“After missing out on a lavender farm and almost buying a dilapidated house, we finally found paradise two hours from the city”

Jimmy Ioannidis: In 2015, my wife, Tracy, and I were working in advertising at the same downtown firm and living in a gorgeous mid-century side-split in Guildwood with our two sons, Finlay and Hayden. I was a copywriter at the time, and it was fine, but I wasn’t looking to climb the corporate ladder.

Tracy Ioannidis: I, on the other hand, loved my work in art direction. It was my passion, and I was driven. It was tough balancing motherhood with my professional ambition, but I was happy managing my team and working with clients.

Jimmy: Meanwhile, demands across the advertising industry were growing as resources were shrinking. We both saw it shift from being a cool sector to a soul-draining grind.

Tracy: I would often come home, do my mom thing—cook a meal, hang out with the boys, put them to bed—then get back on my laptop and keep working late into the night. The impossible turnarounds made it hard to enjoy time with my sons.

Related: I left Toronto to live in a small town and missed it terribly. Now I’m back for good

Jimmy: By summer of 2015, I was dreaming of escape, so I casually browsed properties for sale online and totally fell in love with a lavender farm with a licensed B&B in Prince Edward County. Whenever Tracy had a particularly bad day at work, I would half-joke, “Is it a lavender farm day?”

Tracy: Every time I’d come home crying, Jimmy would say, “Are we buying the farm?” I liked dreaming about it, but I wasn’t ready to leave my steady income. Plus, Finlay and Hayden were both in braces then, and orthodontics are expensive, so we had to consider their needs too. The farm eventually sold, and the idea faded.

Jimmy: Soon afterward, our company downsized, moved my department to another city and let me go. Then, at the beginning of the pandemic, Tracy was also let go. Life felt precarious. But then I noticed that our little lavender farm was for sale again.

Tracy: I was terrified. The thought of farming lavender sounded ridiculous, but Jimmy is such a big dreamer, so we hatched a business plan. Jimmy reminded me that, over one weekend, those farms can see more than 10,000 visitors—many of them willing to pay just to take a selfie beside the flowers. Jimmy, the kids and I made a deal: if we bought the farm, Hayden and I could get a dog, and Jimmy and Finlay could get a tractor. The boys were more on board than we expected, and I started to dream about the B&B side of things. I liked the idea of hosting wine-night escapes from the big city.

Jimmy: In August of 2020, we went to check out the lavender farm, and PEC was glowing: every farm was in full bloom. The seller’s agent, a little old lady who looked like Granny Webster from Looney Tunes, showed us around.

Tracy: She had a smile glued to her face, and she kept insisting on baking us an apple pie. After we finished the tour, she even offered to represent us, which was strange considering we already had an agent.

Jimmy: I asked three of our friends—a banker, a tech company owner and a lawyer—to look over the farm’s financial statements. Their opinions varied, but overall they agreed that it looked like a prosperous opportunity.

Tracy: We were sold. From then on, we were in constant correspondence with the seller. We had many questions, and we visited the farm to assure them that we were all-in.

Jimmy: It took us about three months to plan and secure a business mortgage—something we learned is harder than securing a residential mortgage, especially for two unemployed people. It was challenging to convince the bank that our future income would be sufficient since the seller hadn’t kept a solid record of their cash transactions.

Tracy: On our second visit to the lavender farm, we discovered that a young couple was also interested in the property, but the seller and Granny Webster seemed committed to us in our email correspondence.

Jimmy: Finally, in December of 2020, the bank approved our business mortgage, and we were ready to present our offer.

Tracy: Then, the unthinkable happened—the seller accepted a lower offer from a buyer their agent was also representing.

Jimmy: The seller didn’t see our offer at all.

Tracy: When I got the call, I just crumpled into a ball. I had finally convinced myself that buying the lavender farm was our destiny. But, now, all we could do was have our agent write the real estate governing body a scathing email.

Jimmy: We had to sell our house in Guildwood to make any sort of transaction happen, so we decided to list it while looking for another home and business opportunity. In January of 2021, we frantically prepped the house, storing half of our stuff in a Stouffville locker and leaving the rest with Tracy’s parents.

Tracy: Finlay and Hayden’s attitudes toward moving took a nosedive. Like us, they had dreamed about their new lives in PEC. Rolling lockdowns had already hindered their social lives. Now, neither of them wanted to move anymore.

Jimmy: After many late nights moping on the couch with bourbon and Peaky Blinders, we listed our house in February of 2021 for $949,000. It sold in just five days for $1,225,000, well over what we expected. It was all the money we had, and we were willing to go all-in for the right house and right business. We secured a long close for the end of May.

Tracy: After the sale, we kicked our hunt back into high gear, but we couldn’t find a single property. We had to pack up and move to my parents’ place while the boys finished school online. Narrowing our focus, we decided to find a home first and figure out the business side later—still a challenge since many realtors were forbidding in-person viewings due to Covid.

Jimmy: I started looking at anything and everything, all styles of opportunities in a wide range of locales from Owen Sound to Prince Edward County, desperate for a soft landing. We were looking for a modern house with a huge kitchen, hardwood floors, ensuite bathrooms and walk-in closets, but nothing called to us. At one point, we had three different agents for three different regions, and I calculated that I had driven over 30,000 kilometres just seeing properties.

Tracy: Our goal was to find the perfect home by August, to give the boys enough time to transition before school.

Jimmy: We had some close calls. In April, we visited a gorgeous Victorian home in Port Hope. We offered $11,000 over asking. Our only requirement was that we be allowed an inspection, but the seller passed on us. Months later, I heard that the entire main-floor ceiling had collapsed.

Tracy: About two months later, we saw a beautiful former church manse in Clarksburg that we loved, but it sold for $920,500—out of our comfort zone—and we would have had to keep full-time jobs to manage the mortgage. So we trudged on.

Jimmy: At the end of June 2021, one of our agents mentioned a listing for us in Warkworth, a quaint small town in Northumberland County with a strong artistic community. But its population was barely 1,000 residents, and we had reservations. What kind of social life would our family have?

Tracy: Finlay was now open to moving again, as he would have been switching schools in Toronto anyway. Hayden, though, was still crushed.

Jimmy: I remember driving through Warkworth’s downtown, rounding the corner, seeing our potential new place and thinking, Where are we, a movie set? It was so charming.

Tracy: It was a quirky 1,900-square-foot Queen Anne–style house with almost none of the qualities we were looking for—but it was love at first sight. It had a tiny kitchen, all sorts of different flooring, closets that would more accurately be called indents and horrible heat retention in the winter. Still, with three sunny bedrooms, a lush backyard and a cool loft, it felt perfect for our family.

Jimmy: The original owner was a carpenter who had done much of the work himself, and the beautiful woodwork brought such a unique feel. The staircase has an acorn detail that still mesmerizes me. But it was the porch that sealed it for me. I could see Tracy and I reclining on the swinging bench and waving to our neighbours for years to come.

Tracy: Our only hurdle left was Hayden. During the viewing, he sat in the car, arms crossed, with his gaze firmly set on the street. Nothing I said could get him out of the car, but the rest of us had to move forward. The owner had listed the house at $649,000. We offered $599,000. We were the only serious bid on the block, so they accepted. The process felt effortless—a complete departure from our recent house-hunting experiences.

Jimmy: After moving in, I took a job at Home Hardware, and Tracy started working for a local company called Simply Staging. For the next year, we continued to look at potential turn-key businesses for sale.

Tracy: It’s funny, pretty much three people own all of Warkworth’s main street.

Jimmy: Then our realtor friend contacted us about a café called Our Lucky Stars that was selling privately for $750,000. It had a big community following, and its great lunch program piqued our interest. The space was the perfect size, the numbers looked good and we wanted a slice of that downtown movie-set atmosphere badly.

Tracy: The owner, Lizzie, was guarded. It was her baby, and she didn’t want it going to a thoughtless buyer who would upend everything she had built.

Jimmy: She interviewed us as if we were applying to nanny her children.

Tracy: Even after meeting a few more times, Lizzie was hesitant. So she asked, “Would you like to come work here? Try a shift and just come hang out?”

Jimmy: Neither of us had extra time to spare, let alone recent experience in hospitality, so we gently declined.

Tracy: But she asked again. It was really important to her. So I went in once a week for a few hours, then increased that to twice a week for about a month and a half.

Jimmy: Eventually, I went in for shifts too. We love entertaining, and it felt like a treat getting to do that every day. Feeling more at ease, Lizzie accepted our offer of $647,000. Once we took ownership, we immediately applied for a liquor licence so we could put wine on the menu.

Tracy: We’re making incremental changes, but still hosting tons of art and wine events, the way we had dreamed of originally. The place is now called K Okay Café and Roasters. We’re trying to make it our own space without upsetting the community—and we’ve received great feedback. If, five years ago, you’d told me I’d be a café owner living in a small town, I’d have called you nuts. But I’m so happy to have landed here after so many false starts.

Jimmy: Everything fell into place for Hayden too.

Tracy: After three months of disgruntled teenage-boy energy, one day, about a week into school, Hayden plunked himself down on the couch and said, “Mom, I love my new school. Everybody’s my friend, and they said they’re so glad I moved here.” I cried—happy tears this time. We were all finally at home in Warkworth.

Did you leave Toronto with no regrets? Send your story to realestate@torontolife.com.