Rain is a good thing?

There is a country song where they say so, but the more days of rain we get, the more I tend to disagree with it.

I have not given up my blog as you might have thought – it’s just that we are now preparing for moving to our new home – our first house in Canada – and that is a very time-consuming process. It is very exciting and a totally new experience for both of us, but really exhausting at the same time.

I also applied for and got another position with the company I work for, Alex found a job as well and we are still adapting to these changes. One day I will try to put down a whole report on the moving experience, but now I am just not up to it. :)

Happy New Year!

No, I am not crazy! It’s the Old New Year in Russia – since Russia used another calendar (and Russian Orthodox still do) that is 13 days behind the rest of the world, there is a tradition to celebrate this holiday as well.

We got our kind of present last night - we thought that we were paying our real estate agent for her services certain percentage of the list price of our house-to-be - but as I discovered yesterday, we are not - which is a discovery worth $ 7,000 - I wish I made more discoveries like this one!

I also found a great deal today - I was dreaming of subscription for The Economist for a while, even looked at their promotions yesterday, but they were too expensive to me. But today I saw this special offer, where you get first 12 issues for $12 and pay $36 per 3 months after that. However, when I tried to sign up, it did not work in the beginning - since the offer was a US-only deal. I was disappointed and was closing the window, when a pop-up appeared stating that there is a similar offer in Canada, but I will have to pay CAD 15 for the first 12 issues, which I thought still was a great deal and subscribed for it. Yey!

Another big step in immigration - buying our first home

I was pretty busy last week - we were looking for a house to buy.

Before looking at the market we went to the bank and got an approval from them for a certain mortgage amount. With that being our purchase budget we started searching. At first we just went to different areas and went to open houses. But this felt like blind date - you are not sure if the house is "in your league" when you enter it and you feel a bit awkward when you see that it is above your budget and still walk around it just out of curiosity - I've never been a window shopping supporter - I do not like the idea of just seeing without the ability to actually buy what I like.

So after some open houses we decided to contact a real estate agent and ask her (in our case) to find something within our budget that meets our needs. We did not have many "must haves" on our list - more of "nice to have" - we were certain about one thing - not to look at the houses that were older than 25 years. You never know with the old houses what might eventually go wrong and how much it would cost to fix. Also, we preferred bigger backyards - those small patches that most of the new houses have looked pitiful to me - one would hardly be able to get a BBQ on it... I also wanted one bathroom to be on the ground level - I have seen some houses where the bathroom was on the second level or there and in the basement, but not on the ground floor - and I felt it was hugely inconvinient. The last wish was to have the house in a nice area. No social housing next door or stuff like that.

Our real estate agent was really lucky with us - she showed us two houses and we loved the second one so much, that we decided to make an offer on it. It is a detached 2-storey house in a really nice area - close to highway and malls, quiet place, a big backyard without neighbors behind (there is a playground next to in from the back), windows and carpeting all over the house were replaced in 2010, furnace - in 2008, roof - in 2007, bathrooms were renovated this year as well. There are 3 bedrooms and 2 bathrooms, a finished basement and all of it fits well into our budget!

We made the offer on Friday night - they accepted it with some editions on Saturday morning. We wanted the closing day to be in the middle of April, they were hoping to get it sold beginning of February, so we met halfway on the 15th of March. :) They also made the price reduction of 5,000 we asked for to be 3,500, which was even more than we expected. :)

Now they are waiting for mortgage approval and house inspection that we should have ready by Friday. If everything goes well, we will be prospective homeowners in less than a week from now. I just cannot believe it!