purple room vents: WE ARE ALIVE…MYSTERIOUS DAY

As you can see, we came out of yesterday's adventure in one piece! But holy cow!! what an adventure.

The locksmith guy was about forty minutes. Bill talked with a neighbour who told us that "some rich lady from west Vancouver owned the house, hadn't lived in it for ten years, some guy came around once in a blue moon and took mail in, and the house needed to be torn down and the lot was worth 450,000 and a couple of neighbours wanted to buy it." Okay then!

Aryn and Bradley showed up and we walked around the very rundown, haunted looking house and peeked in windows and took stock of the yard. Pretty sad sight. Finally locksmith guy arrived and busted out the lock and got the door open. We walked into the place completely blind to what we would maybe find.

The place was a mess, but not from junk so much as boxes and stuff here and there, gyprock gone, flooring gone and….sadly we did find a couple of dead cat bodies. A mamma and a young one. Can you imagine just leaving and letting your pets die of starvation and thirst? Who the hell does that?

But….a bedroom, bathroom, kitchen and office area had obviously been well lived in and taken care of. But….no one had been there for many many years. Things just seemed to have stopped in 2006.

It was just eerie, it was like someone had just simply got up, walked out the door and never came back. Things were just left right there…a coffee cup, an old computer on the desk with papers right there…mid work, clean dishes upturned on a dish rack, bedroom bed all made, clothes in the closet, jewelry in little bowls on her bathroom counter, kayaking medals hanging on the wall. In the other parts of the house were packed and sealed boxes, with her name on them, from Edenvale…a restoration company. I picked up bits and pieces and read random mail and files and name tags etc…and bit by tiny bit a picture emerged.

I took a ton of pictures and information with me when we left. On the ferry I googled her name and dug and dug and finally put together a probable scenario.

About ten years ago her house was flooded by a broken water main above her house. The water flooded the house and made a horrific mess. The insurance companies got involved, thus the restoration boxes. But, we know from when she initially got hold of us for a mortgage, it didn't go well and she needed to sue the city of Surrey. Thats all we know about that.

In about 2006 she had to move out of the mould growing house. She moved to her mother's very expensive home in West Vancouver. Thats when she came to us for a mortgage…to take care of those problems. In 2008 her mother died and left her and her brother very rich people.

Now here is the part that I finally found out with a little research. She put a large chunk of money into an account where the mortgage payments automatically came out of each month. Her last tax year that she paid property taxes was 2009. She sold off everything she owned, except for that house, and moved to Great Britain for a while, then moved to Kansas for a while and then in 2010 came back to Canada…Bowen Island to be exact.

This woman is a kayaking aficionado. She has won many competitions, and at one time was the top kayaker in North America. She is an instructor of instructors. She ran a teaching school on Thetis Island for a while. She became involved in helping set up Steamship Days on Bowen Island and from what we can tell, she is living there today! She bought a Monk 35 foot boat and it is moored at the Steamship Marina on Bowen Island and is living in it.

So now I will try to get hold of her and see what she would like done with the property. It is such a good feeling to finally be able find out what has happened to the owner of the house. There are a few in our past where even after we have cleaned out their place and sold it, we have never found out what happened to the owner. The only reason we ended up going after her is because even though she makes her payments, she neglected to pay property taxes. The house almost got sold for taxes. Thats too big a risk for us to take so we need to talk to her.

All in all though it was a really interesting day. I shall put some pics on here. TTYL