The House Saga (Part 1)

We have lived in our current house for over six years.  It was our dream house.  It is actually the second house Ian and I bought together.  We lived in an apartment for several years after we got married, and when Ian got his continuing teaching contract, we decided to buy our first house.  It was a cute little blue bungalow and we liked it.  It was old, but we gave it a fresh coat of paint, and the previous owners had replaced the carpet and redone the kitchen, so it was pretty good for a first house.

Well one afternoon after church we decided to go look at show homes.  We absolutely fell in love with this house.  Ian was hesitant to buy it because at the time it was almost $200 000 (which was a lot at the time!).  We prayed and discussed and finally decided to build this house.  It was so much fun choosing our paint, flooring, fixtures, etc.  We built our dream house.

Our first house sold, and we moved in with my mom and step-dad for about four months while we waited for our new one to be finished.  We finally moved in in April of 2003.  We enjoyed finishing our yard and basement and planning for the birth of Adam.  We really liked this neighbourhood and our neighbours.

Well a few months after Noah was born, the neighbours to the left of us moved and a new family moved in.  They were very nice.  I introduced myself to the mom as they were moving boxes into the house.  They had two teenage boys.  The mom and I made salsa together, went to some home parties, visited over the fence.  It was very nice.

About a year after they moved in, their house turned into the party house.  Their teenage sons were out of control.  They would have loud parties in the backyard almost every weekend, well into the wee hours of the morning, and almost every night in the summer.  We spoke to them about the noise, even phoning them at night when it was too loud, but it never seemed to stop.  Eventually we ended up calling the police one week in July when the partying started at 8:00 and looked like it was getting out of hand.  The parents had been away for a week, and every night it got worse and worse.  The police came and dumped out all their alcohol (they were all underage and there were no adults present).  There must have been several hundred dollars worth of liquor.  Needless to say, the kids were not happy with us.

That`s when we started feeling unsafe.  I don`t think they would ever have hurt us, but the kids started coming onto our property.  One night the doorbell rang at 2:00, and when we looked out the window, there was a pop cup at our front door (we didn`t open the door because they were drunk and who knows what would have happened).  In the morning, Ian dumped the contents of the cup on their lawn and several days later there was a brown spot...  Another night, they threw garbage over their fence into our backyard.  We didn`t want to let our boys play outside when they were around because of the filthy language coming from next door.

And we weren`t the only neighbours that had a problem.  Our neighbours on our other side and also a few houses down also complained of the noise.  One night when our neighbour called the police about the noise, the other neighbour`s dad was sitting outside on the porch while his sons and their friends blared their music on the street.  When the police questioned him, he said, ``All they need to do is ask, and we`ll turn it down," which is ridiculous because we had done that many times.  Ian asked the police when something would be done because we've had to put our house up for sale because of the noise.  They just told us to call the bylaw officers Monday morning.

So needless to say, we'd had enough.  After much prayer, we decided to look around to see what else was out there.  We started by looking at acreages, but we couldn't find any that we really liked.  Then we looked at some other houses in town, but again, no luck.  Finally we walked into the Pacesetter showhome and found another dream home!  We weren't planning on building because we didn't want to have to move twice (once when this house sold and again when the new one was built), but all signs pointed to building.  We even went into the builder and added all the options we could think of.  We made them an offer that was $80 000 lower than the price should have been.  Ian thought it would be a miracle if we got the house for less than $460 000, but the builder came back at $447 000.  We were stunned.

We prayed about it A LOT and felt that God was giving us the go ahead to build.  So that's where we're at now!