The Clay Teacher Blog: Cart before the horse, or work before the permits.

Moving from the city of Edmonton with a metro population of over 1,000,000,000 to the village of Coutts with about 350 people, we might encounter a few differences. I was talking to the lady at my Edmonton bank the other day and told her we were moving and the population was 350. She thought for a moment then said "350,000 is a good sized city". She never considered only 350 people.

In August we went down to look a place we didn't buy and ran into our soon to be neighbour, but didn't know that at the time. We knew owners of the place we not home and we could only look at the outside, but we wanted to see the town as well. We chatted briefly with the neighbour, told him why we were there and he said he know a lady that had a key and he could let us in. This house had been rented and the renter had just moved out. The renter and owner had not had their walk threw, the owner didn't know we were there and had not given permission to go in and we just said no, there we too many liability issues. "You guys must be from the city, we don't worry about things like that here" said the neighbour.

Later we got the lot I talked about in the last blog and as soon as we got our development permit, we sent all the information off to Lethbridge last Friday for the building permits. They said it would take at least a week for all the permits to land. We talked to our contractor told him what we were doing and would send those permits out as soon as we got them and they could get to work. Winter is coming we wanted to move ahead as soon as possible. I got a panicked phone call the following Monday afternoon, I had not answered the contractors email he had sent that morning. He had the place landscaped and wanted to know where the water was going to come in so they could trench.. That was moving ahead fairly quickly. We are from the city and we do things differently. In small towns it must be the commutative law of building. It doesn't matter what order the building and permits come in as long as the end of the day you have construction and permits.

This is Monday morning waiting for permits.

We are going down early tomorrow to finish, or work on, trimming the trees and bushes. We will meet the contractor and lay in the electric cable. All this work and more has been done without us there, it's hard to stay home and work when all the action is going on at the new house. By the end of the month we should have house and lot together, but then we have to come back to Edmonton for November and work.

I am looking forward to going, seeing the work that is done, cutting some more trees and trying out our latest new toy, the hedge trimmer.

Until next time.