Our home on Almon Street

It was really hard to convince Kerry to sell the big house on Lucknow Street. Once it was listed we had an offer almost immediately that fell through, and then it sat on the market through the slower summer season. We hemmed and hawed about taking it off the market. There were no houses for sale that we liked and for Kerry to agree to move, we had to be moving somewhere A-mazing.

Finally one day in July we got an offer on the house. It was a really good offer with a flexible closing date, but since we had nowhere to go, Kerry wanted to decline it and not sell the house at all. July is usually a slow time for the Halifax real estate market and the pickings were slim. One fabulous little house had come on the market a day earlier but we wrote it off because it was a) small and b) belonged to good friends of Kerry's parents, which we thought would make it weird if we bought it. Putting our reservations aside, we decided to go take a look at it with our long-suffering real estate agent, Ainslie MacNeil-Campbell from Domus Realty.

(Side note: if you are ever looking for a great realtor in Halifax I cannot say enough good things about Ainslie or any of the other agents at Domus - they are real pros that consistently go above and beyond for their clients. Also, Kerry designed their signs and website so you should at least check that out).

At this point we had already moved two times in the last three years. We were tired of doing renovations but recognized that since we are so particular about our style it would be impossible to find a house in our price range that was move-in ready. Until we walked through the door of the little house on Almon Street.

It's not as if we had never been in the house. I had visited once, and Kerry many more times than that. But something happened that day when we pictured ourselves living there and we decided we had to have it. Somehow we managed to get our offer through the door first. I think there was a line of buyers behind us hoping that the sale would fall through but it didn't and in the Fall of 2009 we moved in.

The house was almost half the size of our Lucknow Street home. We went from 5 bedrooms to 2.  But it was perfect. It needed absolutely no work. It was fully renovated in a style that was completely our own. Of course neither one of us is completely immune to the call of home renos and so we have been picking away at little things over the last couple of years.

We had the stucco exterior of the house painted before moving in. I think painting stucco may be a bit of a no-no but it had been painted in the past so we just chose a new colour and went with it. With a large lot, there was space for Kerry to fulfill his long-held dream of building a "pod" - a home office in a separate building in the backyard. Last spring I mostly won the fence battle with Kerry and we replaced the low, wire fence that allowed people to see everything we were doing in the backyard, often with comment, with a custom-designed cedar beauty. I almost worried this plan had backfired when, for about two months after the fence was built, we had a steady stream of people stopping to touch our fence and ask about who built it. It's not like it is that amazing, it is just different than most standard fences around the city. Our contractor took some liberties with the gate header, and I really don't like it, but we are stuck with it for now. It looks a little less ornate now that it is stained.

The Pod and fence have both been stained since this photo but I don't seem to have anything more recent. I will take one as soon as the sunny weather returns. We stained the fence a dark greeny gray to match the foundation and the Pod to match the house.

This past summer we finally put in some plant beds in the yard and this winter I have a list of little projects in each room that will hopefully provide fodder for this blog over the next few months.