Introduction

Originally posted on 2018-09-04

Hello everyone and welcome to our journey!

We plan to take this property and transform it into something grand. We chose this property specifically because it needs a lot of work, but has unbelievable potential. When we are finished, this will be a place that anyone would want to call home.

We found ourselves in Bruce County to be closer to family, and decided that fixing up places was something we both really enjoyed doing. After 10 months of trying to find a suitable property at the right price, we found this house just outside of the town of Tobermory in Ontario, Canada. Immediately falling love with the view of the water and the potential we could see in the building, we decided that this property was it. Our next project.

So, a bit about this property. It sits on Lake Huron in the north part of the Bruce Peninsula in Ontario, Canada. That is about a four and a half hour drive from Toronto. It looks south over the lake and although we have neighbors, it has the feel of being isolated.

The property was sold “as is” and it wasn’t hard to see why. We could tell from just our first walk-through the place that it needed a new roof, some eaves-troughs, both the front and back decks needed to be torn out and redone, the kitchen needed to be redone, the bathroom needed to be gutted and redone, and the entire place needed a lot of cleaning. In short, it was exactly what we were looking for.

Since the plan is to live in the house as we renovate it, the first thing we had to do was clean up enough to move in. We applied a little bit of elbow grease and a lot of diluted bleach to the kitchen / dining room area, as well as ripped out the carpet in the main floor bedroom. (The other main floor bedroom already had laminate flooring). We also sent the water out for testing right away, and until we get the results back, we are living off bottled water.

We will be looking at different options for heating as currently the main source is electric baseboard heat, but we did luck out and it comes with a nice wood burning fireplace that will help keep us warm come winter. On a whole, we are expecting winter here to be a bit of an adventure, so be sure to stay tuned for that.

Thanks to all of you that have decided to join us on this journey through weekly blog posts and sporadic videos. We hope you enjoy the transformation as much as we will!