Scores of city-dwelling Canadians daydream about ditching it all for a quieter, simpler country life. In an ongoing series, The Globe talks to ex-urbanites who actually got out of town – for good.
In 2011, my wife and I were living in a small condo in Mississauga. I read an article in a magazine that mentioned off hand that people make beer at home.
For Christmas, my wife, Adrianne, bought me a home-brewing kit. It was the coolest thing in the entire world. I clearly remember it was Jan. 6.
I was standing over a pot on the stove boiling this stuff in our little condo and I said to my wife, “I’m going to do this for the rest of my life.”
About the same time we started talking very seriously about moving. I remember lamenting how expensive it was to live in Toronto and how hard it was to have the life we wanted.
I said to my wife, I wish we could just skip to that point where we retire back to Napanee and buy a house on the water and live our dreams. She said, “You know, we could just do that.”
From there it was a whirlwind. We decided we had three goals. We wanted to move back to Napanee, where I grew up, and buy a century home that was hopefully on the water. We wanted to open the brewery and we wanted to have a family.
We moved back to Napanee in September, 2012.
We bought a 190-year-old home and renovated it top to bottom with own our hands. We finished the renovations in November. On Dec. 3 last year we got our bank approval for the brewery and on Dec. 4, we found out we were expecting.
I was really lucky that when we moved home I could bring my career with me – I work in communications and marketing for Telus. Adrianne didn’t have the same benefit. At the time she was working as an office manager.
When we moved here we had the financial breathing room to live on a single income. It allowed Adrianne to go back to school and study human resources and really find her career and find her place here.
If we had bought a house in Toronto it would have been my biggest nightmare. Toronto is an incredible place, but the benefits don’t outweigh the negatives for me. The life you can live in a place like Napanee is just so different.
I’m sure it would have been possible to open the brewery in Toronto. Having said that, the brewery is more than just a business for us. What I really want more than anything is for this brewery to be a pillar for the life I am building for my family. This is the life I want.
As told to Dave McGinn