So we did it. If all goes well tomorrow morning, we will be the proud owners of a house in Bridgewater. It is definitely “a diamond in the rough” as it was advertised. We will need to do a lot of work on it, but we are excited to officially be residents of Bridgewater Nova Scotia.
Why Bridgewater? The simple answer is that is where Treehouse Village is being built. We had originally thought we would buy something in Sackville or Tantallon, but nothing felt right, plus, the most of the people we know in Nova Scotia are associated with Treehouse Village, and even if they don’t live in Bridgewater, they spend a fair amount of time visiting Bridgewater. Since our new place is huge, we may end up being “the common house” until Treehouse Village is built. I love the idea of people coming to visit and me being able to share my house with friends.
We have already discovered the Bridgewater Farmers market. For a small town farmers market it is pretty impressive. We have enjoyed ordering various things in advance, but also going to the market and hanging out. There are definitely some great finds, like amazingly sweet cherry tomatoes!
After we close tomorrow morning, at some point Pods will deliver the two pods with all of our stuff. It will be nice to be reunited with our stuff, even it it takes a while to actually unpack it all!
We have also applied for the PACE Clean Energy program. It took a bit of looking but I found out what the acronym stands for – Property Assessed Clean Energy Financing. On Thursday we will have an energy audit. This is the first step needed to access various provincial and federal programs to help cover the cost of some of the necessary renovations. We are very interested to see what the energy audit folks have to say.
I mentioned the house is a diamond in the rough – it was built as a high quality “executive” home, so the structure is good – or as the saying goes “it has good bones”. However, it looks like it was last decorated or updated in the early 70s. The appliances look like they might be early 80s – one of the first ever models of built-in dishwasher, and the oven clock has numbers on a role rather than digital numbers. We will definitely need to do a lot of before and after photos!
My plan now is to write more about the different things we discover about Bridgewater as we settle into town and relearn (or in Scott’s case learn) what is means to live in a small town. This is quite a shift from Silicon Valley!