Well ... we went kind of crazy

I guess it was inevitable that we would at some time want our own house. I thought we might rent for a few more years but Sandie had other thoughts. One day last Jan she was walking to work at Look gallery which is on a pretty and very old street in Mazatlan. She saw a small, old home which was listed for sale by a local owner. After a couple of phone calls we had a chance to look inside. I've enclosed a couple of pictures of the place which actually might convince people we went, ... well, a little crazy. We had a contractor check it out who told us that it looked OK and used an expression we would hear a lot in the next year when we asked our contractor about doing something, (It's only concrete!)and decided to go ahead and make an offer.

And then just like that we were home owners in Mexico!!!! Well home might be an exageration, we had walls which needed desperatly to be repaired, no water, no electricity, no lights, no toilets, basically nothing. But we both thought we could see the possibilities.

We then had to go through the process of buying a home in Mexico. Although we have bought and sold and renovated a number of homes in Canada when it came to Mexico homes we were absolutly virgins. But we learned quickly. First down here you have to realize the buyer pays all of the closing costs and you need a Notario which is like a super lawyer to handle the paperwork. He checks land titles, taxes, other debts and ownership and guess what; one of the owners listed had passed away a number of years ago. Then the drama starts; the paperwork goes of to the state capital in Culiacan and on the Mexico City. The Mexican legal system does it`s thing and eventually all the corrected paperwork shows up back at the Notario to sign. We also get what is called a Fedicomicio, or bank trust. The bank actually holds the papers on the property for 50 years when you renew it so it is a real leap of faith that some government doesn`t come along and change the rules and foreign owners are sent packing but the chances of that happening really are virutually nill in the modern times. We sign the paperwork, every page of the Fedicomicio front and back (roughly 100 pages), they give us the keys and the house is ours.

And then, `We went kind of crazy` journey began. For the next few posts we`ll bring everyone up to date on the work we had done to the house, some pictures, Mexican renovation stories, our selling of our townhouse in Winnipeg and the purchase of a condo and the final push and move in at our new house in Mazatlan.