Baņuta: Had I hesitated one hour longer we would be packing now. Had I not pulled over into the parking lot. Had I not asked Alan to cancel our application.
We saw the St. Johns house on a Friday. Someone had already made an offer. We needed to move quickly. I sat in a dressing room holding the phone to my ear, staring at myself in a mirror, surrounded by lightbulbs like an anxious starlet in a black-and-white film, sweet-talking the potential landlady into considering me and Alan and Keely and the cat Oreo as the best tenants she would ever have. Better than those other people, whoever they were.
She was walking her dog and I googled it and said ‘oh, Akitas, amazing,’ though I’m not a dog person.
She said she was just over thirty. She had bought the townhouse as a place to live once she got married (she’s single) but not to worry, she now thinks if she does get married (though she’s single), she would buy a condo so she can be closer to work. She told me the other offer came from a family with three children, two cats and a dog. She didn’t want that many pets, she told me. The house on St. Johns was next to an elementary school, so I began rooting for the family.
Nevertheless, that night Alan and I filled out the application. I got a text from her that she was calling our references at 9 am on a Saturday morning which was way too early and a worm began to eat at me. Did I want this woman as our landlady? Someone who planned for a marital home before she had a steady date? Someone so bored they couldn’t wait to check up on us?
That Saturday my car was finally being towed and I was on my way to the Collision Reporting Centre to file a report. This was a long drive from our house, and as I threaded through the traffic in my rental car, I was consumed by doubts. Should we do it? I wondered. Should we live there? Should we jump? It’s been such a long process and we’re both sick of looking so why not take this place?
The traffic got so gnarly that I was going to be late for the next thing and so I decided to abort my mission and swung into a parking lot to go back downtown. I stopped asking myself questions. Instead I phoned Alan and asked him to text said lonely-hearted landlady and rescind our application. Even though I was the one who loved the place.
Because I was the one who loved the place. The One. The only one!
It was the first property I’d seen in a very long time that had a great office space for me. A big attic on the third floor of a townhouse with a walk-in closet, an ensuite bathroom and a soaker tub. Ah, the soaker tub. Nothing is more seductive than a soaker tub. I figured I could just stay up there soaking forever, I could buy a small fridge, maybe a little coffee maker, get all wrinkly and pink and never go downstairs. In fact, I didn’t want to go downstairs. Downstairs was too far away and downstairs was the problem.
The current tenants warned us that the kitchen was so small that if you opened the oven you couldn’t open the dishwasher. There was no way Alan and I would ever be cooking together without hitting each other with pot lids or poking each other with knife sharpeners. And there was no garden, and the tenant pointedly told me that no one ever sat out on their balcony, the view was too ugly.
I don't care, I said. Soaker tub, office, happiness. I will get used to cursing the tiny kitchen. We will get used to not having a garden and a landlady who keeps us updated on her love life. That’s what I said as we put in the application. Then I got stuck in traffic, wondering could we do better? Are we just exhausted? We still have six months to look?
I’m not going to talk about the other place Alan took a fancy to and was convinced I would love. That place on Clendenan had cracks on the walls and I could break the flimsy banisters with my bare hands. The kitchen was so small that you could fold it into an airplane. But I said I wouldn’t talk about it. So, read on.
Alan: It’s time we tell you about Mandy. Mandy is not a house we looked at, Mandy is our real estate agent. She shows us the places we think about renting. But she doesn’t show us all of them. She shows us only the ones that have other agents attached. She didn’t show us Clendenan or St John’s which are the focus of this entry. And that’s why this is a good time to mention her.
The last time I looked for an apartment was about 20 years ago. I saw the ad, talked to the owner who lived on the main floor of a lovely house on Dovercourt, we hit it off and he rented the third floor to me. That turned out to be a tragedy for the two young men on the second floor but that’s another story. The point is, it was a simple transaction, I don’t think the landlord, who reminded me of Topol in Fiddler on the Roof, asked to see references, let alone bank statements or pay stubs or tax returns. He just liked the cut of my jib and he thought he would enjoy having me as a tenant.
But that was then. Now most apartments or houses you want to rent are represented by real estate agents. I guess it was inevitable they would expand their scope from home sales to home rentals. If you respond to an ad, usually there’s an agent handling it and they arrange the viewing and if you want it, they do the work of judging your appropriateness as a tenant.
But it gets complicated because, just as with home sales, agents who represent properties for rent can also represent potential renters. Like us. When a young woman named Mandy showed us a couple of properties she represented , and offered to help us look for other properties, we were already represented by another person named Michelle. But we liked Mandy, we thought she would “get” us and I think we were right about that. And I thought Michelle was getting tired of us, so we said sure, what the hell. And then I had to tell Michelle, “it’s not you, it’s me” and we started going out with Mandy.
By the way, if you’re thinking that “Mandy” and “Michelle” are also song titles, then you figured that out before I did. I don’t know which of those songs I prefer.
In any case Mandy, who indeed came and gave without taking (at least until she gets her commission), put us on a mailing list and we automatically get sent prospects every day. But I also get these emails from what they call “rental aggregators” - which is another thing they didn’t have when I was a young renter. I look at the ones Mandy sent and tell which ones we’re interested in and I also tell her about the ones she didn’t send. If the places I sent her are on MLS, meaning they’re represented by an agent, she sets up a viewing along with the ones she sent. But sometimes she tells us that the properties I send her are not represented by an agent. So we have to arrange the viewing ourselves, with the landlord just like in olden times.
The other day I slipped up and sent an enquiry on a place, instead of telling Mandy about it first, and it was represented by our former agent Michelle and she sent a terse message saying I was wasting her time and I should set it up with Mandy.
I’m sure when Baņuta reads this she’ll say it’s confusing. And I’ll say that’s good because I’m also confused sometimes by this arrangement.
So a couple of weeks ago I saw a place on Clendenan in a Facebook ad and I knew that at the time it didn’t have an agent so I didn’t contact Mandy about it. Then I saw the ad for a place on St John’s, and I told Mandy about it but she told me it wasn’t listed on MLS. So we were on our own for both places.
Clendenan is a lovely street that I have been aware of since the early seventies when I bought a green Volkswagen Bug from a guy on Clendenan and it turned out the brakes were so defective that the Ontario Ministry of Transportation asked me if they could take my brakes to put in their museum of “Believe it or not, this passed a mechanic’s safety check.” If we got a place on that street, we could stay in the neighborhood, be close to High Park and close to the subway. I went to it without Baņuta. It was a second and third floor of a Victorian house. And I could see that it was a bit of a dump but it had a beautiful third floor room that I thought might just make Banuta so happy that she would decide to ignore the general dumpiness , the small kitchen, and the absence of a garden.
I say it had a general dumpiness, but it wasn’t too dumpy for this guy. I could have been happy there. I liked the location, and I liked the price which was at least 500 dollars less than any place we’d seen or are likely to see, especially since it included utilities. And along with the potentially beautiful room for Baņuta, most of all it had that Toronto Victorian house feel which I’ve enjoyed in the past and which I could enjoy again. I thought I could feel at home there.
I told Baņuta she should definitely see Clendenan but before that, we went to see the one on St John’s, which turned out to be, in many ways the polar opposite. It was a townhouse, it was 20 years old rather than 120 like Clendenan. I could see she loved the place. I didn’t. It was a townhouse, I could stop right there. It was too new, I felt squeezed in by houses on both sides, both of which were populated by retired couples. I didn’t like that it had no backyard, that the immediate surroundings front and back were pretty barren, and that it had a surprisingly claustrophobic kitchen, especially for an otherwise decently arranged space.
Baņuta agreed to hold off judgement until she could see Clendenan, which it was clear, the moment we got there, she hated. She later asked me why I wanted to live in a slum. Which I can laugh about now. Ha ha ha.
We couldn’t have been much further apart. Nonetheless when she said let’s take the St John’s I said okay. And not because I’m such a martyr. I liked that it was in the west end, that my 24 hour gym was right around the corner, that there was enough space for me and my (gradually dwindling) record collection. But mostly I figured that I would get used to the things I didn’t like about it. After a while it would just be where I lived with my girlfriend and my daughter and my stuff. It would be home, even if occasionally I found myself pounding on the walls screaming “Back the fuck off!!”
Also I was feeling like I was ready to stop looking so if this too clean claustrophobic townhouse was the end of the road, so be it.
I know this makes it seem like Baņuta and I are 180 degrees apart on what we’re looking for and that that might explain why we’ve had difficulties finding a place. But we have both loved places at the same time and our differences have seldom manifested as clearly as they did with these places.I have a high tolerance for what you might call griminess - as I often tell people “I don’t see dirt” - whereas she has a low tolerance for a single crumb on the dining room table so the contrast between Clendenan and St. John’s was like a perfect little storm.
I had already talked to the St John’s landlady on the phone. I knew that she was kind of….maybe ‘insecure’ is the right word. When I told her that I couldn’t go see the place the previous day because I had to go to the hospital for a checkup, she got really quiet and said something that almost sounded like “if you’re dying maybe you shouldn’t rent my house.” After the appointment, which was an annual CT scan of my lungs, she asked how I was and seemed relieved to hear I was healthy enough to pay rent.
And so I wasn’t that surprised when she asked for all kinds of things from us, including our income, our tax returns, pay stubs and references. And when I said I’m not sure I’ve ever seen a pay stub in my life, she suggested I get screengrabs of my deposits. No fucking way was my unspoken response. But Baņuta delivered hers.
This was on a Friday night. The next day Saturday she started calling our references. In the meantime Baņuta was getting cold feet. In the past when she had cold feet I would warm them up, but this time I didn’t want to. I had started to like the place less and less as we handed the landlady more and more personal info. I got worried that with neighbors behind every wall I’d have to play my music quietly. But mostly, it’s what I said before. I don’t want to live in a new townhouse. Sometimes i can be a bit “princess and the pea”. Even if I never heard the neighbors, I can imagine myself feeling squeezed on both sides. It just wasn’t me.
I can’t speak to all of the reasons Banuta soured on it but a lot of it was the kitchen. I don’t think it’s too much to ask to have a kitchen two people can be in at the same time, or where you wouldn’t be annoyed every time you’re making food. I think that was the straw for her. And I’m glad there was one.
The funny thing is that just before Baņuta called me to say let’s not do it, I had gotten a call from my ex-wife whom I had given as a reference. She told me that she’d spoken to the landlady, and she was sure we were going to get it. So when Baņuta said let’s not do it, I texted the landlady right away to call it off. And she texted right back that she was just about to call and give it to us.
All the stuff the landlady had asked us, she referred to as “normal due diligence.” But Baņuta had found out at this point that the landlady had asked one of our references (our neighbour) whether she thought Baņuta and I would break up any time soon. I guess if I had liked the place and wanted to get it, I would have laughed off that invasion of our privacy. But I’m glad we called it off and I won’t have to worry that my landlord is monitoring us for signs of relationship strain.
None of that bullshit would have happened if we’d looked at it with Mandy. That’s the point. Mandy would have ran interference on all of it. Mandy would have made up a beautiful story about the lovely family that we are - who are never ever going to break up or get sick and die - and the woman would have begged us to move in.
[Which she did. After we said no, she ran due diligence on the poor family with three kids and too many pets and they didn’t pass her muster. Maybe a reference told her the couple fought a lot? She asked us did we want to reconsider, which we didn’t. But in the meantime she has dropped the price by $200/mth. Had she offered that to us, who knows. Maybe Alan would be squeezed into a townhouse. B.R.]
If we’d looked with Mandy, maybe she would have told us “it’s a townhouse, what are you thinking?” Probably not. But she would have protected us.
Anyway I was kind of looking forward to ending this thing, writing our last blog and not looking at any more houses but I don’t want to stop just to stop. It would have been a good time to do it though. As we start December, it is getting a bit weird. Baņuta is going away to Australia for the month of January. If we find a place this month for next month, she’ll have to spend this last month - including Christmas and a visit from her son - packing up. And that will cause enormous stress on her and then on me, especially if I have to do the move without her. But if we wait till after she comes back, Mandy tells us the market might heat up again and the prices will jump accordingly. And since very few people apparently want to move in the winter, that might work in our favor if we can find something soon.
PS Since I wrote this, I have seen a couple of places. The first was nothing much. The second place was so beautiful I tried to figure out how we could work it out even though it was much too small. There are two more I’m trying to see. Both of them have dropped their price by almost five hundred dollars. But then I think what fresh hell is this and if I get to see them, it’ll be blah blah la dee dah and vo dee oh doh all over again.
"Back the fuck off!!" Made me lol. Banuta's metaphors are so refreshing. Good luck in your search. This would make a great feature film. Narrated by interior dialogue from what is written here. The zingers alone would be entertaining as hell. Also, a wonderful study in character, like the 30 yr old townhouse landlady.