How the pandemic sped up our future dreams

November 19, 2020

As the year is slowly coming to an end, I have to admit that despite the 2020 craziness, a lot of amazing things happened. The pandemic created the perfect storm for some serious introspection. Jelger and I went from a busy schedule to nothing on the books practically overnight in March. Luckily from June on we picked up our cameras again and photographed several beautiful elopements and engagement sessions. But despite all of that, we had substantially more time off during the summer. And time off means time to think, ponder and wonder.

For years we’ve been talking about how important spending time in nature is to us. And we have a dream of actually living in nature, in a cabin in a remote location. We both felt strongly about this, but it was a far away future dream and one that seemed rather unattainable to be honest. However because of Covid and the extra time on our hands, we started looking at real estate websites again. Everything we saw was completely out of our budget. And then , after chatting with family, the idea of “why don’t you do it on your own, step by step” came up.

The land

As it often seems to happen when we make decisions in our life, things randomly start to happen. Suddenly we came across a small piece of land in Horsefly, BC, that was within our budget. And in the exact area we were dreaming of. When I say small piece, it’s 1.99 acres, which locals consider small out there. But for us city people, that’s MASSIVE. Not to mention that behind it is kilometres of Crownland (aka endless backyard). So we decided to drive over and take a look ourselves. From there on everything happened super fast!

We arrived in Horsefly on the evening of August 8th, and decided to take a quick look at the land, before our appointment with the realtor on the 9th. When we first experienced it in person, the whole plan seemed mad. The entire plot was on a slope, with no road access to even drive on it. Not to mention it all being forest. But then the realtor, who randomly drove by, saw our car parked on the side of the road and came by to say hi. When we started talking with her, we slowly started to see more possibilities.

Because we’re the kind of people that trust their gut, we decided right then and there to just go for it. We followed the realtor (she’s fabulous btw, check out their website) to her office. She managed to get a hold of the seller. And boom, just like that everything was done and signed the same evening. Weeks later we found out someone else would have purchased it the day after if we hadn’t snatched it away that evening. Speaking about lucky!

This is basically what everything on there looked like. 😉

Developments

With the winter approaching quickly, we knew that if we wanted anything done on the land, it had to happen quickly! Winters are harder in the interior and with those cold temperatures, there wouldn’t be any building/digging. But thanks to an awesome local team, we now have a driveway and a building platform!

Before and after in the same spot (still in progress).

What’s next

Next up will be either drilling the well or getting electricity connected. Did I mention we purchased “a slope”? Lol. No water/electricity/sanitation/…. Hopefully that’ll happen in 2021. Who knows! We try not to have too many expectations. But we’ll continue to build bit by bit over the next years, until eventually we’ll move out there and have a long commute for Vancouver weddings and shoots, lol. 😉

Thank you for joining us on this journey and know that every single one of our clients is helping us making this a reality! <3