The prologue to Our Long Way Home can be found here: http://homesteademporium.wordpress.com/2012/05/28/our-long-way-home-prologue/
Our Long Way Home – Part 1
It had been a long and hard fifteen months. During twelve of those months, our family had been split apart with Graydon (dh) living and working first in northern Alberta on the Oil Sands, and then on the Prairies in Saskatchewan, working as an engineer. The rest of us, myself and the five kids, back on the Island doing our best to fill in the void left by Graydon/Dad being away while still keeping up with kids jobs, caring for the homestead, my own full time business, and the younger three girls homeschooling and care.
Our family had grown very weary of this lifestyle. This was not the way we planned to live our lives. We had always done everything together, worked together, schooled together, lived together, worked hard to build our small homestead together. Our children were growing up right before my eyes, and away from their father’s eyes. To be split apart, with the head of the home thousands of miles away, just didn’t seem right and we felt it was time to put an end to it. We had seen Dad/dh just twice since the summer, each time only for a few whirlwind days. Time always flew much too quickly, and then he was gone again.
About the first week of March we made the decision to make the move, to just get it done and get our family back together under one roof. Well, most of our family. Our eldest daughter Alesia, who was now 20.5 years old, would be moving to Ontario in the spring to be a Nanny for relatives. The rest of the family however, would be moving to be with Graydon in the prairies, all under one roof. Our son Joshua had already secured an apprentice position with John Deere in the same town Graydon was living and working in. And now, Graydon’s income tax return could be enough to move our household belongings, and almost enough to cover our own gas, etc.. We decided we’d have to work hard to come up with funds for any extra costs we’d incur to make the move. We just couldn’t go on like this any longer. We needed to make the move now.
Finally!
We had a 2 week time frame. In just a few short weeks, Graydon would have just enough time off, to get back to the Island, help us pack up anything that still needed packing, and move our family and homestead to the prairies, before he had to be back to work again.
At the same time, we finally found a rental home that seemed to suite our family’s needs, and our homesteads needs too. We had horses and other animals to move across the country. It wasn’t as simple as finding a home in town, we needed an acreage. When we found one for rent, we jumped on it. It had been the first, and only acreage, we’d seen come up for rent since Graydon had moved out there in July. He viewed it, spoke with the landlord who suggested we may like to buy it after we lease it for two years, and we said we’d consider this option if all worked out.
It seemed things were falling into place and we’d be on our way home.
However, first we had to take our current home off the real-estate market and find someone to care for it and deal with renting it out. We had tried for years to sell it, and decided that instead of giving it away by dropping the price still lower and lower (we were already almost 100,000.00 under appraisal price) in this bad market, we’d rent it out instead. This wasn’t so easy however. Every rental agency we contacted said they only dealt with city properties and our 5 acre hobby farm was too far out of their way. This befuddled us. Our home was exactly 12 minutes from the city. How could this be ‘too’ far?
Finally, we found a rental agency willing to work with us, but now the hard work (not to mention all the extra cost we never realized!) had to take place. The property, the cabin, the shop, and the main home all had to look ‘perfect’. New carpet was ordered for the top floor of the main home and the stairway. Appliances had to be purchased for the cabin. We had used it for my business, but now it would become a rental and needed to be ready to rent. No excuses, things needed to get done, or it wouldn’t rent out, and we needed it to rent out. We were working on a very tight budget.
We got to work, did what needed to be done and cringed while we hired others to do the very few things we couldn’t do ourselves in the short 10 days we had to work with. We hired a painter we knew personally, since we had so little time to work with. We removed the large built in bunk bed from the girls room, and ripped up the old carpet in preparation for the new carpet ourselves. We removed the closet doors, and anything and everything else that needed doing was done, or on it’s way to being done.
The entire house, cabin, shop, and barn were packed up in short order. The movers were scheduled to pick up our belongings 3 days before we moved, just a week after Graydon arrived. I booked them to arrive on Friday the 13th of April, so that they could get to our rental home on the prairies shortly after we would get there, on the following Tuesday. I specifically arranged it this way because originally, we were going to have them pick up on the Sunday, the same day we would leave, but the movers said there was no way they could get there as fast as us. We had to give them some extra time, so we worked around it.
In the meantime, we arranged to sleep in an RV from friends for the last few nights. Our belongings would be gone, except for what we could fit into our vehicles, and the two trailers we would tow behind each of our vehicles along the way.