Now what?
We finally had one foot in New Brunswick, where we really wanted to be. We just didn’t know exactly when we would move here or what our life here would look like. Would we come just in the summers or live here full time? What about Michele’s job and my appraisal business back in Alberta? What about our kids? They were technically adults, with neither living with us full-time, but they had to be factored into the decision as well.
In other words, while one foot was finally in New Brunswick, the other was still firmly planted in Alberta.
Then there was the house we had just bought. The home inspection we commissioned when purchasing it resulted in a passing grade but there was no question that it needed some things done sooner rather than later. And what about tenants? And on-site management? And about a hundred other things. How exactly do you own a home and rent it out from 4,400 km away?
Turns out that buying the place was the easy part.
Making it ours
I took a short trip back to New Brunswick by myself in early October 2014, right after we’d taken possession, and met with various people about the house, including our lawyer, the realtor who sold us the house, a septic tank cleaner, and several others. Lots of ducks needed to be put in a row before actually advertising the house for rent and starting the process of making it our home in the years to come.
Incidentally, early October is always a great time to be on the East Coast, with the fall colours still out in full force. We’d never visited the Maritimes this time of year, so I’d not ever actually seen a red maple leaf and was thrilled to be able to do so, finally. (Let’s leave aside for now the conversation about why our national flag includes something that you virtually cannot find west of Ontario…)
Based on the home inspection report, there was a plethora of things that required attention, from missing and curling shingles, improperly installed gutters, trees and shrubs too close to the house, an old, non-conforming wood stove in the basement, and various small to not-so-small electrical and plumbing issues. Essentially, the property had not been well-maintained over time for a variety of reasons.
Now that the initial euphoria of being “home” had subsided, it was time to face the stark realities of owning an improperly maintained fifty-something-year-old house.
Contacts
Unsurprisingly, getting things done in New Brunswick was going to be a lot more difficult than it had been in Alberta. I’d been in business and in various volunteer positions in Alberta for a long time, so I knew whom to contact when I needed something done and there was a pretty good chance that whoever I did contact either knew me or had at least some idea of who I am.
Not the case in NB, of course.
However, one of the reasons we were at least somewhat comfortable in buying this house is that my wife’s brother-in-law in Miramichi was willing to manage it. As a former area athlete and businessperson, he also had a lot of contacts in the greater Miramichi area, so was able to put us in touch with some of the tradespeople we would need to do repairs and renovations.
The first was a plumber, as plumbing was the most problematic of all the things pointed out in the home inspection report, so I met with him during my early October visit. Upon having a look at the rat’s nest of pipes, he spent the first ten minutes of his visit exclaiming “Omygod,” over and over because of incorrect installation of traps and vents (kind of important in drainage). I started to understand that getting the place up to snuff might be a bit more complicated than I thought. Yikes.
In any event, doing these repairs was critical, so that’s where we started.
More good people come to the rescue
Michele’s brother-in-law also put us in touch with a contractor, who turned out to be an absolute godsend, both soon after the purchase and ever since in terms of the work he did, the contacts he had, and his counsel along the way. He did major renovations to our house right before we moved in and has just always been there for us.
He in turn eventually put us in touch with a fellow who worked right across the road from our place. He ended up taking over the management of it after it became clear that it was just too far for my wife’s brother-in-law to drive to Pointe-Sapin on what turned out to be a fairly frequent basis.
Bit by bit, we built up our own base of contacts in New Brunswick, without whom we never would have been able to pull off this whole relocation thing, whatever that might eventually look like. We had a lawyer, we had a contractor, we had a property manager, we had an insurance person, and we even had a septic tank guy. I even managed to establish a relationship with a local appraiser, whose business I might consider buying upon moving here.
This, of course, was in addition to our musical friends and other people we’d gotten to know along the way, especially the wonderful people who were to become our neighbours in Point-Sapin. Feeling more and more like home all the time, even from 4,400 km away.
Tenants
However, Michele and I were still a long way away from moving in ourselves, so we had to find ourselves some tenants. When we purchased the property in 2014, this was still many years away from the Covid-driven New Brunswick real estate boom, so the rent in this off-the-beaten-path community would not make this a lucrative investment per se. However, we did still need tenants, both to offset costs and to keep the house occupied and at least somewhat maintained.
Over the five years we owned the house but did not yet live in it, we had several tenants, whom we found via either putting up posters around the area or classified ads on Kijiji, etc. The tenants were generally good but none lasted a particularly long time for various reasons. One got married and moved into her husband’s place; one got an offer to live in a relative’s house for free (the nerve of some people); one ironically moved back to Alberta.
The last tenants we had were the best, although we had to spend some money outfitting the house with some basic furnishings to make that relationship work. The seafood plant in Baie-Sainte-Anne, about 18 km to the north, needed a place for temporary foreign or out-of-province workers to stay, so we rented to them. One of those was a group of Newfoundlanders who could not resist their own “call to home” when they made hundreds of dollars of long-distance calls to The Rock while staying here. Fortunately, the seafood plant covered that bill…
Snow…so much snow
In early April 2015, my daughter, Jill, and I had the good fortune to attend the Final Four (i.e., the US college basketball championship) in Indianapolis, Indiana. We had to fly though Toronto (from Edmonton) both ways, so we thought we’d take a detour east on the way back and check on our newly-purchased Pointe-Sapin house.
We were welcomed by the aftermath of what had been one of the most snow-driven winters ever in that part of the world. Early April, and there was literally still six feet of snow on the ground! I felt for our tenant, who obviously got help from someone to keep the rather large driveway accessible. I quickly realized that buying a snowblower (which was invented in New Brunswick, by the way) when we moved in was going to be a non-optional expense.
The 2017 ice storm
Then there was the great ice storm of January 2017, during which we came within a razor’s edge of losing our house completely. The entire community was absolutely decimated with downed hydro lines and trees and the power being off for a full eight days.
Water leaked through the house’s ceiling fixtures, making some of the structure’s other deficiencies clearly evident. There was also, of course, no heat (insurance dictated that tenant couldn’t use the old wood stove in the basement under any circumstances), which naturally caused the tenants to relocate elsewhere until the house was dealt with and the power restored.
If it hadn’t been for the fact that the temperature apparently never dipped much below -1 C during those eight days, I’m pretty sure that the house would have become unusable. We were so grateful that our property manager was nearby and could keep us apprised of what was happening. Talk about feeling helpless over 4,400 km away.
Now that we live here, we have a generator and a wood stove (which, along with a snowblower and a 4-wheel drive are the four items I think are required to get through a rural New Brunswick winter) but we’re fortunate to have survived that ice storm as well as we did. Michele and I learned yet another thing about living on the East Coast that we would be wise to remember when moving there.
Planning the move - so much to consider
I can’t recall when or why we decided to make the big move in 2019 but we ultimately aimed for leaving that summer. I was turning 60 in February of that year and it was then or never, and “never” was not an option.
But so much needed to be done before then.
I’d already sold my appraisal business in 2016 but we would have to figure out our New Brunswick job situation, as needing to work there was clearly evident from the financial plan we had commissioned. We would also have to figure out the logistics of actually hauling our belongings all the way across the country. And Michele and I would have to work on our French (more on that below).
New Brunswick jobs
Thanks to some family contacts in New Brunswick, the job situation in our new home unfolded favourably as we got closer we got to our planned move date. Michele, who is both an RN and a psych nurse, got a position working in the psych department at the Miramichi Regional Hospital, while I managed to hire on with Service New Brunswick, in Property Assessment, at the Miramichi office. While we both ultimately left those particular positions for various reasons after living in New Brunswick for some time, we were very fortunate to be moving to a new place with employment waiting for us.
With such a big change looming, the comfort factor that those jobs provided was huge.
Learning French
For some reason, even as a youth, I’d always relished the opportunity to live someplace in more than one language. I can read, speak, and write Ukrainian but I’d always wanted to be at least functional in Canada’s other official language so I’d have more options of where to study or live. Now, you’d think I might therefore have worked harder at French in university but that’s not how that evolved for some reason. We all wish for certain do-overs in life and that’s certainly one of mine (the list is not short).
In any event, Michele and I were moving to a French-speaking community and we wanted to show our respect for the Acadian people and their culture in general and for our community and neighbours in particular. Nothing worse than moving somewhere and not showing respect for how people there live – not a recipe for good relations.
As a result, I did things in Alberta that I hoped would enhance my French. I took some low-intensity classes, I joined the Association canadienne-française de l’Alberta (ACFA) – even becoming a member of the executive, and I volunteered to coach basketball for three straight years in the Jeux francophones de l’Alberta (which included preparing and conducting practices in French). We’d even invite French-speakers over for pizza suppers once in a while so we could expand our knowledge of French while simultaneously expanding our girths.
Getting closer to leaving, but then…
I’d had knee issues from the time I was a teenager. Between 1979 and 2018, I’d had no fewer than ten knee surgeries between the two legs – the first two relatively major and the rest minor, but still ten surgeries. If they’d offered Aeroplan miles for those, I could have flown around the world several times, I’m sure. By 2018, my knees were devoid of cartilage and so bowed that they looked like they belonged to one of those cowboys who had spent more of his life with his legs wrapped around his horse than he had on solid ground. Major concern.
We were getting good medical care in Alberta. We had good, caring family physicians in Daysland and very qualified specialists in Camrose, including our orthopedic surgeon. But we knew we’d be starting from scratch for health care when we got to New Brunswick, so we though we’d best follow the surgeon’s advice and get my knees replaced before we made the big move.
I had one replaced in fall 2018 and the other in May 2019, scant weeks before our planned move in July. I was facing the possibility of several days in a vehicle, unsure how much physical pain I’d have to endure (answer: very little). To make a long story short, it all worked out – the orthopedic surgeon and his team were beyond amazing and I was ready to take my straightened titanium knees, as well as everything we owned, across the country.
Yet more good people in our lives…and a twist
There are two reasons that people show up to help you move, especially if you’re going far away. One is that they’re genuinely good friends who would help you no matter what; the other is that they can’t wait to be rid of you. We had a huge group of helpers show up – friends, neighbours, players I’d coached. I’ll leave it to them to speak to their individual motivations…
Objective: pack a lot of stuff into a truck that may or may not be big enough. Hard to tell at the outset.
Oh, and they’d have to help me attach one of our vehicles to the moving truck’s trailer, too (we’d sold our other vehicle). This wasn’t going to be just a move; it was going to be a trek.
Michele and Jill (the latter of whom made the trip just to help us out, especially with our cat) flew out to our new home on July 25, 2019. Upon their arrival at our house, they discovered that there had been a murder-suicide, of all things, in the marine shop across the road from us – the same one where our property manager worked!
Michele didn’t know any of the details at the outset. I was still back in Alberta helping pack the truck while frantically trying to get in touch with our manager, hoping he wasn’t involved in the tragedy and eventually learning that he was not. A very sad start to life in our new home.
On our way home at last
Our friends and neighbours in Alberta (especially the next-door neighbour, who was an absolute Tetris-master) finally helped get everything loaded. The truck turned out to be just the right size but there was no way you would want to test your Jenga skills by trying to remove anything from the back while in transit. Our one friend and I were ready and on our way, with a stop in Moose Jaw the first night and then a stop in Winnipeg, from where that friend would fly home and another would join me for the rest of the way.
For those who have never done it, a drive across most of our vast land is a gruelling multi-day affair, especially if you’re trying to be somewhere at a certain time. You encounter every type of driver, every type of weather for whatever season you’re travelling, and every type of amenity along the way. We stuck to the all-Canadian route that includes the north shore of Lake Superior, which has a number of twists and turns in it and makes you think that Superior is an ocean rather than a lake. It just never seems to end.
Some say that one of the routes through the US is an easier drive but there was no way I was taking this cube of belongings across any international border. I can just imagine unpacking and re-packing the truck in some trigger-happy border guard’s quest to find a rogue citrus fruit.
The final leg
I won’t bore you with the details of the final leg, other than to say that there were still several stops along the way. Did I mention how vast Canada is? I maintain that every Canadian should travel the breadth of it at least once (although not necessarily all at once) in order to get a true feel for where we Canadians actually live and who we are.
Considering that the geographic centre of Canada is just east of Winnipeg, it was stunning as to how many days it still took for us to get to New Brunswick’s eastern shore, never mind what it would have taken us to continue on to Cape Spear in Newfoundland, Canada’s easternmost point.
Eventually, on July 31, 2019 (five years ago to the day, as I write this), we rounded that final corner from Miramichi into Pointe-Sapin, too dark for us to see my favourite ocean vista but with the wharf lights burning as bright and welcoming as ever just ahead of us. I count among the happiest moments in my life when we pulled the truck into the driveway and there were my wife and daughter waiting to greet me.
The gods smiled upon us in those final few kilometres – just as we pulled into the driveway, one of the tires on the trailer carrying our vehicle literally disintegrated. That could have happened anywhere along the way, but it didn’t.
It waited until I was well and truly home.
COMING SOON – Part III
I had no idea of all you went through! Glad you are settled now.
Thanks for reading, as always, Lana! It’s been an interesting journey that I thought others would appreciate knowing about. Way more positives than negatives – haven’t included them all, of course. Maybe in my next book…