Beloved Dearly and I have been retired (really retired) since July 11th (I think that was the date), 2009.
Our retirement posting took us to the small town of Truro, NS. Truro, proper, has about 1140 inhabitants, but Truro and Surrounding area have about 35,000. So Truro has just about everything anyone could need.
In actual fact, Beloved and I bought a lot ONE block out of town, as luck would have it ON THE RIGHT side of Fir Avenue (the other side has lots of springs and so they have problems with drainage off their lots.)
We bought the lot in 2008, so we owned it for almost a year before our house went on it.
We made the arrangements with a 'manufactured' home company to have a house put on the lot and we headed back to Ontario to work on plans.
After emailing back and forth, we began to get paperwork from the manufacturer... and we firmed everything up by email. I suspect we were their first email sale.
As I look at the plans now, I can see some differences between this view and what actually happened, but it was pretty close!
The house in Ontario was on the market for 2 1/2 weeks. We were pleased when it sold. Okay, that is a MILD understatement - we were ecstatic when it sold! I wanted to tell my Mom and Dad, but they were enroute home from Florida and I was going to be away for the weekend, so I went out with my camera.
In June, I flew down to watch the house 'land'. I have to tell you it was fascinating to see two big trucks drive up the street with our house in two pieces on the back of it. Beloved was away for work, so I took a few pictures and a movie...
Here is the front half of the house... I don't think I got a picture of the other half (I did take movies of it!) I was so excited!!!
And the afternoon of that day, I flew back to Ontario to finish work (two more weeks), greet the movers and then prepare to get ourselves to Nova Scotia!
So Beloved and I packed our new ceiling fans, our house plants except for the Norfolk Pine that a friend put in the backseat of her car to deliver, got ourselves organized in the trailer and we moved to Hilden to the Scotia Pines Campground...
We spent the summer at Scotia Pines. Nearly daily we visited the work site, until finally the foreman called in August and told me that we couldn't spend each afternoon there. We were in the way of the carpenter and he was busy. (Really it was me who was in the way. Beloved was not, but I was so INTERESTED. Honestly, if they had given me a hammer, I would have pounded in nails, or mudded the basement, or painted something.) Scotia Pines was lovely. But I was bored and finding living in one room a bit confining. And I missed my OWN bathroom. I did not want to share my shower with spiders any more...
We did have some excitement in August. At that time we owned a timeshare week in Ontario, and we left the trailer in NS and headed off for a week's vacation. We had a nice week and we discussed spending the night in New Brunswick, instead of driving the whole way (about 16 hours give or take half an hour) back in one day. Two drivers, good roads, summer time, reasonable weather, that drive was certainly do-able in one day, but we were feeling a bit tired. So on Saturday morning we got up, packed everything into the Jeep, checked out of the timeshare and set off, intending to stop in a hotel in Florenceville that Beloved had stayed in in the past.
Except that, as we got closer to Nova Scotia, the weather forecast became more and more ominous. This was Saturday. Because we had intended to stop for the night we had not left the timeshare at our usual early (oh dark hundred) travelling time. We passed Florenceville without seeing the hotel.
(I'm going to do the aside thing here... the thing about the Maritimes is that the governments are STILL working on the highways. So there are still spots where they are 'putting' the new highway in. They have not quite finished the new road in northern New Brunswick and they are doing MAJOR roadwork between Riviere du Loup in Quebec and Edmundston in New Brunswick that will probably not be finished for another 20 years... Back to the continuing saga....)
When Beloved had stayed at this nice hotel in Florenceville, it had been right on the highway. However between that time and us moving here (maybe three or four years) the highway had moved and the hotel was off the highway. We had roared right by it without realizing that we had missed it.
By this time, however, I was no longer interested in staying in New Brunswick for the night.
A hurricane was forecast to make landfall in Nova Scotia the next morning. And all my worldly goods, were in a trailer that had the windows on one side open just a titch! The table cloth was on the picnic table with those little weights in the shape of strawberries to hold it down - just perfect to be picked up in the wind and thrown THROUGH someone else's trailer window. AND the houseplants were outside.
We arrived in Fredericton at 8 pm - three hours from Truro. And I asked Beloved if he thought he was okay to drive to Truro. We had discussed staying in Oromocto somewhere for the night, but I was no longer comfortable with the thought of not being with the trailer...
We arrived in Truro (about 15 minutes from Hilden) at 11 pm. Beloved suggested we stop for gas, just in case the power was out... So we did that.
We got to the campground, opened the gate (the gate is closed between 10 pm and 7 am, but you just use the rope to open it up, drive in, and then lower the gate again behind you.) and in we went. I needn't have worried too much about the table cloth and the weights - there were only three trailers in the whole park. Needless to say, anyone who could take their trailer and go somewhere out of harm's way, had done so!
We took the stuff out of the Jeep and put it in the trailer. We took the houseplants and put them IN the Jeep's trunk. The tablecloth and weights were put away.
Beloved watched as I very grumpily emptied the cooler and filled the fridge. The thing about the trailer was that there wasn't enough room for two people to do much at the same time. After he listened to me grump and mutter for a few seconds, he announced that he was going to go and take his shower now, since he couldn't put his clothes away until I was done at the fridge and he was only in the way. He took the change dish (the showers were 25 cents for quite a reasonable amount of time and hot water), his towel, and clothes and headed off.
I finished putting the food away, and all of a sudden, I took stock of the situation. Yes, it was midnight, but who cared? We were there, everything was taken care of. If the hurricane woke us up we could sleep again later. The houseplants were okay, the trailer was as secure as we could make it, we were in a sheltered spot, safe and sound. I poured myself a drink, put away my clothes and found my book.
When Beloved came back from his shower, he found me there, happily reading my book, all set for whatever the morning brought.
The Hurricane - and sadly I can't remember his name - was kind of a dud. I think we slept until 11 am. It rained, but I had been in Hilden in heavier rain without a hurricane that summer - it was not a driving rain, it was just rain. And there was not much wind. We had no problem. The power did not even flicker!
By the end of the third week in August it was getting cold at night. The temperature was dropping to 5 C (about 42F) and we had to turn the furnace on in the trailer. We were supposed to get the key to the house on August 31st. We were getting anxious. I told Dad we were tired of being in the trailer and he told me he would have gone crazy long before this.
(Another digression - when I was 11 or so, we lived in a small city that had a CN rail yard. And our house was about 3 blocks from tracks that had an uncontrolled crossing - the city by-law called for no train whistles in town limits. However, this track crossed four lanes of traffic, and in the middle of the night, as they shunted cars back and forth, they would sound the train whistle before it crossed this fairly major street. I guess it just about drove the grownups crazy - but to me, it sounded safe and like home.)
In Hilden, we could, quite frequently hear a train. Since then I have discovered that there are several freight trains and a passenger train that goes from points West to Halifax and from Halifax out west. When the trains pass the uncontrolled crossings they whistle; one long, one short, two long. When the wind was right we could hear the train cross at (we assumed) Brookfield, a siding just before the campground, one a ways past the campground and another where it crossed Truro Road. We would generally hear it about 1 in the morning. Dad thought the trains would have driven us nuts by then... but in fact, the trains made me feel like I had come home.
Another short train story and then I will finish this and head to bed. We frequently heard the freight train go by in the daytime. It was obviously moving right along and it would make quite a lot of noise. I finally decided that if it was making THAT much noise, I ought to be able to see the silly thing. So I put my book down, exited the trailer and went out on the street of the campground to look for the train. Nothing but trees. Beloved had followed me out, and was watching me with some puzzlement. "What are you doing?" he asked.
"Looking for the train," I replied, leaning right and left and trying to see around the trees. "It MUST be just beyond those trees."
"Turn around," he suggested.
"What?" I asked, still striving to see the train.
"Turn around," he said again. "It's behind you."
"No way...." I said as I turned. Sure enough, on the otherside of the main road from the campground, there was a rumbling freight train. The sound was echoing off of the hill behind the campground... I actually turned around to look again at the trees - I could hardly believe that all that noise from behind me was actually in front of me!
Anyway, as time does, the days ticked by and the 31st of August came. Dave phoned to make an appointment for the 'hand over'. He made it for 1 pm. We would do an inspection of the house, sign papers and collect our keys. I was so excited!! All of a sudden, I could not wait to get into the house!! We could SLEEP there tonight!!
Holy smokes that meant we needed blinds for the bedroom!! And to get blinds we needed measurements. Before we got to the house to measure though, Dave called back. The carpenter is going to be done at 1 pm and we need 3 hours to clean the house, so here's the deal. We'll meet there at 5 pm to do the hand over.
Great! Did he mind if we went in to measure the bedroom window? No, not at all.
We arrived at the house at 12:45, rather expecting Rod to be nearly done, as he was going to be out of there at 1 pm... He was NOT done, but was happily working away at various little details (he was an excellent carpenter and I have not heard anyone say anything negative about him at the time or since!) We got our measurements and headed over to the hardware store to buy the custom blinds. I can't remember what else we did for the afternoon, but we went to an early dinner and while we were there, Dave called again. The carpenters were gone (at 4:30) finally, and his wife and mother-in-law were cleaning the house. Could we meet at 7:30? Of course.
We arrived at the house at 7 pm. Dave wasn't there yet, but by this time I needed to use the washroom - so I risked interrupting the cleaners to see if they would mind if I went in.
We had put toilet paper, a hand towel and soap in the bathroom so that Rod and John had facilities to use. The cleaners were not at the floor cleaning stage (they had done the bedrooms and bathrooms earlier in the afternoon while Rod was finishing up in the main part of the house) so they were perfectly happy to have me tiptoe through and use the washroom. (Heaven - not a single spider!!)
We started in the basement. Dave gave us the keys and then lead us on a tour of our house. We had already spent lots of time there, looking at every nook and cranny, but he took us around and showed us everything! It was really funny! I was so excited, I felt like I was floating.
After we had our tour and they left, Beloved and I headed back to Hilden, where I packed the Jeep with so much stuff that Beloved told me I was going to break it. (I didn't for one second believe him.) I packed the dirty dishes, dish pan, tea towels, dishclothes, and dishsoap. I packed the food from the fridge into the cooler. I packed up our clothes from the cupboards, scooped up the mattress off of the bed, STUFFED it into the back of the Jeep, along with the blankets and pillows, the food out of the cupboards, the lawn chairs and the two wooden tv trays that I had bought to use because the trailer's table was inconvenient. I packed the towels and facecloths and the bathroom bag (soap, shampoo, etc.) and the two computers, books and movies. I bullied Beloved into the Jeep, and we headed to Truro to spend the first night in our new house.
Because we sold our fridge and stove with the house in Ottawa, we had had to buy a new fridge and stove here. There was a sale early in August, and because of that, we had had them delivered as soon as the flooring was in. So we had a fridge and stove, and we had put some water and pop in the fridge for Rod and John.
We got to the house, fussing and fuming (the Jeep, I'm happy to report did NOT break down because I loaded it up so much) by about 10 pm and brought everything in the house. Good thing I had brought the dirty dishes, because I had not brought any clean ones!!!
We put the mattress on the floor in the master bedroom. We put the soap and shampoo into the shower that had NO SPIDERS! We put the food in the fridge, hung our new blind in the bedroom window, opened our lawn chairs and sat in our new dining room (we didn't want to put the lawn chairs on the hard wood floor in the living room.) All of the light fixtures had bulbs - that was the kind of attention to detail that the builder had put in!! It was a bit echo-y with no furniture, but we put the two tv trays face to face to make a table and we were HOME!
August 31st, 2009.
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