Journal: News & Comment

Moving house

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We live on the north slope of the Metrotown hill in Burnaby, the closest suburb of Vancouver. There have been houses and streets here for a hundred years, and the old inter-urban train from Vancouver to New Westminster used to run along the crest of the hill, a few minutes' walk south of here. (Now the SkyTrain follows a similar route.)

Diagonally across the street from us is an old farm-style house that has been here most of that time. My mother remembers walking past it in the 1940s when she took the train to visit someone who lived in this neighbourhood, which was then mostly farmland and brush. In the last decade and a half that house—which we've long called the "Amityville House" because of its design, and which had been falling into a bit of disrepair—has been extensively renovated. It is a beautiful structure.

The house was recently sold. A few days ago diggers and trucks started appearing and working in the yard. We feared the lovely old house would be torn down. But no. They're moving it. Not to another lot, but to a different location on the same one, which is very large and could easily hold two or three modern homes. The whole building has been hoisted onto a giant girdered platform, and workmen are slowly rotating and moving it closer to the street corner with big diesel trucks.

I'm guessing that once it's been settled, the lot will be subdivided and a new house put where the old one used to be.

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