I always like these kinds of stories, and then I wonder what the after-story is. A couple hundred thousand in repairs, renovation and remodeling, I'm guessing the occasional B&B guest doesn't provide a huge amount of income. What do people who do this (move out to extreme rural areas and buy enormous and expensive to maintain offbeat homes like schools, churches, power plants and missile silos) do for a living to afford this?
I'd love to go out to random-rural-county and buy 20 acres of land and a school and turn it into a huge home, but then I'd be hours away from where I need to go to make the money to do that.
There's always some other parts of the financial story that never seems to come through in these kinds of articles.
They sold their house in Toronto, one of the most expensive cities in North America, and probably made a couple of million or so. The school was only $190,000 plus whatever it took to fix it up.
As the article states, the area is a tourism hub so their B&B is probably quite busy. Otherwise, assuming they own the school free and clear and grow a lot of their own food, I imagine they don't have many expenses.
I mean, that's cool. It'd be interesting if the article mentioned how much they made from selling their home. They could have sold their house underwater and are still servicing their old mortgage too. We don't know from the article what the story is.
Suppose they made money and have a million in the bank, how long can they ride on that before they have to pack it in and move back to a place where they can get jobs? What about their kid's future expenses, how are those sorted out?
The article mentions a couple things about their B&B:
- 3 rooms
- they get overflow from other B&Bs, not their own business.
- they only operate during the summer
So that puts an upper limit to what they can earn from that.
Going rate for Milford, ON B&B is about $200/night.
That's about $600/day. That's $54k/year before costs assuming full occupancy 7 days per week during the in-season.
The music camp alone is $900 to attend, with 50 students, and probably fills. That's 45K gross for a 5 day gig - I'd imagine they make 1/3 to 1/5 of that in rent:
I couldn't find a time when their AirBNB sites weren't booked, but they probably command a premium given the size and amenities and tolerance for animals/kids.
The math on a lot of this appears to be a lot of "slow and steady"
You seem to think that they owned their house in Toronto outright, which is rare for a young family, especially in such expensive area. Also, median detached house price in Toronto is just over a million, so if they got a couple of million, they had above average house as well, so it's still not clear how are they affording all of that. But, I don't think that's the point of the article, maybe they are trust fund babies, who cares.
> Also, median detached house price in Toronto is just over a million, so if they got a couple of million
Be careful, the Canadian real estate industry always publishes averagesales prices, not median prices, and not median valuations.
Which is why the numbers are rubbish: Their numbers are biased toward by whatever turns over more, and by a small number of high value sales.
It's the same reason why average income is a farce. The average of 4 unemployed homeless individuals and a $250k/yr lawyer is $50k/year. The median is zero and more representative of reality.
Once the industry starts publishing the average valuation of a 3bd 1.5ba home (detached or not, there's not a lot of detached inventory left!), listen to them. Until then, ignore their self-serving statistical butchery.
We have friends in the same area who recently bought a fixer-upper for $1.2 million. You're right, I'm assuming they owned outright but regardless, I'm betting they walked away with a nice chunk of change if they bought more than five years ago.
That is a great question, but it kind of takes the shine off don't you think? :-)
One of the things I look at from time to time is what sort of burn rate I'd be willing to tolerate while 'retired' (which is code for just doing what ever the hell I want without having to fit it into other agendas). And, because it showed up here on HN once, ran the numbers on a missile silo. The one I was looking at was less than a million dollars to purchase but my brother in law, the civil engineer, gave me a list of things that would have to be vetted/fixed before occupancy. Since it was a vertical silo I was thinking a 10 story living arrangement built inside the silo itself, with floors going down from the circular top floor and an elevator in the middle.
We figured that construction, retrofits, and infrastructure would cost about 3 - 6 million (depending on how much corrosion and toxic waste cleanup was required to remediate). Power for pumps to keep it dry during the wet season, insurance, maintenance about 7K a month (it costs a lot to pump water up a 100'). We figured you'd have to start with about $10M to exit the other side with a "self sustaining" environment you could live and work in (but a seriously "fun" environment to hang out in. You could pay someone $12K a year just to come out once a week and restock the larder with consumables.
It would definitely be something I'd explore if I had sufficient FU money. Drop out, drop off and just do whatever I felt like. I have enough things I'm interested in to keep me self-occupied for at least 20-30 years I'm sure.
UK TV series Grand Designs features people who self-build homes, or sometimes convert weird buildings (water towers for example) into homes.
The show talks a little bit about the finances, and how people often start over-spending on details.
In England this can save some money over just buying something as big / distinctive. And if the homeowners DIY there are further savings. And some people are just very fussy about details, so self-build or conversions allow them to have total control.
I was expecting you to bring up the point about how many of the people featured simply seem to have much more money than sense.
One that particularly sticks in the mind for me was a nice old gent who got heavily into drugs in his teens so his family trust fund was taken out of his control. He had to ask permission from the trustees to build a £350,000 custom designed house,specifically designed around him, even though he hated houses and had lived most of his life in a mobile houseboat and never spent much time in one place.
There seem to be some people doing it. I've been reading about this a bit lately, and also had been to a remote place recently, where someone had built a rather big "earthship" and was living pretty much off the grid. It looked, very roughly, like the Brighton Earthship shown in the Example section here, but was round, not rectangular:
> I'd love to go out to random-rural-county and buy 20 acres of land and a school and turn it into a huge home, but then I'd be hours away from where I need to go to make the money to do that.
Being a rural doctor is a sweet gig. They get paid as much or more than doctors in urban areas, so you can be making $300k in the middle of nowhere, Iowa.
Same in Ontario. You might even get paid more for working in a rural area than one would in the city. Plus no worry about insurance paying or whether your patients can afford the co-pay (that's all someone else's problem).
Well yes, but they still have to pay for it. For most people that means working, and that's time out of a day, most days a week.
They included what it used to cost to heat and power the school for a year, but never mention what it is now. Details that are interesting to the story but probably take away from the 'feel good' type of article they were trying to make.
I always feel there's kind of a weird slant to these kinds of stories...a "hey, look at how these clever people are living, isn't that a great idea hinthint maybe you can do it too!". And you'll see this kind of living referenced in all kinds of alternative living magazines and websites and whatever. It's like the tiny house movement, where you read about some daring young family who've moved into a 300 sqft shed with a composter out back. What you never hear is what life is like 2, 3 or 4 years later. (actually you do, and it's usually stories of people about to go crazy for lack of places to go just to have normal time alone after a year or so)
I think it potentially paints a false picture of what it takes to do this. For example, it mentions that the school was listed for $256k, has 10,600 sq ft of space and 8 acres of land. It sounds like a steal and so obvious that only idiots wouldn't think this sounds like a great idea.
But wait, it gets better! They actually only paid $190k for it! Well shit, I should sell my house, quit me job and cash in my 401(k) so I can live the highlife like these folks in my slightly oddball, yet roomy estate.
Sure it was a little bit of a fixer upper, but that's nothing some elbow grease won't fix. Heating bill is $4k/mo? No problem, I'll just bring the kids out and we'll chop wood.
It sounds like for under a quarter million these folks ended up with a little slice of consequence free paradise.
But that's obviously not true.
"After much searching he found a plumber who was willing to make the drive to the south-east corner of the county to help him get the new system running. Loads of insulation and 60 new windows were in place. Suddenly everything came together and they were all blissfully warm."
Okay, so that's like what, $60-100k in windows. $10-15k for a wood pellet boiler they could never install. Probably thousands of dollars in plumber bills (I can't get mine to come out to even look at a sink for anything under a couple hundred dollars). What do you want to bet that the school was packed full of asbestos they had to replace?
It talks about ways they save some money, gardening for vegetables (in those great long Canadian growing seasons) and run a B&B with 3 whole rooms (only in the summer months).
"Last summer, for example, all five of them planted seeds for growing organic corn. When the corn was ripe, the girls earned their own money for new tablets by selling it at a roadside table."
Well isn't that nice. That's a lot of corn. Are they basically just farming the property? 8 acres isn't a lot of land to support commercial farming. Now toss in the expense of farming equipment, seed, etc.
If so, they lose about 2 acres to the school, the tennis courts, the entrance and the back lot behind the building. From google earth it looks like they have about a quarter acre under cultivation right now...but the sports fields to the West look like they may have something growing. Some googling shows that you can get about $300 per acre for corn with costs of about $250/ac to grow it. So if they put all 6 available acres under cultivation they might get about $300/year in profit. Those poor girls must have been selling corn at that stand for years before they could all get tablets.
Actually it also look like they're planting trees that will eliminate lots of their arable property. That may be what's going on in the old sports fields.
"They have already planted 1,000 trees and aim to plant many more.
“We are treeing the land just as quickly as I can possibly do it,” Mr. Parker says."
Maybe this is a desperate attempt to cut down on the crazy heating bills?
Either way, they aren't paying for heating with roadside corn and 3 months of 3 room B&B overflow.
So either they started off wealthy and this is just some kind of "get back to the earth and spend time with our family" early retirement, or they're living in virtual poverty conditions. Wait until they need to spend $100k to reroof that school.
I really wish these kinds of stories would talk more about how these families make ends meet because otherwise it comes off as a little idealistic and even fantastic. These are incredibly expensive fantasies in these stories and I think lots of people believe it's not.
> To be perfectly honest, we really didn’t give our purchase the right amount of consideration. We were so excited and scared that we forgot to properly assess the practical side of owning a 65 year old institutional building with no insulation.
When you don't have a mortgage/rent payment, it appears that you can live a simple, full country life on very little. They run their 3 suite Bed & Breakfast ($200+/night each) plus they operate a bluegrass music camp/festival that brings does decently too. They've been able to get press for their little business, so I'm sure they're doing just fine.
Re-frame it in your mind as if they decided at 40 years old to put their savings and lucky timing in the housing market and invest in a low to no debt 'lifestyle' business.
edit:
A few other notes:
- people plant acres of trees with in-demand wood and then sell the future rights to those trees. Don't have trees growing, can't sell the future right to the trees. This is pretty common, and the author of the article probably felt it was obvious why they were planting a lot of trees.
- kids selling surplus produce at a roadside retail stand are not going to be selling by the bushel/acre. This is a lemonade stand, not a commercial business. The kids are going to have enough cash from their summer operation to buy new tablets or other fun things, but not enough money to survive on.
- I can buy forest land for less than 20$ / tree. If I go to Eastern Europe, I buy land with 10 year old oak for half that (if you buy large enough plots). Please quote a price for timber futures because your story sounds like baloney.
- 2 tablets - let's say $500 for two. A single piece of corn sells for what, 50 cents? At an expensive supermarket? Let's pretend they convinced everybody in that rural atea to pay urban prices. That means they had to sell 1000 of them, over two months, 15 a day, 7 days a week, from a roadside stall. Yeah, don't see that happening.
The corn thing is just running the numbers to make it logical, rather than illogical. Instead of buying $250 tablets, they could buy $50-$100 tablets. They could sell by the dozen, which would mean they'd only need to close one or two sales each day. Since their parents run a music festival / camp, and three B&B suites, I am generous enough to consider that they had enough traffic make enough to afford a tablet of some sort.
As far as timber futures or even the financial side of that business, I admittedly don't know much about. I do know of and see people that plant and maintain several acres explicitly for selling the lot's wood in the future. I assumed that such a time-expensive thing would have been turned into a financial product years ago, but that part I admit is a guess rather than fact.
> Some googling shows that you can get about $300 per acre for corn with costs of about $250/ac to grow it. So if they put all 6 available acres under cultivation they might get about $300/year in profit. Those poor girls must have been selling corn at that stand for years before they could all get tablets.
I suspect that the girls got all the revenue from the corn without having to cover the costs.
I get the same feeling from a lot of design magazines. I was looking at a slideshow of "five affordable prefabs" or something like that, and one of them was offhandedly mentioned as only costing $500k to build and furnish. Sigh.
The vast majority of decent new restaurants fail because they don't have enough money to last until business picks up. Most small restaurant owners have just enough money to open, and they assume they'll be making enough to pay expenses within a month or two.
But unless you're in a fantastic location, or already have a great reputation before you open, it takes time to build a steady customer base.
I think this is a great example of a growing societal acceptance of people experimenting and choosing alternative styles of housing and also city organization, especially ones that involve reclaiming/re-purposing space. The article's particular example focuses on redefinition and reuse of an existing structure in a very sparsely populated area.
In dense areas, other ways of re-purposing space are happening. Everyone has seen former industrial facilities converted into multi-unit housing. But these ideas are even creeping into traditional neighborhoods. In my case, I would love to convert my second parking spot into additional living space.
The idea is, with urban neighborhood land values so high (at least in booming areas), it's hard to justify providing housing for a second car).
Of course, this isn't even a new idea. For decades people have been kicking their cars to the curb so they can use their garages for other purposes (gym, workshop, playroom,...). In the coming decades, as people move more towards uber/lyft style services for transportation, I can see a lot of prime space formerly occupied by cars being freed up for creative re-use.
Who do you think is, I don't even know what, harrumphing at the idea of people buying old things and repurposing them? I live in the midwest and have a pretty good idea of what the stodgiest old-fogiest ideas about housing could be, and all I can think of even the retired guys around here thinking is "Hmm, that would be an interesting challenge." Repurposing barns is a cottage industry around here. (From what I gather, the farms are doing fine, but improved logistics has rendered a lot of storage excess to requirements.)
Repurposing space is basically what happens to space.
Renovating is more expensive than rebuilding. Renovated nice old buildings are a luxury, not a savings measure (I live in one, which we renovated ourselves - would've been cheaper and better to knock down and rebuild)
Depends on the building. We bought a house from the 40's on the small side (1500sf) that needed plumbing, electric service, all flooring surfaces replaced, kitchen guttend/replaced, both baths guttened/replaced, all appliances, and significant mechanical (furnace, water softener+filter), addition of closets, replaced deck, and probably stuff that I'm forgetting. Had a good roof, which was critical, because water damage would have sunk it (har har har). We did a lot of the work ourselves, saves a bundle. Contracted for about $40k of it up front to get it livable quickly.
Somewhat related to the story - I bought a pellet boiler off craigslist for $2800 and did 100% of the installation myself (electrical, plumbing [heat + water heater], control) all-in was about $3900, and I'm already in the black on it after 3 years use (vs. propane). I decided to burn lpg this year because it was 'only' $1.70/gal, and it turns out that even at that low price (compared to the last three years) I'd probably have been better off on pellets, but probably not better off enough to make up for all of the labor that it takes.
I set it up to automatically switch between the propane furnace and the boiler (I have a water/air hx) based on the boiler's temperature to make it seamless for my wife to use :). It's a Central Boiler Maxim M175 ... cranked all the way up, it might be able to heat his school (just barely) -- I run it at its lowest setting. Burns very clean, no smoke, happy neighbors.
Renovation can be done for a reasonable financial cost with an investment of time. Our house isn't super-luxury now, but it's perfectly serviceable and now we have a house on 11 acres that we couldn't have touched if it hadn't been a dump when we bought it.
In an old job I worked for an affordable housing developer who did this with properties down in New Bedford, MA. We'd turn old schools into affordable housing units. Same with a hospital in Connecticut. It's a great way to increase the number of affordable units while using old buildings.
Note the firewood. Lots and lots of firewood. Those high ceilings and cavernous rooms are a nightmare to heat. That wood stove must run 24/7.
I'm all for re-purposing, but there is a point at which a building built for one purpose just isn't suitable for any other. Elementary school into residence/home might be that line.
Moving into a giant, expensive-to-heat home is one thing, claiming as they do in the article that it's part of a quest for sustainability is a little bizarre.
The headline says "Toronto family" but the school itself is pretty rural and not that near Toronto. I expect taxes are lower than their urban house and zoning is pretty relaxed.
The headline is "Toronto family ditches the city for old school fixer-upper in country" (at least in the <title>) and the tagline says "the obstacles they overcame in moving to the country." It seems quite clearly to be talking about a family who moved from Toronto, the city, to the country, not that their endpoint is in the city.
That's a 1.5 hour drive from Toronto, not even considered the Greater Toronto Area. I am sure the Globe is putting them under the Toronto umbrella to get views; who the hell could afford to do this in Toronto... oh wait it's not Toronto, but you already gave them your traffic.
See my comment to your parent. I don't think it's about getting more views, when talking about a transition from city to country. In the second paragraph: "They had been ruminating for years, however, about leaving Toronto for a more free-spirited life in the country with their three young daughters."
Americans just assume that in Canada, taxes are slightly higher, corruption in local government less prevalent, and land use restrictions less severe.
Of course, some of us may also believe that Canadian taxes may be paid in maple syrup, Molson lager, or ketchup chips, and that the revenue agency is required to sincerely apologize for every remittance accepted.
As a national aggregate, we don't get out much, even to visit the neighbors.
My question was based on the opposite actually: I had an assumption that US property tax would be higher, building code more strict, and zoning laws less permissive. I just felt like buying a gigantic old school and living in it would be a massive administrative pain in the backside in the US, but sort of a nicely achievable bit of whimsy in Canada.
(I'm British, but own property in the US, and I'm staggered by the size of my property tax bills here vs. the UK, and more so by the sheer number of permits I have to get for doing trivial work I'd tackle myself in the UK).
Americans love burdensome zoning laws. They appeal to our inner racist. Unfortunately for them, buildings like schools, fire stations, and police stations are usually in residential zones anyway. The major problem in the US is that there's just no way you would be able to set up a bed and breakfast as easily as the article implied.
Our property taxes vary wildly in the US. One place, you might pay 3% of the fair market value, and in another, only 0.25%. Or maybe the assessment value is restricted by some formula. Maybe it's reassessed annually, or maybe every 3 years. There's really very little consistency, because property taxes are usually assessed locally and the major service provided from them is the local public schools.
Building codes between Canada and the US are pretty much the same. In either place, there's a "model code", but each locality has to adopt it explicitly for it to be in effect. Some places adopt it without modification, and others amend it heavily. A Canadian town could adopt the American model code (called the international building code, of course) if it wanted to, or vice versa.
But for the most part, they have nearly identical intent, even if the implementations are far apart. As long as you hire local contractors for the work, you shouldn't need to know the particular variances in the building codes. Either way, you won't be allowed to do anything serious without a work permit, and someone will inspect the heck out of it.
(Of course, the permits and inspections are often ignored for DIY work.)
I doubt you would even be able to buy an old public school building in many places in the US. Perhaps in Detroit. Most local governments would rather board it up or use it for administrative offices than sell. You would have better luck finding an old church.
"In the last year of its operation, the heating oil bill for the school was $38,000 and the electricity was another $10,000. They needed a better system."
I would love to live in an unconventional house. There are schools closing in surrounding farming areas regularly but most are too much travelling time and poor Internet access.
When there are some good ones with decent services not far from population, the government seems to have problems getting the schools on the market. By the time anyone can buy them they would be ruins.
Bravo on the out-of-the-box thinking. Nice to see someone make such an opportunity happen, showing others that status quo need not be adhered to.
I once seriously considered buying a defunct health club for the same domestic purpose. Adapting the locker rooms seemed the most daunting aspect, but the 3-lane full-length indoor pool was awful tempting.
Notice how far out the family had to go to make it work: fully insulating walls, wood heat, and a large garden among other factors.
I lived two streets down from there. High Park has both very posh houses and not-so-posh (as in: derelict) ones, it's very much a mixed bag there, especially on the North-East side.
I hope the wood splitting picture was staged. Those girls are a few feet from a man swinging an axe splitting wood. That's an accident waiting to happen.
I do not believe it was staged. While there is a risk of danger, I believe it is a small risk. Perhaps a the axe head flies off, or a block of wood shoots out and hits the kid. But those risks are small, and it doesn't make a lot of sense to spare a child the experience of physically working to heat your dwelling in order to insure they are safe from an unlikely accident.
Anecdotally, my dad and I drove into the woods and cut down trees for the fireplace in my family's house. After he cut down the tree, he would cut the tree into 1 foot rounds and then split them with a maul. The cut, triangular pieces had to be loaded and stacked into the back of a pickup, and it was back breaking work.
However, every time the work was done, I remember feeling a sense of accomplishment and contemplating how it was the drudgery that ultimately created that feeling.
I think that we should not spare our children these enormously valuable learning experiences in the name of safety.
Your dad could have stacked logs in the truck and cut them to length and split them near the permanent stack location. Otherwise, you're stacking once in the truck bed and then again at the woodpile. Perhaps he was building your character instead of seeking efficiency.
A little bit of gratuitous labor helps the lesson sink in. So maybe you set up a little contest with your victi-er, kid. You each take half the logs and whoever finishes first wins. You even let the kid get a head start. They're concentrating hard because they want to win. But behind their back, you're using a log splitter instead of a maul. When you yell out "done!" they look around, and see that you "cheated". Hopefully, they learn the value of appropriate technology over brow sweat.
That guy shouldn't be swinging that maul so close to his kids, not for safety reasons, because he should be using at least a lever-operated log splitter instead.
I guess risk acceptance is different person to person. I know that when splitting wood, there is often pieces flying in random directions. I would at least have my kids wearing safety glasses. It doesn't take much to lose vision in an eye and all because you don't want to wear safety glasses?! Not for me.
This seems to be a modern, Western approach to thing. I've seen South American tribal folk give a 5 year old a machete to do actual work. I didn't see a lot of dismembered children.
A lot of it comes down to family training. The older kids teach the younger kids what to do and not do. This doesn't protect from every little thing, but life is not that safe.
You do need training however. I was in Montana as a child with my dad on business. The client lived way out in the middle of nowhere. He was a big man (bigger than my father who's 6' 1"). He reached into a drawer, pulled out two bear size handfuls of .22lr, showed me how to load the riffle (fortunately I'd been trained by my dad and grandfather on hunting small game around the farm) and told me the adults need to talk. What he didn't tell me is that it was a modified .22lr: full auto. I was in for a surprise when 10 rounds cracked out at supersonic speed. I was fine and had fun. It could have been bad though.
I may not be from a rural area, but it doesn't take a genius to know that wearing safety glasses is simply a smart thing to do.
>SUMMARY: Wood chopping is still present in many homes in rural regions. In some cases, it may lead to serious ocular injury and potential loss of vision.
I'd love to go out to random-rural-county and buy 20 acres of land and a school and turn it into a huge home, but then I'd be hours away from where I need to go to make the money to do that.
There's always some other parts of the financial story that never seems to come through in these kinds of articles.