Hello, Edmonton

Well, 2024 was a whirlwind of a year. Suddenly we're Albertans!

About a year ago now, Carrie applied for a job in Edmonton. Many months after receiving the informal job offer, she finally got a real one. In the meantime, I had to get my butt moving to get the partially-gutted basement renovated just in case we had to sell a house! My several-year-reno plan turned into a much, much shorter one. (Turns out that's one way to make a perfectionist get things done.)

The renovation went down to the wire, but I managed to get everything done in a sort of timely manner. I recruited a couple of friends once or twice, but other than that and subbing out the carpet laying, I did everything myself. Oh, and my brother-in-law was over and did a bunch of mudding (about 30 times faster than I could do it). I must remind myself never to do drywall mudding/sanding ever again; that's the one time it pays to pay someone! Worst job ever.

From this... (nothing square, lots of holes, DIYer who doesn't know what he's doing)

...and this... (I custom-made some ceiling ductwork to maximize headroom)

...to this. Even put new windows in the basement.

Aaaand then this. (Bathroom ceiling.)

I redid the basement bathroom entirely: put self-levelling cement on the floor, plumbed for toilet/sink/shower, did electrical, stuck in a new window. Sometime in the spring I had the drywall hung in the bathroom, when I had the HVAC guy in for an annual checkup. Turned out my air conditioning was leaking coolant... somewhere. He checked where he could, and then he declared than I must have hit a line during my renos. I was sure I hadn't, but whatever... so it was time to knock some holes into my nice new ceiling. Boo! So he did a dye test, which would cost me $900 if it turned out to be my fault. And, whaddaya know, I hadn't punctured an AC line after all. So while it cost me some extra work, they covered the test cost and the refill, so that episode ended as well as it could have.

Shower installed.

Floor going in.

I got the shower in; that's really easy to type, but the process-slash-delaying-slash-whatever took months! I recruited a friend for the shower glass part; didn't want to end up dropping that stuff, and it is heavy and awkward. Then put in some cheap flooring... and proceed to fail to take any photos of the finished room. Nice going, me.

EDIT: Oooh, found the realtor's photo!

I also managed to finish my shed for the next owners to enjoy. Sigh...

Carrie tackled the patio that we'd never cleaned. Should have done this years ago.

And the giant elm tree that probably helped keep the patio pretty filthy did not fill out this year. In 2023 we had it pruned after severe damage from ice/wind storms. We always joked that if that tree died, we'd be moving. Well, dunno if it's actually dead or not, but here we are...

We went to BC for summer vacation, but I really felt like I should be back home working on the house.

Throughout the summer I sourced moving boxes. Found some really good deals, and always ended up needing more...

We made sure to spend extra time with some of the friends we'd be leaving behind. Did a bunch of dinner dates, blowing any restaurant budget we may have pretended we had.

After a flurry of activity and realtor chats and stuff, as soon as the job offer was official, we had the house staged and listed in September. Another not fun process: keeping your house (and yourself) ready for showings. I wasn't told that I'm not supposed to be there for those, so it was just grand to learn this one day while my kid was napping and I was strongly encouraged to vacate immediately for two hours... not cool.

Some staging furniture, some ours.

Impractical staged glass table... so much fun to wipe clean fourteen time a day.

Anyway, the first weekend had eight showings, resulting in four offers. After a few counter-offers and rejections, we sold the place after only eight days. I think the realtors did their job, but I must say neither Carrie nor I were thrilled with the suggestion to MAKE. EVERYTHING. WHITE. Really? Buyers are too dimwitted to be able to look past any colours and imagine their own space? Well, apparently, so we also acquiesced to their request to at least paint the kitchen cabinets. In the end, because we had a short timeline and weren't prepared to hang on to the house after moving, we did what needed doing to sell the place. But not without us doubting their process...

Old kitchen (back in 2016).

Lipstick-on-a-pig new kitchen.

I did happen to get some shots of the rest of the basement, but not enough. And the realtor shots are virtually staged so they're not legit. Nice going, me!

Nice new basement, and very little time to enjoy it!

Then it was time to buy. To port our existing mortgage and thereby not double our payments thanks to higher rates, we had to close on a new house within 30 days of closing on the old one. So it was off to Edmonton to house hunt in October (we had already come to do some neighborhood hunting in August). We went for four days without the kids, rented a car, and stayed at my brother Richard's place near the city. We saw 15 homes in a day and a half, then short-listed that to 6, then saw 3 again a couple days later, and then eeny-meeny-miney-mo'd one a sec. None were perfect, but our choice would work as either a short- or long-term home.

Things were moving uncomfortably quickly at this point. We flew home from our expedition on a Tuesday and had Carrie's parents fly into Ottawa that evening. They left for Edmonton the next morning with one car and a utility trailer with some stuff (freezers full of stuff that shouldn't freeze, and whatever else the movers wouldn't take).

We had to carry on packing, trying to prepare for the movers' arrival Thursday. Wednesday night a couple of friends saved our necks by helping us pack frantically. Thursday a great friend took our kids away. The giant truck came with five 8-foot-cube vaults. We weren't ready for them but they worked around us and with us and were amazingly patient and helpful.

Thursday evening we had an unexpected dinner with yet more friends, then fetched the kids. (All these friends will be missed; it feels like we ran out on them all.) Friday the movers finished loading a sixth vault, as we scrambled to determine what needed to be loaded and what needed to come with us on our road trip. (Complicating this was the fact that we wouldn't get our new house for a month, so we planned to stay in a rental without access to whatever our movers were taking.) The movers were gone by noon or so. We spent some time cleaning the house and then left Ottawa for good by 4pm, taking a loaded Suburban and pulling the RV.

We had planned to leave the next day, but there was no point sticking around. Our first stop was three hours down the road, near Driftwood Provincial Park where we've often camped. It was challenging to find a campground that wasn't closed for the season. One private one was busy shutting down but they let us pull in yet with full services. It was very nice to have a powered site and a furnace running all night. We went online and reserved a site at Rabbit Blanket campground at Lake Superior Provincial Park for the next night. On Saturday, we headed off and made it to Rabbit Blanket by 8pm. We had a powered site here as well. It was their last night of operation.

Wet snow outside. Comfy and warm inside.

We woke in the morning to a layer of snow on everything. The campground power was turned off that morning. We took our time getting out of there. The snow proved to be a problem: it was very wet, and when I tried to close the camper's slide-out, all the slushy snow was getting pushed right into the RV. I had to clamber up top and brush off all the slush before I could close up without issue. We headed out around noon.

Our next stop was Thunder Bay; we treated ourselves to a Hampton Inn. There was a pool but we'd failed to pack swimwear, so that was disappointing for the kids. Then off to Winnipeg. We stayed at a Victoria Inn near the airport. Oh, and the cheapest gas in the country was in Manitoba (apparently due to a gas tax holiday). That was welcome when it seemed I had to gas up every 350km. And then it was off to Riding Mountain National Park, three hours from Winnipeg. At this point, there was probably no other camping available (other than Walmart or boondocking). We were the only campers in the whole place, until a couple of brave Mexican Youtubers pulled in later in the day.

And some deer.

We had a powered site, but the outdoor water in the park was turned off, and the sani-dump was shut down. We enjoyed the heated comfort station though! We ran out of propane so we did two tank swaps in town nearby. We spent a nice warm night in the camper while it was -6 outside. I also kept the RV battery inside the camper overnight, since it's a lithium battery and shouldn't charge when below zero; it turns out it probably has built-in protection against this, which might also explain why it wasn't charging while towing the day before. I used a separate charger to charge it overnight, so we were good to go by morning.

Then we were off to Saskatchewan. Our journey was surprisingly relaxing, due in part to the fact that we were in no particular hurry, and pulling the trailer long distance wasn't as onerous as I expected (I do need to upgrade my transmission cooler though). We stayed at a Motel 6 in Swift Current. Then, finally, we were headed to our new home province.

Once we hit Alberta, we detoured to Drumheller since the kids really wanted to see some dinosaurs again, plus we didn't get our rental house for a few days yet. The museum was great, and wonderfully empty. It was too cold to do outdoor stuff like check out the hoodoos, so we just went out for dinner before heading out to Red Deer. There we found an Old Navy and grabbed some swim gear just before closing. Then we stayed at a Microtel with a pool and waterslide. That evening the RV's slide-out broke, and it wouldn't close properly. I managed to get under it and close it with a wrench and lots of huffing and puffing. After our morning swim the next day, we hit up Princess Auto for some parts; I patched up the trailer, and we were off to Edmonton! Found a sani-dump to empty out the trailer, then dropped it off at Richard & Fen's place because this is why we have family with acreages! We picked up the other car that Carrie's parents had dropped off there and made our way to our temporary home for a month. Made it!

The rental place was a small three-bedroom townhouse. It was very warm, with no way for us to control the furnace. It was conveniently close to downtown, which suited Carrie just fine. But that meant the kids, thrown into their new school right away, got to spend 45 minutes each way on the bus. The school is twenty times the population of their old one, five days a week compared to four, and a half hour longer every day. Quite a rude awakening for our little students.

The kitchen was most of the place.

We spent the entire month of November in the (well-furnished) rental, taking the time to work on moving and mortgage details. The mortgage... oh man, was that an experience! Our mortgage may have been technically portable, but there was no way our lender was going to make it easy for us. We spent far too much time trying to conjure up random documents they wanted, made more difficult by the fact that Carrie was starting a new job and didn't have handy things like paystubs and stuff. If there wasn't so much money to be saved by porting, we would have happily punted that dumb lender and gone with someone competent. But in the end, it all got squared away in the nick of time.

Rented near West Edmonton Mall, so we hit that up a few times.

We took possession of our new house on November 29, and on November 30 our free storage with the movers ran out. So they showed up with our things in -16 weather and threw everything into the house. Gotta say, it's quite a treat to have professional movers do all the work; that was a new experience for us.

Where to begin?!

Now we've been here for a few months. What to say about Edmonton? Well, where to start?

Property taxes for one. They are crazy high! And for what? I got to put my whole basement reno on the curb for free in Ottawa (they changed that right after we moved though... my fault no doubt). Here you get one big container every two weeks... and it's not even paid for in your property taxes! In Ottawa, I think the line item on my property tax bill amounted to $65/year for waste disposal; here it's $47 per month!

Oh, and in Ottawa, they had these things called snow plows. When white stuff fell from the sky, these magical machines would appear immediately and start keeping your streets usable. Here? Not so much. Neither of us even saw a plow until January (not even kidding). I don't know where they hang out or what they do, but you'd think a place like Edmonton would have snow clearing figured out by now. By the time they get to a lot of residential (and other) roads, the snow has compacted and rutted to the point of ridiculousness. A big fail on plowing. Homeowners, however, get right out there with their leaf blowers! I'd never seen this before, but since the snow is normally so dry, you can just blow it right off your driveway. Handy dandy.

People looooooove idling their cars. I get that it's sometimes cold out, but once you start your car why not run it for five minutes and just get in already? It seems it's normal for a car to be running twenty minutes or two remote start cycles before the owner decides they helped the natural resource sector enough. I guess we can count ourselves fortunate to be able to fit both cars in the (sort of) heated garage. 

Utilities are fun. There are a bunch of providers of natural gas and electricity, and once you choose one you have to choose whether to go with fixed or floating rates, and even the wisdom in this choice apparently varies by season. And then on your bill, what you use is a reasonable amount (and possibly even reasonably priced), but there are nine other charges/riders/fees that make your final bill double or even triple this amount. About the one benefit I see is that I can pay for natural, electricity, water, and garbage on just one bill. Yay?

Insurance. That's a fun one. We pay double for our vehicles what we paid in Ontario for the same coverage. Home insurance isn't quite double but pretty close. Private insurance, just like Ontario; we even stayed with the same insurer (after shopping around). What gives, Alberta? Gotta charge us all for Calgary's hail damage or something? Actually, Alberta seems to be the worst per capita for auto theft. (Is there a convenient sea port nearby that I don't know about?)

Recently I was driving along when a big ol' pickup (a few of those around) was oncoming. He was stuck behind a tractor going kind of slow, so he was poking his head out well over the centre line. Well, I saw what was about to happen but couldn't go any further to the right. Sure enough, our mirrors had it out, and his won. I turned around and caught up to him, but since I definitely did not want a mark on my insurance right before switching to Alberta insurance, and no thanks to an uncooperative other drive, I ate the cost of a nice new mirror. Welcome to Alberta.

And once your vehicles are here, you have to "import" them. So a picky out-of-province inspection is in order. The kicker for me is that I bought the Suburban in Edmonton three years ago, and paid several thousand to have it repaired to be able to register it in Ontario. Now it's the same going the other way. Anyway, I've managed to get that all done for less money than I'd feared. I found a guy to do a pre-inspection of sorts, so that I knew what needed doing. Then I did the repairs myself and got the vehicles to pass inspection. It cost more to change over licenses and registrations than I paid for repairs.

Well, we're settled in to our new home now. A bunch of repairs needed to be done, and the list isn't done yet. But hopefully soon I'll be starting on the basement as it's completely unfinished. If you happen to be in town and don't come by too terribly soon, we'll be thrilled to host you! We're very close to the school, so the kids now have an under-10-minute bus ride.

For Christmas we flew to the Fraser Valley on Christmas Eve, since that's easier to do now. Enjoyed some time with family. Went to the Glow festival in Langley, thanks to a family connection.

Glow.

Right before we headed for home on New Year's Eve, Carrie's poor sister broke her nose at the playground; some festive drama to end the year!