Eliza Brownhome
Crafting My Life Guest Post
“The size of your success is measured by the strength of your desire; the size of your dream; and how you handle disappointment along the way.” – Robert Kiyosaki I’m excited to say that I’m guest-posting on that very theme over at Strocel.com today as part of Amber’s awesome Crafting My Life series. This is one of my favourite things on her blog and I’m honoured to have been able to contribute. She’s busy putting together a Crafting My Life e-course and I highly recommend that you check it out. And in the mean time, I hope you enjoy my post today. I have a dream. This dream began as a talk about what my husband Aaron and I envisioned for our retirement; then it morphed to include what we hope to provide for our kids as they grow up. A random conversation evolved into an elaborate picture of what we want our life to be like and I’m serious when I say elaborate. …Read the...
Read MoreLeaping
The summer of 2002 everyone must have thought I went crazy. I started dating a friend (who was also the ex-boyfriend of a long-time friend of mine) and by the end of the summer, we announced that we were getting married in September. When I called my parents to tell them I was getting married they didn’t even know I was seeing anyone. That was only half of it. We also bought a 1984 Bluebird schoolbus and told everyone that we were going to convert it and live in it, in the middle of Vancouver. We owned it for a year and were slowly trying to do the conversion on the weekends and not making much progress. We thought if we moved into it, our progress would be quicker. My older sister and her family were moving to Vancouver around that time and we came up with the idea to try to find a house for them to rent where we could park the bus in their backyard. We thought we would subsidize their rent for two years before looking for somewhere else. We started keeping our eyes open for good potential houses. As we went about our business in the city, there was one house that we always noticed had the perfect space. It was on a corner, backing on to a huge green park with a lake complete with swimming beach and where the farmer’s market is held on Saturdays. On Sunday nights, there is firespinning in the park and every summer there is a lantern festival that attracts 10,000 people. The park is in the middle of metro Vancouver in a vibrant diverse multi-cultural neighbourhood. The yard was perfect and had just the right space for a 40′ long bus. My brother-in-law came to Vancouver to house hunt for his family and one evening, after dinner, we drove by the house just to give him an idea of the kind of sweet space we were dreaming of. A few days later, Stewart came back from his search with the classifieds and grinned “You’ll never guess what house I just looked at!” We couldn’t believe our luck that the house was actually for rent! We went to the open house with the landlord and there were a lot of other contenders. The rental market in Vancouver has been tight for a few years now and the house was reasonably priced. We thought it best to be upfront about our plans to park a 40′ bus on the property rather than ending up with a mad landlord on our hands later. We were very worried that the landlord would never want to rent to us with our crazy idea to park a bus there. The weekend passed slowly with much hand-wringing and driving by the corner wistfully staring. At the end of the weekend, the landlord called to let us know that he had decided to take a chance on us and it was ours. We called it the Destiny House. We stayed for 5 years. We got to know all of our neighbours. We built a parking pad for the bus, redid the whole yard including putting in a 40′ long veggie garden beside the bus. I developed a close relationship with my sister who I’d never been close to as she is seven years older than I am. Both of my kids were born there and all of our children grew up more like siblings than cousins. We became fixtures in the neighbourhood and we learned the meaning of the word community. What started as a bunch of crazy spontaneous ideas in 2002 became the most magical experience. I could never have imagined such a perfect vision of this dream made into reality. I wanted to live in the bus in the city and by taking a leap of faith, it came out way better than I even envisioned it. We’ve moved on now but we’ve been having a lot of discussions with my sister and we now share the mondo beyondo dream of creating a...
Read MoreJust Renting
Bear with me for a moment while I do something taboo and talk about finances – you know, how much money we make (or don’t make). My husband and I are the last people we know who are still renting. Seriously. I don’t just mean the last in our group of friends. I mean all of our friends and acquaintances and the new people we meet all seem to own a house, a townhouse, a condo, something. It’s like we’re the last people in our demographic who are still renting. Although, what demographic do we really fit in anyway? If it’s age, that’s easy. But income? Class? That’s a little trickier. I have started to notice the subtle ways we apologize for things we think society finds objectionable, like renting. When we moved to our small town in 2008, everyone assumed we were escaping the Big City real estate prices and were surely buying a place. When we moved from our 1 year lease last summer into our current house, everyone assumed we’d bought our cute too small war time bungalow. Our answer is always this kind of bashful “No, we’re just renting.” Sure, some of it is by choice, but really, honestly, truthfully, we can’t afford to buy. It’s hard not to feel apologetic when you’re revealing a semi-embarrassing class barrier. Especially when all of your friends are on the other side of it. The people our age who own a house, have done so because: 1) they are professionals 2) their parents have helped them out SIGNIFICANTLY 3) they were the recipients of an inheritance We are not professionals. I am a stay-at-home mom and former administrator. When I went on maternity leave, I had been working my way up at the company I worked and was getting to the place where my salary was not too shabby. But I’d be back at the bottom if I returned to work now, after all the time off. My husband is in the trades. The non-unionized trades. So no big bucks there. Most of our married life we were paying off my student loans for my General BA in the humanities – you know, the degree that gets you tons of high paying job offers? There was no chance to pull together a down payment for anything. Our parents will not be helping us out. Our parents are working class. My in-laws are farmers in Saskatchewan. My parents are former Nazarene ministers who lost a house in the early 80’s. (Oh, yeah and those student loans I was paying off? Also because I wasn’t getting help from my parents. I’m ok with that. I do think it builds character. But it definitely changes things when you leave school with massive loans. That’s a totally different blog post though.) Our extended families are also working class. There will be no surprise inheritance from a great-aunt or aged grandparent. Even if there was, we’d be splitting it 36 ways with cousins. And for the few friends I have that were able to buy a place because they’ve already lost a parent? I can’t think of anyone who envies them their houses…they came at a price far far greater than any mortgage. I stay home with our kids – with two, I’d have to earn a lot to cover the childcare anyway. Aaron just started his own business so the banks won’t be looking at us seriously for a few years. For some reason, I feel apologetic about that. Every time someone asks me if we own our house, I forget the choices we made and I toss in that little just, “just renting”. So after all this whining about class and income, why am I saying choices? Because there was a time, before we had kids, when we lived in the Big City and were both working when we probably could have bought a place. But we consistently made choices not to buy real estate. Aaron’s parents did give us a bit of money. At the time, it would actually have...
Read MoreR-value
Living in a metal house gives you an interesting perspective on the weather. In the winter it’s like living in a tin can. In the summer it’s like an oven. We’re hoping to build our next house out of straw bales – the complete opposite end of the spectrum when it comes to R-value. When we first bought the bus, we paid $80 a month to park it in a field in South Vancouver between a gorgeous market garden and the Hari Krishna temple. The narrow strip of land was essentially a rutted mud pit in the winter. The row of trees bordering the temple side of the property provided screening but not a lick of shade in the summer. The sun would beat down on us and we would watch the chinese ladies harvesting veggies next door wistfully, jealous of their pointed straw hats. Of course, we worked during the week and spent our evenings in our East Van bachelor suite (with off-suite bath). Summer weekends we spent at The Cabin. We would have a cooler packed and a bag of clothes ready so that we could head out straight after work on Fridays. Arriving around 6:00 pm, the sun would still be high in the sky. Poor Eliza had sat all week, windows closed, doors locked, sun beating mercilously down and nowhere to get away. No shade. No breeze. Aaron would boost me up so that I could unlock the padlock on the Emergency door at the back and get in. The air inside was boiling, stagnant and oppressive. The trip to the front of the bus only took seconds but felt like an eternity, gasping for breath and sweating profusely by the time I clambored over all our junk and made it to the driver’s seat to untie the door handle (high tech security) and throw open the door for Aaron. I don’t miss that trip from back door to front one...
Read MorePriorities
Have you ever wondered what you’re made of? I always thought I was kind of a wimp. Cold all the time. Can’t lift much. I complain about papercuts. The first year in the bus made me realise that I was a lot tougher than I ever gave myself credit for. We had this idea that the bus conversion would go quite a bit more quickly than it really did and we moved in before much—ok, let’s face it—before anything was completed. For the first year, we gave up some pretty basic modern conveniences: No furnace. We had a small woodstove but the fire would go out after about 3 hours. This was a bit of a problem during a Canadian winter but thank goodness we live on the West Coast. We could see our breath in the morning when we woke up and when we got home from work. We gave new meaning to the suggestion to “wear layers.” No plumbing. We bought a port-a-potty after the first month peeing in a bucket. We got the Canadian Tire 24L camper model. With regular use they break after 1 year. We replaced ours yearly. We showered and did laundry in my sister’s place. Not a huge big deal but it did mean walking outside every time we wanted to have a shower. We kept a couple of 4L jugs full of water in the bus for washing up and we had a small Rubbermaid basin for doing dishes. No water heater. We boiled all of our water for dishes and washing up. We kept a pot of water on the woodstove at all times too. No stove. We had a single propane burner that looked like something from chemistry class. It was hooked up to a 20Lb propane tank (like you use for bbq’ing) that we kept inside. I used this exclusively for cooking that year. We boiled our water on it too. No fridge. Ok, that’s an exageration. We had a mini-bar fridge. It could hold a 2L of milk, a couple of Tupperware containers and a few veggies. A head of green lettuce stacked on the containers would fill it completely. No wiring. We had two extension cords so we could have power. For lights we used those small indoor Christmas lights. Aaron calls them fairy lights. We also had a lamp that Aaron made himself out of wire & cardboard and a desk lamp. No curtains. There are 11 windows on each side of Eliza, not including the back windows or windshield. Considering that we were parked on a corner, on a bike route in a fairly big city, beside a busy park that held a farmer’s market on the weekends, this is a big deal. Aaron used butter knives to stick blankets into the seams between the walls and the ceiling so we could have some privacy. We did have a phone, a computer and high speed internet though. Was it the internet that gave me the strength to weather all these other hardships? Or was it something inside...
Read MorePropane
It is 2:00 am. I am snuggled in bed. Down duvet. Down pillow. Aaron and Rain are cuddled next to me. It is raining outside and I can hear the steady drum of drops on the metal roof, lovely lullaby because I’m not out in it. Being January, the temperature outside is probably hovering around zero. A sound rouses me from deep sleep – the steady whirring of a fan blowing. The propane furnace runs periodically and we are used to it. But there is something different about it. With dread, I drop my hand over the edge of the bed to hang in front of the vent. Cold air blows over my warm fingers. Out of Propane. I slip out of the covers and walk to the fuse panel to turn off the furnace. No point letting the fan blow cold air all night. Returning to bed, I pull the blankets as tightly as I can and squirm close to Rain to warm up. The temperature in the bus has already started dropping and I want to stay warm as long as possible. I nudge Aaron “We’re out of propane.” Groan. There isn’t much that compares to the sinking feeling in that groan. The knowledge that all night the temperature inside will keep declining, until morning when we’ll be able to see our breath inside. It’ll likely mean hitting the snooze button many times because it takes an iron will to get out of the warm bed in the dark to get ready for work in a propane-less bus. It’s even worse because you’ll forget and think “At least a cup of tea to warm up while I eat my cereal,” only to remember an instant later (or when you try to light the burner under the kettle) that no propane means no furnce, no cooking, and no water heater. It means washing your already cold hands and face with frigid water and dressing quickly, making the space between getting out of bed and leaving for work as short as possible. For those who get to go to work. For me, it means sleeping in as long as Rain will let me, then bundling myself and my toddler to head out in the winter weather. Unhooking the small propane tanks in the rain, icy fingers slipping on the wet couplings, and driving down Grandview to have them filled at 8:30am as sleepy commuters shuttle past. The attendant filling the tanks in his regulation issue SuperSave Gas parka looks at me like “Great day for a bbq.” I don’t miss that one...
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