…a year and a half ago. And now we’re renovating it. I’ve had so many people ask me about our renovation – friends, family, neighbours, colleagues – that I thought I’d try writing about it. It also feels like a good way to document what we’re living through right now and be able to look back on how far (or not far?!) we’ve come.

We’re well into renovations right now, but let’s back up and start from the beginning. We used to live in a very lovely 1-bedroom condominium in Vancouver with our two young kids (now ages 3 and 5) – lovely, but definitely too small for our family of four. After years of browsing realtor.ca while saving as much money as we could, we finally got serious about buying.

Buying a single family house in the Lower Mainland is a very scary undertaking. There are so many stories of far overvalued properties with multiple bids sold with no inspection and no conditions. We wanted to be in a specific neighbourhood which limited our search area. But we were up for a renovation project – we could get far more house and property for our budget if we were willing to take on something that needed work. Our only requirement was that it had to be livable – taking on a massive mortgage while renting and paying for renovations was not in the budget!

We found a home that we thought had great potential and were very lucky to have our offer accepted. The only competing offer was a builder, maybe a sign it needed too much work?!

The house was built in the early 1960’s, and after a couple of additions done in the 70’s and 80’s, not much had been upgraded since. It had some very interesting design choices, to put it mildly. But we thought it had great potential.

Here are a few photos from the real estate ad.

We have a project…