The critical time

There comes a time in everyone's life where one crucial decision causes a cascade of intended and unintended consequences. Our decision to build our home was one such decision. It was my husband's dream, something he had always envisioned doing. In fact, he had helped his best friend build his own dream home, so it was a plan that seemed certain to come to fruition.

The temptation here is to share every last gory detail of our home building odyssey. However, I should condense it down to the essential points. We bought a piece of land for more than we should have paid. We decided to build a house without a general contractor (i.e., my husband did the contracting) thinking that we could have the home we wanted for much less than we would normally have paid otherwise. Along the way, we hit many, many roadblocks. Costs spiralled out of control, money slid through our fingers, and long story short, we have a (mostly) finished house which is beautiful, but has drained us financially.

So what to do? The housing marketing takes a dive. Suddenly, we are "upside down", so even if we could sell our home (which we definitely don't want to do) we would not be able to recoup our costs, much less make a profit.

We're here, in this big, beautiful home, and commited to making it work. However, the flip side of this is that we're house poor. Which is essentially how I got to where I am now, and why I am consumed with trying to find my way out of this pit of debt and getting my head above water so we can actually enjoy our lives, instead of trying to make our paycheques last until the end of the month.