Alan: I’m going to cut to the chase. I feel like our readers need to know that we don’t hate every place we see. So we did see a place and we did make an offer and we didn’t get it.
Here’s the story.
I went by myself to see three places in the East End with an agent I hadn’t met before, a lovely young woman who we may continue to work with. The first place was nice but too small.
But the second place I liked even before I got inside. It was a corner house on a lovely street and it had a gate and a lovely front yard and a nice front porch and I could imagine the opening shot from our sitcom where I round the corner whistling, open that gate and go skipping up to the front door.
I called Baņuta and we made an appointment for us to see it again the next day.
(I admit there was something weird about the place and I’ll let Banuta address that if she wishes.)
So I was feeling pretty good about all this and then I went to the third place. And oh that third place.
It was further east but that doesn’t really scare me anymore. Okay it actually does scare me a bit but not until I start thinking. This was on a nice street and close to the Danforth and the subway and that was fine with me. The agent got there a bit later than me so I thought I would kill time by looking in the backyard.
And the backyard was magical. Someday when Baņuta and I get sad about not getting this place it will be because of the backyard. But I’m not going to even try and describe it because it’s already painful.
Inside the first thing I see is the supposed living room which is isolated from the rest of the floor and it’s not big. That doesn’t turn me off. Baņuta and I had much discussion about how we might have used that room. The dining room and kitchen were nice. The size was good, the floors nice, there was a nice big cutting area in the kitchen, and good appliances.
So let’s go down to the basement. Ah the basement. In the future I may think about that basement more than I think about the magical garden. It was long and empty and the floors were wood, which is amazing for a basement and I could have put all my records down there, and a couple of couches, and stereos and TV, and other furniture, and I could have watched TV and listened to records and did my workouts, comfortably. It could have been a kind of man cave except I’d have to keep it relatively neat because we would all watch tv down there and we’d put a bunch of Banuta’s books there. Yes it was that big. I could have even put my desk and computer down there too, though that wasn’t my wish.
Suffice it to say, the basement could solve a lot of problems. Now we wouldn’t need two sizeable bedrooms, only one. And as it turned out there was one. The third bedroom was surprisingly tiny but all and all the house combined usefulness and prettiness better than any other place we’ve seen.
On Sunday we put an offer on it. On Monday it was rejected.
We offered to move in December rather than in a couple of weeks and the owners didn’t like that. But more significantly we offered 300 less than the asking price because we still can’t quite wrap our heads around the likelihood of paying over 4100 a month when you add utilities.
They had another offer and they took it. The agent told us that the owners thought the price they were offering was fair. I would love to know what previous tenants had paid but that’s none of my business. The owners, like so many others, had come up with the price they thought the market could bear – my least favourite phrase these days - and those market-bearing landlord types usually feel good about the prices they create.
Now it’s Thursday, three days after our offer was refused. And I got back on the horse and drove out to the east end again, to see another place on Sammon.
This one was 3200 utilities included. That’s the ballpark we were hoping for.
As I often do, I went first to the backyard.
And speaking of backyards, let me take a detour here. In the fall of 2006 I bought a house near Roncesvalles. It had been a rooming house. No one had taken care of it. I renovated the inside and in the meantime, I finished my film Lovable, which is about being chronically single, which was a fair description of my life up to that point. When it was going to play at Hot Docs the following spring, the National Post sent a photographer to take a photo to accompany an article they were doing. The guy looked around for a good spot to take a picture of an “unloved” man and chose the backyard because in his words “That’s a real bachelor’s backyard.”
I won’t continue that story but had he not said that, I may not have had a daughter a few years later. I only menton it though because this place on Sammon also had a real bachelor’s backyard, except unlike the one I bought in 2006, I don’t think this one could be much improved without a lot of money, and the planting of trees. It was an empty ugly field. Compared to the magical backyard we weren't getting, it was just sad. And it made me sad to look at it.
That’s what 3200 will buy you. A place pretty far east that would suit a few people who didn’t need much besides a place to put their beds and some of their stuff. I’m not sure the place we bid on and lost was worth an extra thousand dollars. But maybe it was. And maybe we’re going to have to pay that.
Our agent sent us another place to look at while I was finishing this report. Then she wrote back and said not to bother. There were already five bids on it. People are bidding on apartments like they bid on houses. People are offering more money than the landlord is asking.
“Please sir, can I pay some more?”
The only silver lining I can come up with is that we can put off moving for six months or so and save another six or seven thousand before we start having to live way above our means.
And in the meantime we can keep darkening your doors with our tales of woe.
Baņuta: When he called me from the east end, Alan had that throb of excitement in his voice that people have when they’ve planned a great surprise for you, a glittery person jumping out of a cake, or when they’ve put the lid back on something.
He was practically dancing with joy when we drove up to the house on Milverton, where he’d imagined the sitcom version of coming home to the porch on the corner. Actually that house was strange. The walls were made of a fake white grotto stone, and there were these large fluorescent rectangular lights shaped like carpets in the ceiling. A perfect space for a party in the 1970s where you would wear a leather miniskirt and knock back some ouzo and blow smoke rings while having a violent argument about soccer teams. Maybe I could have gotten used to running my hands along those fake stone walls, but the owners creeped me out. The two of them were in the garden, old and hunched, the wife with disheveled hair peering through the windows at us, grinning, while her billy goat husband pretended to rake the garden so he could avoid direct eye contact. A fancy garage and a back room and a section of the garden were all off limits to us because the couple still wanted to store their stuff there, and the kitchen door in the back was blocked off, like a secret room in Bluebeard’s castle. Probably they had just started to downsize their lives and it was a shock to see new people in their home of fifty years. But I couldn’t live with a blocked entrance and whatever storms of emotion our inhabiting their house would bring on.
Next we went to the house with the perfect basement and the magical garden, the house on Rose Heath, the first one we’ve seen that we thought would 100% work for us. Okay, not 100% — 90%, because it was missing an honest-to-goodness living room where I could host my carolling party like I used to before the pandemic.
We’ll sing in a bar, Alan said.
Yes, but where would the Christmas tree go? I asked. In the basement? Surely not?
Forget the tree, Alan said. Consider the garden.
The garden had a pond and a grove of beautiful trees. It was an oasis. We could have great parties there. We could just bask in its oasis-ness and discuss Chekhov and consider life.
Christmas is over-rated.
Submitting an offer triggered a panic attack. Sunday morning I filled out a form and left it with Alan, while I went to a concert at Koerner Hall, hung out with a friend, and ignored all messages until I was standing in a gas station at 6.40 pm and saw that we had to sign digitally, on the phone, before 7 pm. The type was so small I couldn’t read any of the fine print, yet the offer was binding. I phoned Alan in a paroxysm of indecision. Maybe we shouldn’t bid? It’s going to cost so much! Poor Alan talked me off my perch and at 7 pm, we’d done it.
I wish they had at least bargained with us.
I really liked this real estate agent, Mandy. She understood what it means to be self-employed and she’d studied criminology and lived in Beijing for a while. She said we should buy instead of rent. She said there were ‘entrepreneurs’ out there who could put together a mortgage for us. Is that we should do? Pay an exorbitant mortgage but at least we’ll have property we can sell/rent?
Many years ago, when my mother lay dying she’d hallucinate and say things like “tell your brother to bring my shoes, I’m leaving” or “George Wallace came to visit me in his wheelchair wearing a cowboy hat.” For sure George Wallace had not done that because he was dead and why this racist Alabama politician entered her imagination, we will never know. But one of the very last things my mother murmured was “invest in real estate.”
Maybe she had a point.
Carolling at home may be overrated.