s filled with little details and on-theme knick knacks. “Thank God for Etsy,” Smith says. 

An ode to Canada, the Cabin Room evokes bygone trips to the cottage, complete with fishing tackles, log furniture and wood everywhere. The light fixture is made out of a 13-foot canoe. “A lot of things in there are things from cottages that I sold,” Smith says. “I’d see a kitschy welcome sign made out of sticks or something and say ‘Hey, are you guys throwing that out? I’ll take it!’”

The Pink Room, or Glam Room, is filled with disco balls, lights shaped like unicorns, and a golden birdcage you can actually sit in. The wallpapers are leopard pink, the walls are pink, the couch is pink. “I even painted the toilet pink,” says Smith. There have already been a ton of calls for bachelorette parties. 

There’s a Green Room, too, which has a chill nature theme. It’s has a vinyl record player and a lot of space to sit and zone out while listening. 

Smith hopes Hotel Philco helps tourism in Crystal Beach, sending guests to other businesses in the area. If all goes well, he has room to expand even further. “I’ve got some ideas,” he says. “I hope it’s successful. I banked everything I have on it.”

Hotel Philco’s rooms range from $200 to $275 per night.

The post This new Ontario hotel has an outrageous amusement park theme appeared first on Macleans.ca.

From the outside, Jesse Tufts’s Edmonton house looks like a handsome new home, with ample windows, a glassed-in verandah and charcoal and pine siding. But it’s not like every other house on the block: the 1,350-square-foot house, located in Edmonton’s Glenora neighbourhood, is net zero, which means it consumes as much energy as it produces.

Tufts, a mechanical engineer, and his wife, Jena, a development engineering manager, purchased the 1950s-era two-bedroom box bungalow in 2011 for $400,000. They liked the location—within biking distance of downtown Edmonton—and the big backyard. But after their first winter, they realized that the home’s postwar construction couldn’t keep the cold out; in Edmonton, temperatures regularly dip below -20 degrees Celsius. Blankets would freeze on the bed if they were too close to a wall. Frost formed on the ceilings, and condensation froze on the windows. Any time they stood next to a wall or a closed window, they could feel the cold. The couple replaced the windows, sealed baseboards with spray foam and added insulation to the basement’s bare concrete walls, but the house was still too cold whenever temperatures plummeted.

The original home, built in 1953

By 2016, the house needed more upgrades. The asphalt shingles on the roof had begun to peel, and things were getting cramped: Tufts’s sons, aged nine and four, were sharing a room. The couple planned to replace the original roof and add dormers—small rooms that jut out from the roof—to squeeze some extra square footage into the house. But when Tufts asked a carpenter friend for his opinion on the renovation, he was told that he might as well rip off the roof entirely and build a new second storey.

The two used software to play around with different configurations. They realized that with enough insulation, it would be possible to cut off natural gas entirely and heat the house only with electricity, turning the scrappy bungalow into an energy-efficient, solar-powered dream. Tufts was thrilled: as a self-described “gearhead,” he already had an interest in EV-powered cars, and he once converted a Japanese mini-truck to battery electric and learned how to home-brew biodiesel to run cars on vegetable oil. He decided to do it.

At the time, Tufts was working in R&D at a window and door manufacturer. He realized that every time a customer wanted a door with a window cutout, the company had to remove and throw away a piece of fibreglass foam insulation. He came up with the idea of gathering and upcycling the door cutouts to use as insulation for his own house. He added three layers of this insulation, bringing the energy load of the house so low that it could be heated with the power equivalent of four hair dryers on the coldest day of the year.

With a proposed budget of $250,000, he hired Butterwick Construction, which specializes in building net-zero homes, to begin rebuilding the second storey in August of 2018. The family camped out in the basement until construction was finished, and built a temporary wall blocking off the front door so builders could come and go without disrupting family life.

Once the structure was built, they wrapped the house in an exterior airtight barrier, which resembled a giant Gore-Tex jacket, to keep out the rain and wind. They sealed over the original walls on the main floor and added new walls and windows that went all the way up to the attic and right down to the foundation.

Tufts focused on longevity when it came to upgrades, spending $36,000 on durable Hardie fibre cement siding and installing a metal roof instead of a shingled one to avoid future repairs. A 12-kilowatt solar panel system was installed onto the roof, which generates about 13,000 kilowatt hours of energy a year—more than the family uses by 3,000 kilowatt hours. “We’ve been net positive since we turned the system on,” Tufts says. In the winter, when there’s less sunlight, their energy bills can cost up to $300 a month, but they receive roughly the same amount in credits during the summer. After adding up the credits he received over the course of a year, Tufts realized that the power company actually paid him $500. The house is heated by a $12,000 air-source heat pump that extracts heat from the outdoor air, even in the winter.

Even though the cost of the finished project stretched beyond $350,000, Tufts estimates that only $50,000 was directly related to the efficiency upgrades. The extra insulation and solar panels they added ended up costing far less than the siding and the metal roof. The family also took advantage of generous government rebates, getting $19,000 back from the Efficiency Alberta program that helped cover some of the overall renovation costs, including the $27,000 solar-panel installation.

Now, post-retrofit, the family has much more space—1,800 square feet compared to 1,350 before the renovation, and four bedrooms instead of two. It’s also much more comfortable. “You don’t really notice a difference until you go to someone else’s house and you sit by a window and think, This is cold and drafty,” Tufts says. “Every square foot of our house is the same temperature.” The thick insulation has also created a sound barrier: traffic noise rarely makes it inside the house.

Perhaps the most surprising aspect of the net-zero retrofit, Tufts says, was how easy it was to accomplish. “Even though I’m an engineer and was already involved in efficiency work, I thought it would be difficult,” he says. Achieving net zero was a ladder of opportunity, he says. “Once you get to the next step, you realize all these things become possible.”

The post An Edmonton couple refitted their home to be completely net zero appeared first on Macleans.ca.

Rental rates are soaring across Canada. Over the past year, average rent prices have increased nearly 18 per cent in Ontario, 15 per cent in British Colombia, and 12 per cent in Alberta—while in Atlantic Canada rents have risen by a whopping 32.2 per cent compared to last year.

To help explain why, we spoke to Aled ab Iorwerth, Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation’s deputy chief economist, who shares his expertise on the Canadian rental market and what to expect going forward: 

Tell me a bit about your role at CMHC. 

My role is to analyze housing data from an economic perspective. I’ve been in economics my entire career, but started focusing on housing and rentals in 2016. I’ve written a few major reports on housing. The first one, in 2018, examined escalating house prices across Canadian metropolitan areas. The other report, in 2022, looked at how much housing supply we needed to reach affordability. 

Safe to say you’re an expert on the topic? 

Yes. 

That’s good. So, what’s happening in the Canadian rental market right now?

We don’t think there are an adequate supply of rental units across Canada, specifically in Toronto and Vancouver. Vacancy rates are low. First, the problem is even finding a place to rent. Then, when people are changing rental units, their rents are going up significantly. 

Why is that?

It’s part of a general pattern: there’s very strong demand for housing in those two cities, and not enough housing being built. It’s driving prices up in the ownership and rental market. The additional factor now is that mortgage rates are going up, which increases the cost of home ownership. That means, instead of buying a house, people are more likely to stay in rental units, driving up the cost of renting. Higher mortgage rates, fewer home buyers, more renters. There’s also been an increase in the flow of immigration. A lot of those people will rent. In 2011, the home ownership rate in Canada peaked at 69 per cent. It’s now at 66.5 percent, whereas the growth in renter households is up 21 per cent. 

MORE: How Toronto’s housing market is transforming the rest of Canada

Low supply, high demand. I think I learned about this in high school or something. So, how much are rental prices increasing right now? 

Some provinces—like B.C., Manitoba and Ontario—have rent control policies. If you’re in a rental unit and continuing to rent the same unit in a rent-controlled province, rents have probably gone up two per cent. And if you’re changing units, rent could go up more than 10 per cent. Here’s a couple of examples of how prices have gone up. From 2011 to 2021 in Montreal, the price of a one-bedroom rental has risen from $641 a month to $821. In Toronto, over that same time period, a one-bedroom rental went up from $977 to $1,439. 

Yikes. Let’s say I wanted to find the cheapest rental in the country. Where would I look? 

In Quebec. The average rent for a two-bedroom in Quebec City and Montreal is roughly $940 a month. 

And where is it the most expensive?

Vancouver is the worst by a long shot. Monthly rent for a two-bedroom in Vancouver is $2,498. Toronto is $2,370. And to get a sense of what it looks like across the country, here are some examples: Victoria is $2,116, Halifax is $1,530 and Winnipeg is $1,406. 

Which part of the population is suffering the most from high rental prices? 

Younger people and low-income households. Given where house prices are these days, I don’t think many people are going from university straight into home ownership. 

RELATED: Rent hikes priced me out of my Toronto apartment. So I moved in with my 65-year-old aunt.

I guess we need more units. How much more housing do we need to reach affordability?

By 2030, we need 3.5 million units more than what is currently being built. In an average year, we start building somewhere between 200,000 and 250,000 houses. We need to double that. 

Any suggestions?

There are a few things. We need the government to speed up the approval process for getting building and zoning permits. A lot of this has to do with the fees associated with submitting an application, which make the process lengthier and more complex. We need changes in the private sector to improve construction technology so we can build faster and at a lower cost. There’s also concern about a labour shortage in the construction industry. We need more skilled workers, whether it’s more training, or increased immigration of people with the appropriate skills. The industry needs to make itself attractive to workers. Higher wages would help, too. 

What do you expect to happen in the future? Is it going to get worse?

If things continue at this rate, with low vacancy rates and rising rent prices, the economy will start to deteriorate in cities like Toronto and Vancouver. People will be reluctant to move there. The population, GDP and quality of services will start to decline. For example, it will be too difficult to get staff at restaurants and coffee shops. So business owners will move to lower-cost cities—from Toronto to Ottawa, or Vancouver to Edmonton.

How does Canada rank around the world in terms of affordable rentals?

I’m not aware of data on that, but there’s international comparisons of house prices. In countries like Canada, Australia and New Zealand, house prices have gone up enormously, owing to higher levels of debt to personal income. It’s mortgage debt. Prices have gone up in other countries too, but they’ve had a commensurate increase in income. Prices have been relatively more stable in the U.S., for example. 

Pick one: rent or buy? 

Technically, we don’t give advice on renting versus buying. Our goal is to make sure everyone has a place they can afford. But here’s my concern: inflation is high across the globe right now because of the pandemic. At CMHC, we’re already projecting a slight recession next year. Employment growth will come down, people will reduce their consumption of goods and services, leading to a slowdown in the overall Canadian economy. Perhaps now is not the best time to incur large amounts of debt. If people have large amounts of debt and lose their jobs, it can be impossible to pay it off. 

That’s a roundabout way of saying rent, right? 

Yeah.

The post Rent or buy? An expert weighs in on the sky-high rental market appeared first on Macleans.ca.

In 2016, Cathi Marshall and her husband, Trevor, saw a squat, compact shipping container in the parking lot of a Kelowna shopping mall, where it was set up as a model home. Cathi, a singer-songwriter, and Trevor, a machine operator, are both mid-century-modern architecture buffs and huge fans of Frank Lloyd Wright. They adored the modern and minimal shipping-container home, manufactured by Edmonton-based Honomobo. “I loved the sleek, simple design,” she says. “It’s just a rectangle with huge windows.” 

At the time, the couple were recent empty-nesters looking to downsize from their 2,400-square-foot home in Kamloops’s Batchelor Heights neighbourhood. The house, with its three bathrooms and five bedrooms, seemed like a waste of space for just the two of them. Meanwhile, Cathi had inherited a small piece of rural land in Kamloops from her father when he died in 2015, right next to the house where her mother lived and one lot over from her brother. She decided the shipping-container house, with its giant windows, would bring her closer to family and provide amazing views of the South Thompson River. 

Giant windows wrap around the home.

The Marshalls bought a shipping-container home from Honomobo in 2017. Downsizing from the Kelowna house was easy. “It felt rather cathartic,” says Cathi. Her sons had taken most of the family sports equipment, as well as the living room furniture, when they moved out. Clothing, shoes and the rest of the furniture went to Goodwill. 

Before their new home arrived, the only prep work the Marshalls needed to do was to pour 1250 square feet of concrete to build a raft slab foundation for the containers to rest on. Less than four months after the purchase was finalized, four trucks carrying shipping containers rolled up to the property. “The trucks showed up at 10 a.m., and by 5 p.m., the house was assembled,” Cathi says. 

Over the next seven days, two employees from Honomobo added a second coat of paint and finished the drywall and flooring on the seams. Around a week later, the house was move-in ready. “One thing I enjoyed about the process of building a container home is that you have limited options,” she says. “It eliminated a lot of unnecessary anxiety.” The final product—which Cathi affectionately calls her “black box”—is reminiscent of the retro-yet-futuristic homes she adores in Palm Springs.

With both sons out of the house, the Marshalls were looking for a change.

The house is divided into two sections, joined by a breezeway in the middle. The Marshalls live in the main Honomobo shipping container; on the other side of the breezeway, they built a 396-square-foot wood-frame studio garage, which functions as a separate apartment and is available to rent on Airbnb. The electricity for the home is standard wiring, but the water comes from a 1,000-gallon cistern, located in a water shed 76 metres uphill. The house relies on passive solar energy for most of its heating needs. The winter months are usually chilly unless the sun shines directly on their home, but the black box heats up in the summer, requiring a higher-than-average level of air conditioning. 

While the entire home is only 704 square feet, its expansive windows offer panoramic views of the river and the Shuswap Highland. “You don’t get that cramped-in feeling,” Cathi says. “I step out of my house, walk 100 feet, and I’m climbing a mountain.”

Cathi spends time with her family outdoors, hiking mountains and exploring the terrain.

The region has a desert-like quality, and tangled sagebrush plants dot the landscape. When Cathi previously lived in the area with her parents, she didn’t appreciate the howls of coyotes at night or the rattlesnakes. Now she loves the local wildlife. Bighorn sheep, deer and even bears often wander onto the property. 

Even better than the proximity to nature is that of Cathi’s family. The Marshalls and Cathi’s mother and brother go on outdoorsy adventures together, including canoeing in the river, swimming out to the sandbar or hiking in the mountains. During non-wildfire months, they light up their outdoor wood oven and dine on homemade margherita pizza with a glass of wine made by Sagewood Winery, their next-door neighbours.

(Photograph of Marshall by Emily-May Olson)

This article appears in print in the December 2022 issue of Maclean’s magazine. Buy the issue for $8.99 or better yet, subscribe to the monthly print magazine for just $39.99.

The post How a B.C. couple turned a shipping container into their dream home appeared first on Macleans.ca.

While it might look timeworn, this newly listed seven-bed, four-bath home in the township of Uxbridge, Ontario—about an hour’s drive northeast of Toronto—was only built in 2018. The sellers, Brad and Maxine Lawrence, bought the land in 2010 with plans to eventually move there from Pickering, Ontario, and build a log cabin–style home for them and their four children. It’s on the market now for $3.8 million.

At the time, Brad was a regular viewer of Barnwood Builders, a TV show about a West Virginia company that converts old barns into modern homes. Inspired by the show, and by fond childhood memories of summer days spent playing in a barn on his family property in northern Ontario, he began fantasizing about taking on an old barn conversion project of his own. 

“So many barns are lost. They just get taken down and plowed under,” Maxine says. “Our home would give these barns a breath of life.”

The first step was sourcing barns for the reclaimed wood. They were in the market for English-style barns, which tend to include lofts that they could turn into upstairs bedrooms. Using a combination of googling and word of mouth, they tracked down a 100-year-old grain-processing barn in Owen Sound. 

In late 2017, after hiring Krista Hulshof, an Ontario architect who specializes in barn conversions, they transported the barn from Owen Sound on a 53-foot transport trailer. “Everything was carefully packed like a Jenga puzzle,” says Brad. However, the driver refused to take the trailer into the Lawrence property’s driveway because of a sharp curve en route. “In the end, we had to unload everything in a secondary site and bring it all up in smaller flatbed trucks,” Brad says. “We had small hitches like that every step of the way—nothing was straightforward about this build.”

That winter, with the barn materials finally in place, the builders erected the frame of the main section of the Lawrence family’s 6,000-square-foot future home. To support the barn roof, the builders integrated some steel, which was then concealed by barn wood to maintain the home’s aesthetic. 

In the great room, there are 27-foot ceilings and a four-sided wood-burning fireplace in the centre of the space. “We couldn’t install a stone fireplace against a wall because the additional weight would have meant completely restructuring the barn framing,” says Brad. Instead, they opted for a custom 25-foot fireplace they purchased from a Quebec company.

Brad and Maxine wanted to use reclaimed barn wood for the interior walls, ceiling and flooring as well, and quickly realized they’d need more raw material than one barn could provide. They scoured southern Ontario and tracked down four more century-old barns in Cobourg, Lindsay, Little Britain and Stouffville. “One of the barns still had cows in it the day before we took it down,” says Maxine. Because barns from that era were built with whatever trees were nearby, they contained all sorts of wood, including spruce, pine, oak and birch. It took approximately 15 months to complete construction on the home, and the Lawrence family moved in shortly after.

The kitchen contains a 23-foot island with a concrete countertop that the Lawrences mixed and poured over a weekend. Brad and Maxine used cherry to help the kitchen cabinets stand out. The adjustable cast-iron stools were purchased from Wayfair. “We felt cast iron suited the barn look,” says Maxine.

The five-piece primary ensuite bathroom comes with a large copper tub imported from the United States. “We didn’t want to use any glass or brass in the home, but we really liked the dark patina of copper,” says Maxine. All four bathrooms have heated floors and custom vanities built with the reclaimed barn wood, according to the listing agent, Steven Ferreira. 

In the basement, there’s a theatre room with surround sound and a custom 120-inch screen and film projector. To add some insulation, the Lawrences installed felt in the ceiling and then spray-painted it charcoal to blend in with the rest of the room.

On the second level is the primary bedroom. The carved-wood bed frame was purchased from Wayfair. “We went for something that was a bit softer to balance out the rest of the home,” explains Maxine. All seven bedrooms have walk-in closets. 

The family installed a pool in the backyard. For a cabana changing room, they obtained an old corrugated-steel grain bin on Kijiji. “Initially, we considered a grain silo to match the overall barn idea for our home, but we figured a smaller grain bin was more practical and would work just as well,” says Brad.

The sprawling property backs onto Walker Woods and Glen Major Forest, which contain 47 kilometres of trails. Only one of the property’s 10 acres is cleared – the rest is pure forest.

Now that the home is for sale, the family plans to downsize and spend more time travelling. “We might do another reclamation project like this down the road,” Brad says, “but definitely on a much smaller scale.”

The post This $3.8-million Ontario home was made from five reclaimed barns appeared first on Macleans.ca.

The buyer:

Dana Kayal, a 54-year-old cookware entrepreneur

The budget:

$650,000

The backstory:

In 2014, Dana moved with her three children—Jared, Ronel and Alexa—from Kelowna, B.C., to a rural property just a 15-minute drive outside of town. She hoped that the teens would benefit from more time spent outdoors. For Dana, an avid gardener, it was an opportunity to plant a bevy of fruits, veggies and robust nut trees. But her new one-acre lot, wasn’t private enough.

By 2021, Dana was once again itching to move. Her spice-and-cookware business went online just after the onset of the pandemic, and Jared and Ronel had moved out a few years prior. Alexa had just graduated from high school. Most importantly, the smoke from B.C.’s forest fires was affecting Dana’s health. “My doctor told me that, at that time, breathing the Okanagan air was equivalent to smoking two or three packs of cigarettes a day,” she says. In July of 2021, a fire started just down the road from Dana’s property. The only reason it was quickly snuffed out was because her neighbour happened to be driving by the site in a water truck en route to refill another neighbour’s well, which had dried out due to the area’s hotter-than-hot temperatures. “I thought to myself: this is ridiculous. I need to get out of here,’” she says.

An overhead shot of Dana’s Nova Scotia home.

Dana briefly considered moving to Newfoundland, where her mother lived. She wanted to be able to provide any care that her aging mom might need. But Dana, ever the green thumb, balked at the province’s unfavourable gardening conditions. (“It can be tough to grow anything other than potatoes, cabbages and beets in Newfoundland because of the cooler temperatures,” she says.) Dana’s sister, Liette, suggested Nova Scotia, where fruit trees were newly flourishing thanks to the warmer, wetter weather. Dana was a bit shocked by the extent to which climate shifts were influencing her relocation. “Climate is the biggest factor you can’t control,” she says.

The hunt:

In the summer of 2021, Dana started combing the available listings in Nova Scotia and set a budget of $550,000. She wanted a waterfront property, with at least two bedrooms and three or four acres of land for farming purposes. “I see myself as a bit of a homesteader,” she says. “I hope to be able to provide for myself, especially with rising food costs.” Dana was also looking for a property that was within a 15-minute drive of basic community amenities, like a gas station, and no more than an hour’s drive to a larger city centre. She was delighted to see how much further her budget would stretch in Nova Scotia compared to markets out west. “I was like, ‘Holy shit. Decision made,’” Dana says.

She listed her semi-rural B.C. lot in early August. It sold within a day for $990,000. With a closing date set for September, Dana figured she’d have plenty of time to find a new place, not realizing that Nova Scotia’s South Shore region—where she’d been scoping out properties—had recently become one of the fastest-growing real estate markets in the country. “I’d see a house go up online, contact the realtor and they’d be like, ‘There are four offers already,’” Dana says. She decided to increase her budget to $650,000.

Two weeks later, Dana stumbled on a listing for a three-bedroom, two-bathroom home priced at $575,000. It sat on a whopping 18 acres of coveted South Shore land, including 600 feet of lake frontage on a scenic cove. “After I saw the first 12 photos, all of which were drone shots of the exterior, I thought: I’m sold. I don’t even care what it looks like inside,” Dana says. The sellers were in their 80s, so the interior decor was a bit dated, but the overall structure appeared to be in good condition. The home’s main entrance opened to a large living-and-dining room with stunning views of the lake, and the kitchen had a large island, where Dana imagined she’d film some of her online cooking classes. The basement was unfinished, but Dana never shied away from getting her hands dirty. Lastly, the property was a 45-minute drive from Halifax and a day-long trip to her mother—but that was still preferable to an expensive, last-minute flight from British Columbia. Dana submitted an offer of $650,000 the next day, which the sellers accepted contingent on an October closing date.

At the time, the rental price for a coast-to-coast U-Haul trip hovered around $10,000. Instead, Dana bought a small, used trailer, sold most of her possessions—handing down some to the kids—and packed only the essentials. She drove across Canada for eight days, stopping each night—and once in Ontario to pick up two friends who volunteered to help her settle in. The first thing the group did when they arrived at Dana’s new home was take a lakeside stroll. “We stood on the dock and cheered with some champagne,” Dana says. “All the leaves had started to turn red and orange. All the glory of nature was around me.”

Still, Mother Nature’s many moods seemed to have followed Dana eastward, and the months after move-in were a mixed bag. Dana’s well water was too high in iron, so she spent $3,000 on a new filtration system. The property also began flooding with every big downpour, and the next spring, a sinkhole opened up on the driveway. Dana spent another $20,000 to outfit her acreage with drainage ditches, which, so far, has helped.

Aside from these mini natural disasters, Dana is enjoying her new natural life in Nova Scotia. She’s planted a vegetable garden as well as seeds for a future “fruit forest”: berry bushes and peach, pear, cherry and hazelnut trees. She hikes and kayaks and ends her days watching the moonrise. In general, she breathes much easier. “The air is ridiculously clean,” Dana says. “Whenever I set foot outside, I can feel my blood pressure lower, like, This is exactly right.”

(Photography courtesy Kayal)

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