Floating in the Caribbean Sea...

My husband Paul broached the subject of selling our lovely Victorian home in downtown Toronto and moving our family out to the country. Perhaps it was the calming effect of the salt water, or the rum I had with breakfast, but I didn't say no.

For eight years we had been working on our house. It was over a hundred and forty years old and rather like an old finicky lady, it had it's own way of seeing things. Then, as we started to consider having our first child, the universe gave us twins. We couldn’t have been happier but it started to eat at our savings and our free time. We were working to live and both had started to feel quite tired.  

The more he talked of living mortgage free, the more it seemed to make sense. Three months later here we are. We sold our house quickly and happily to some friends and moved our brood to Orono Ontario; a town Paul had lived in years before we ever met. We bought a house on Main St. that stood empty for many, many years. I fell in like with it online, and in love with it when I saw it in person. It would need a complete do over inside, but blessedly had already been gutted, so it was really like a blank (but filthy) canvass.

Around the same time we had decided that city life was no longer in the cards for us, we went out to see a musician Bradleyboy MacArthur play. Bradley is a one-man band and a force to be reckoned with both onstage and off. He also happens to live in Orono. We got to talking to him between sets and he spoke of his home in the country and the simplification of life with such reverence it struck a cord with both Paul and I. The more we got to know Brad, his lovely wife Jude and their family, the clearer it became for us that that is what we wanted. We were both from smaller towns and really wanted to have our kids grow up somewhere where they’d know everyone.

This is a story of transformation; both for our home and our lives.  

My son Shepard sums it up best...chaos, but great chaos.