Finally Starting

Welcome to our new blog.  The Wendling family has been living in Port Colborne, ON for just over a year after spending 3 years of living in Suwon, South Korea.  One of the goals upon returning to Canada was to build a new house for our family - a house that would that be big enough for the 7 members of our family and a house that would take advantage of the fact that we would be living on 9 acres of "country land" within the City limits of Port Colborne and beside Ecole St-Joseph, our children's school.

During the Winter of 2011 Rosanne and Kevin worked with an architect to create a two storey raised bungalow, pictured below.

After many months of planning, considering, and contemplating the Wendling Family was issued a building permit on Friday, July 20th by the city of Port Colborne to begin construction on their new home on Elizabeth St. in Port Colborne.

To say that the family was excited and relived is an understatement.  The journey to build the house has been long due to the uniqueness of the property and the fact that Ministry of Transportation and Niagara Pensiula Conservation Authority need to give approvals prior to building beginning.

However, after submitting our application for a building permit we had another problem.  The problem was around having services to our lot on Elizabeth St. and the fact that the City and Region had placed equipment on our property without our permission.  This led to Rosanne and Kevin having to make a presentation to City Council.  That led to a newspaper article and many people in Port Colborne becoming interested in our plight.

Port Colborne is a great place to live, usually people let you go about your business - in this way they are very kind.  Yet, when we started having problems with the City we were very surprised by the number of people who supported us.  To them we say thank you.  In the end everything worked out and we are extremely happy to start building our new home!!

The first step was to "clear the lot".  That is we had many, many, many trees on our lot that needed to be cleared.  So with the help of Rosanne's nephews, Eric and Ryan, the family begin the process of cutting and clearing out the trees.

Over the next few months we will keep you up to date with the progress of our home, we hope you enjoy this experience as much as we do sharing it with you.