Home ownership and a love story

Jody Pineholm
5 min readJul 22, 2021

Neither home ownership nor love always last, but a well-built house will.

The 1946 house built by my parents — photo by author 2021

We’ve seen the articles about how much better it is to rent than own property. We’re reminded that houses need repair and upkeep, maintenance costs are high and the return on our investment is low. By renting an apartment, we’ll be free to live our lives without worrying that we need to replace the furnace or the roof. Except that renters do pay for maintenance and utilities. They pay the salaries of the employees of the property management company, the rent and utilities for the offices of the property management company, the profits of that business, and the return on the investment for the people that own the property management company, usually a real estate investment trust. As their costs and profits go up, so does rent.

There is a better way, but the way we think needs to change.

This is the story of a house built on love.

My parents were married in 1943. My mother had been raised as a Catholic; my father’s family was Protestant. She was born on the prairies, near Edmonton, Alberta. He was born in Toronto, Ontario. He was a flight navigator in the Royal Canadian Air Force, who had been transferred to Victoria, British Columbia. She worked for Boeing in Vancouver. They met at a dance. Her sister and his brother stood up for them at their wedding.

They moved to Edmonton when the war ended in 1945, and my father received about $500 as a war veteran, to purchase land. The picture above is the house they built in 1946 for about $1,500. It’s a two bedroom bungalow close to downtown, and my mother designed it. They had been married three years with no sign of any children coming along, and saw no need for a large house. They didn’t need a garage, because they didn’t own a car. There was plenty of space for the two of them. There’s an extra bedroom, a little breakfast nook to have coffee and read the morning paper, and a built-in china cabinet in the dining room. It was perfect for a young couple, and the birth of my older sister a year later completed the family. Well, not really.

By 1959, there were six children. The three oldest children, including me, slept on bunk beds in the dining room. Obviously, eight people crammed into 925 square feet meant crowded conditions…

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Jody Pineholm

I’ve learned a few things. Reading is a great teacher, song lyrics rule, and poverty’s a bitch.