What happened next was a combination of a whirlwind and a science fiction novel …
When we made our offer to purchase, to the bank, we also took our lawyer’s advice to only offer them exactly what Al owed them. We knew this amount because of the paperwork and foreclosure notice. The bank immediately said “No”! So we offered a little more. “We’d like to see a little more than this,” was the bank’s reply. We upped our offer a little bit again and waited. Hopeful. Anxious. Cautiously optimistic.
We knew that if our offer was accepted, we’d have a very tight time frame to do a lot of important things to get a mortgage and insurance. We’d need to get a conditional occupancy, first and foremost, and that would mean doing some important upgrades to the house in order to pass. We would have two weeks after the offer was accepted where the offer would sit in the Clerk’s Office at the Court House. That was our Achilles heel. Anyone with $5 and valid picture ID could go in to see our agreed offer and then put in their own sealed bid, which, if it was significantly higher than ours, the judge would have no choice but to accept. We waited. We planned. We hoped and prayed.
What happened next, no one could have dreamt in their wildest imagination.
We got an accepted offer. Yay! We could buy the house! We’d have two weeks before it left the Clerk’s Office to go for court approval and, if we were successful in court, another 21 days to complete the deal (get the house up to code and conditional occupancy, plus get the mortgage approved and property insurance in place). But we had everything ready to go … What a fantastic day! Little did we know that the day would not end that way.
That evening, we were sitting on the couch, celebrating and watching a hockey game, when during the 1st intermission, the announcers started having their phones light up. The NBA was shutting games down in the middle of them and sending entire stadiums of people home. What was to be made of this? The next day, the entire world shut down because of Covid!
This caused some significant problems for our purchase. The court shut down (good, no one could see our offer), but then the bank wanted to suspend the sale until after Covid was over, because we couldn’t get into court. The building inspector couldn’t come out to inspect. The realtor started getting calls from people down south who would wire the cash and move in immediately to get away from Covid. We had to move very fast and be very strategic or we were going to lose it all, plus potentially be out of a place to live and also our downpayment if we couldn’t get everything together and close in time.
I called the realtor and said, “Just remind folks from down south that, until we own the property, we are still tenants, and as such they cannot evict us immediately. Also, my lawyer tells me that with all of the confusion regarding Al’s stuff versus ours, he can tie the eviction up in court until Christmas. Tell them to go ahead, buy the property, then get a hotel room for the next nine months.”
I called our lawyer and explained the situation with the bank. Our lawyer and the lawyer for the bank called Justice Veale, who was in charge of the file, and asked him for a hearing over the phone. Justice Veale accepted and granted the purchase. Great! But it shaved well over a week off of our time to get things together for the completion. And, of course, we were trying to self-isolate, so I had to get the house up to code with whatever I might have on the yard and in the shop.
The building inspector agreed to tour virtually through video. Okay, we were getting somewhere now!
At first, our insurance broker said that there was no way that any insurance company would touch this, due to the 15-foot-high deck having no railing. The building inspector agreed that as long as I secured the patio door, that would be good enough for him. Still not good enough for the insurance company though.
I thought about this for awhile. What do the “cubical dwellers” in Ontario need to convince them? Signage!! So I printed off a red stop sign that said “Stop—Do Not Enter,” cellotaped it to the patio door, and the insurance was good to go.
We finally got confirmation at the 11th hour, on both the mortgage and the insurance, the day before we had to complete the sale at our lawyer’s office (where we were all grinning, ear to ear, and being very careful to stay six feet away from other people).
Since we bought the house and property, we’ve been renting the little house out at a very modest amount. We’ve had some amazing tenants. We’ve done quite a bit of work to the big house, with more to come in the future. I’ve really enjoyed the fully-equipped, heated shop space. Between my own significant amount of tools and the ones that Al left, there is nothing that the shop can’t handle, from construction to plumbing to mechanical.
The best part is that we are keeping our promise to our friend—to “take care of his stuff.” If Al ever does show up again, we’ll be happy to sell him back his house and yard, at current market value, of course, and go back to being tenants in the little house. We’ll also be very happy, if he so chooses, to help him load up his stuff, which we have taken care of for almost nine years now, as promised.
A little side story to end this series
While we were tenants in the little house, we kept to our own house and the little bit of yard around it, the rest was Al’s place. Once the bank started to foreclose, and especially as it started looking like we may have to leave and move some of his stuff into storage, we started to check out the yard … There’s almost 10 acres!
After we bought it, I went and found the survey pins for the corners of the yard, then I took Pam into the bush to see the cutline of the property. Honestly, she wasn’t that impressed with the cutline, but while we were out checking it out, she found something far more important.
There’s a poplar tree just inside the property line that is way older than poplars ever get to be. Pam’s suggestion, with her Master Gardener ticket, is at least 50 years. It’s probably the mother of all of the poplars in the surrounding vicinity. It’s so big that you can’t get your arms around it and is incredibly healthy to this day.
What’s more interesting than that, Pam noticed, is that when it was very young the tree had suffered some significant damage to its trunk. It overcame that by creating some channels around the damage, to keep itself alive, flourish, and transport nutrients. Pam has named it her “Spirit Tree.” This tree sort of resonates with our own challenges we had to overcome to find and then become owners of this fine property. We don’t feel we “own” that tree!
The question remains to this day: Was it fluke or fate? Or did the Spirit Tree attract us to the property, all the way from our friend’s ranch in Southern Alberta? We may never know and we don’t care. But we do get out to visit the tree as often as we can, and think about our blessings at the end of what turned into a very long journey.
If you’re in the area, pop by for a coffee, beer or nip and we’ll go visit the Spirit Tree. Door’s always open.
