the house chapter

In 2005, we bought a house. It's 3 blocks from my mom's house. We wanted to be close by but not too close. Neil said "close enough to walk but not close enough to see". It's an older house that was great but just needed some updating and so we decided to renovate it. What began as removing a few walls turned out to be quite the project. The renovation took 10 months. We had a great family friend, Bill, who helped as our contractor and was so great, we would have been lost without him.

We asked Neil's mom and dad, Ken and Cathy, if they wanted to move into a new suite downstairs that we would make accessible for Ken's needs. They made the big decision to come. They were a little tired of the Manitoba winters. They arrived June of 2005. Unfortunately, they had to live in a hotel for 10 days, but we made it work. I was on vacation so I spent most of the time with them. While Neil worked hard on the house. He lost nearly 25lbs. Like I said, he was the labourer and I was the money lady. After all of that, we love our house and never plan on moving.