Alan:
I thought I might look at places while Baņuta was traveling but by the time I thought I might start again I got sick, and then she was getting back in a week so I let it slide.
Just then an old friend told me that the house next door to her was coming up for rent. It was on Ritchie, where I bought my first house 17 years ago — Ritchie, the street where my daughter was born , and around the corner from the second house I owned, where my daughter still lives part time with my ex-wife. I had mixed feelings about the possibility of returning to the old neighborhood but for my daughter it would be a big plus, and I have to admit when I’m on Roncesvalles these days, I realize I miss it.
So I arranged to see the house and that morning, another house right around the corner came up, so our real estate agent Mandy arranged that too. The one on Ritchie was nice enough but the basement wasn’t finished, the room I imagined for Baņuta would be big enough for her but there just wasn’t enough room for me.
But Mandy had an interesting idea. The kitchen was big enough to eat in. What if we used the dining room as a living room and made the smallish living room into an office for either Baņuta or I. If you love the location that much, you could make the sacrifice, she suggested.
I don’t think I can adequately explain how that suggestion scrambled my brain, given that we have looked at so many houses and some had this thing and didn’t have that thing, had nice yards but an ugly kitchen, or a nice basement but no air conditioning, and none were perfect and the nearly perfect ones we thought were too expensive except now we’re looking at paying that expensive price and if you’re actually willing to give up a dining room at this point, why didn’t you take that one or that one or that other one that you rejected for this, that, or the other thing.
The price was okay. 3800 plus, meaning over 4 thousand when you include utilities, a threshold we didn’t want to hit when we started but it would have been better than 4000 plus or 4200 plus which are the kinds of prices we’re seeing most often these days and they don’t seem to be going down much.
There were other challenges to the place, like parking bu I told Mandy if it was still available when Baņuta returned that very weekend, we’d look at it.
We went over to see the other house. It was pretty big, a good price, and on Golden, one of my favourite streets, but it had been renovated in so many head scratching ways, I just couldn’t help repeatedly exclaiming “what the fuck.” The stairs to the second floor were translucent and lit with green LED running lights. That’s a first but maybe we could live with that. But the second floor where two of the bedrooms were located had a big kitchen in the middle of the floor in case you needed to get to the kitchen quick in the middle of the night. And the steps to the third floor were very steep and neither of the rooms, when you got up there, were all that big.
There was so much about the bones of the place I liked but it also gave me a headache and I knew Baņuta wouldn’t like it.
Now that I was back in the swing of things I started looking at the ads again though it turned out there weren’t a lot of choices at this time of year. But I saw one in the Junction and I arranged to see it Sunday just before Baņuta was getting home.
I didn’t recognize the street by name, but I knew it when I got there. I’ve parked there many times. It’s a short block, one west of Keele, running between Dundas and Annette, and it used to have a cop shop, which is now abandoned. But because of the cop shop I suppose, it’s one of those side streets that is sort of half commercial and half residential, like some transitional zone. The houses come right up to the sidewalk unlike anything in the rest of the neighborhood and there’s meter parking during the day. It wasn’t very pretty, to say the least.
The house itself was square and fortress-like, with none of the charm of the older houses in downtown Toronto. And when I got inside, my first impression was no better. Gray laminate floors. I hate laminate. I think I’ve rejected houses for laminate.
But it was spacious. It had a nice sized front room that could be a living room and dining room. The kitchen was new and looked comfortable, there was a powder room, a washer dryer behind a door, and behind the kitchen was I guess what could be a family room or TV room. Past that was a small concrete porch, a concrete pad below, no backyard to speak of, no chance of a garden but instead what looked like a pretty big garage.
There wasn’t one part of it that was pretty, but like I said, it had space. It would have made a decent art gallery. And that impression continued upstairs where there was a front bedroom that I thought could very likely accommodate Baņuta. It also had a big walk-in closet that I knew she’d like. Keely’s room also had a nice closet. And though this doesn’t really sell me on the house, I knew that both my girlfriend and daughter would like the fact that for some reason each of the three bedrooms had its own ensuite bathroom, however narrow, with stall showers and a bath in Baņuta’s room. They could have made bigger rooms and had one nice large bathroom but they went a different way.
The room that would probably be mine was also fair sized and though I wasn’t sure it was big enough to accommodate my needs, there were other spaces including the upstairs hallway and the family room downstairs that could potentially give us some flexibility.
At 3500 plus utilities, the price was nothing to celebrate except that’s about as low as things get, and often for much less space. The biggest issue I could see involved our outdoor cat, his apparent boldness around cars, and the close proximity to three main streets, If we moved there, he would have to get a lot more cautious and accept the limits of his territory. North, south or east he would have problems. Only if he went out the back and stayed in this little triangle of relative calm to the west, will he be safe. And even then.
But I certainly wouldn’t have rejected it for the cat so I made a tentative plan for Baņuta to see it and the place on Ritchie when she got back on Monday. But when I talked to Mandy she told me the place on Ritchie was already taken.
Some of you may remember a house Keely and I had seen in East end and which my daughter had dubbed “the mansion” for its generous size. Baņuta never even got to see that one and maybe it was just as well. In honor of that house though, I called the Junction house “the ugly mansion” and Baņuta and I were supposed to see it around 2 while Keely was still at school. But it got pushed to 6 and it turned out to be a good thing, that the postponement allowed Keely to accompany us.
Almost from the moment we got in the door both Keely and Baņuta were smiling. They didn’t mind the laminate floors, they didn’t mind the newness, or that it resembled a condo on the ground, which is the other way I described it. They also didn’t mind the lack of garden or real outdoor space or room for all our snazzy lawn furniture.
They just liked it. And when they saw the space upstairs and the closets and the washrooms the smiles got even bigger. Baņuta said it was the best place we’ve seen, Keely was excited, not just that she would still be relatively close to her mother but that she’s be walking distance from one of her best friends, something she’s never experienced at this house.
I showed them how ugly the outdoor space was, they didn’t care. We went into the garage and I kind of liked that it was theoretically big enough for two cars though with the narrow laneway, getting both our cars in there might require driving skills that neither of us possess. But with one car, there’d be a fair amount of storage.
They seemed decided. I kept looking at them and kind of saying “Really”? What about Oreo, it’s really not a good location for an outdoor cat. They were unswayable. I guess they thought Oreo would figure it out and maybe he will. Baņuta said she’d miss the garden but that didn’t matter to her as much as the things she liked about it. I could see where it was going but I still wasn’t sure. So we went for a short walk on Dundas, just to look around and let me mull it over. Keely was so excited she pointed out the Apple repair store. We kept walking, they kept smiling and by the time we got back to the car I said what the hell.
The next day I got kind of sad. It’s hard to explain. It wasn’t that I didn’t like it or wanted to change my mind. I could see what they liked. If the last year has shown us anything it’s that space is important to us and that lots of nice houses we’ve seen didn’t have it. But I’m a glass half empty man. I was worried, I was scared, and I was just a little in shock that it might be over.
I got over that though, just in time for another nightmare to begin - the arduous negotiation between our agent and their agent, accompanied by the thorough forms and signatures that characterize every event these days. There was some talk that we needed to make a higher income to pay for the rent. They wanted to see notices of assessment and bank statements and all kinds of shit. We thought we were being clever offering a few months in advance but not only did that not impress them – apparently everybody’s doing it these days – but their interpretation of an advance was much different than ours.
They wanted a key deposit and a deposit on the utilities and we have to pay to rent the water heater. And they want us to have renter’s insurance.
And our solemn oath that we’ll patch up all the holes we make when we hang a picture. And we can’t touch the floors, we have to hover, except in the washrooms.
That went on for a day or so.
Then it ended.
Keely was over the moon, she couldn’t sleep that night, and right away she was asking my ex to help her buy things for her new bathroom and worrying if she ran out of toilet paper. Baņuta was also very happy but I sort of rained on her parade and all I can say is that sometimes happiness is hard for me. Somewhat because of that confusion I talked about earlier, the sense that “if we’re taking this one with all these compromises, why didn’t we take that one or that one.”
I guess it was a kind of buyers’ remorse. We were so pleasantly surprised by all the good things the place had, we didn’t really check it out and I suddenly got worried about all the things we didn’t inspect. Like in order to have three ensuites, all the washrooms are kind of narrow and when I later looked at the pictures in the ad, I was afraid that the toilet is kind of jammed in beside the sink and as I’ve experienced a few times, sometimes they find a spot to put the toilet but they don’t consider the ass that’s going to sit on it.
But it was still kind of shitty of me, so to speak, that I couldn’t celebrate with my girlfriend and it took a day or so for us to get on the same page and be happy together.
I like the neighbourhood, though I don’t think it’s as cool as people say, and I may have anticipated finally living on some lovely leafy neighborly street, where people wave to each other from their porch and thousands of children trick or treat, but I’ve never really had that and I don’t really need it. And I guess I don’t need a back garden either as long as I can walk out the back door and sip my coffee in my own space. And I like the idea I can just scoot up to the corner and there’s coffee shops and a couple of restaurants to try. And I can walk to the gym I joined a few months before. And there’s a good record store and a new one opening and normally I’d say that’s dangerous but I anticipated the higher rents a couple of months ago and started selling records and these days I’m not buying much and only really cheap records when I do. So maybe I’ll be living around the corner from the stores where I’ll dismantle my collection rather than the stores where I’ll fritter away my modest nest egg.
I will miss my various walking routes in this neighbourhood and the hills and the proliferation of Little Libraries, I’ll even kind of miss the lady across the street who hates us, her nervousness about people parking near her driveway and the snow mountains she assembles every winter to prevent people parking near. I wrote a story about her once but never published it. Maybe I’ll share it with you someday. And I’ll miss the hermit across the street who never shows his face. I almost talked to him in a store the other day. I imagined someday I would find out his secret. But I’ll find new routes to walk, I’m sure I can find a new neighbor to hate me, I can still go to High Park if I want and maybe the cat will acquire some city smarts.
Hopefully I’ll get used to the laminate floors; it will be certainly easier when I wake up at night and need to pee. And if I miss the bowl, it will be like a tree falling in the forest. No one will know. Baņuta will write a great book in her room and maybe I’ll perform my one man show downstairs. And Keely and I will spend way too much money at the Dollarama and she will feast on the gluten-free dumplings at one of many of the new places that seem to have popped up in the vicinity.
So that’s it dear reader. I will miss over-sharing my life with you in this long form. Maybe we’ll do it again someday but I’m not sure what would inspire it.
Oh one more thing before I turn it over to the best writing partner a guy could ever have. To my friends in the east end of Toronto, I have to say I’m a bit disappointed I won’t be experiencing a whole new life with you on your side of the Don River. There was a time I thought that was inevitable and I was actually kind of excited, though not for all the driving.
But I guess I’m destined to die in the west end.
Okay honey, bring us home.
Baņuta:
It was an impulse buy.
Definitely prompted by the fact that I’ve slept in ten beds during the last three weeks in Australia, ranging from bunk beds in a dorm to a sunlit cottage in a Tasmanian valley. I came home feeling particularly homeless and suddenly hated everything about the house we are living in now, beginning with the fact that we are being forced to leave, but ending with all the broken things they will not fix, the garage door that won’t open, all the dilapidation, the messed-up second-hand stuff they’ve foisted upon us, the shittiest stove in the world and the kitchen that’s a fire trap, the holes in the doors, the leaky windows. I was so grateful to find this house in 2012 and now I can’t wait to leave it.
So, yeah, the new place is ugly, and it turns out ugly is something we can agree to live with, given other perks. Did you get at least 80% of what you wanted? my sister asked, to which I can answer yes.
If this had been the very first place we saw, back in May, we might have said ‘we can do better.’ But now I think we can’t. Not after seeing dozens of houses.
In fact, the very first place we saw, we liked very much, the price was great, but the location was awful and Alan nixed it. And the midwife-owners weren’t going to give it to us anyway.
The next place that we liked very much was slightly more expensive, on Annette, up a long flight of stairs, and it was very, very beautiful and had a wonderful landlady and the alluring soaker tub but no place for me to work.
Then we actually bid on a house way out in the East End which had a magical garden and great workspaces for me and Alan but Keely would have had to live in a closet. Those landlords wouldn’t accept our lowball offer. They wanted $3800 plus utilities. We have regretted that low bid, but now I’m okay with not getting it.
Then there was the place with the wisteria and my dream studio which on second look turned out to be too cramped and small and we let it go.
Then we thought we had found our dreamspace in the Bathurst/St. Clair area for $3700 plus. This house did not have a great workspace for me but had a fantastic kitchen and sunroom and a fun little garden and I thought it would be okay. But the landlord would only give it to us for a year, so we said no.
Then we applied to live in a townhouse where once again I was lured by a soaker tub but the personal questions the landlady asked gave us the heebee jeebies and we backed out of that one at the last minute. It’s still on the market for $3450.
The weirdest thing about returning from Australia is that you are moving back in time. They are sixteen hours ahead so your tomorrow can be their yesterday. Which means I felt like I was living in a different dimension outside of time and space when I’d barely unpacked my suitcase and Alan whooshed me and Keely over to Mavety. Like in that Oscar-nominated movie.
Alan kept staring at me to clock my reaction. Put it this way: the floor could be uglier, and you can cover a floor with carpets. For the last twenty years, I’ve lived with colourful walls and this house is monochrome gray. But you know what? Gray is a Latvian thing — we like gray peas, and gray rocks, and gray linen, so I will feel newly at home with it. And ‘new’, that’s the main thing: everything is new rather than grimy. Yes, we won’t have a garden. Instead, we each get our own bathroom, how crazy is that? And we get to stay in the West End and I’m one block away from the bookstore Type, my favorite cocktail bar Famous Last Words, and the Annette Public Library looks so tasty I might even go and write there.
Keely’s whoops of joy when she saw what she assumed would be her room probably clinched the deal. Note that we didn’t take any pictures of the place. What were we, delirious? (It’s only after writing this blog that Alan said, no I have pictures.) I didn’t open all the kitchen cabinets, I didn’t flush the toilet, I didn’t take a good long critical second look. I saw the walk-in closets (in every room!) and said let’s do it. And above all, after those ten beds, and twenty hours of flying, and seven months of nail-biting, I just wanted to get it all over with, now.
I remember the first time a landlord told me he was asking for $3500 and I couldn’t stifle my gasp. That was for a one-floor apartment with a gigantic living room and postage stamp bedrooms and kitchen. That was what I would call greedy. A decent price, a reasonable price, a price I can at least understand why you owner-person believe this is justified, a price that is not oh I can suck your blood? thank you, now if you could just bare your neck for a second, that price is so hard to find in this city. Mavety is $3500, which seems low in this market. Maybe we’ll find out there’s some awful surprise, like the place is actually haunted or our neighbours play golf. Or maybe it’s that price because we don’t get the basement and the owner has some sense of decency. Let’s hope for the latter.
We will be paying $1000 a month more than we are now, $1300 more than when I first rented this house. People seem to think that’s okay, because things have changed in the last ten years. This is true but massive pay hikes weren’t part of that change. How we will earn that extra remains to be seen. More likely we will simply deplete our savings.
To make the bid, we had to fill out an application which demanded a shocking amount of our private financial information. The real estate agent warned us that we might not get the place because we are self-employed and landlords prefer to have evidence of regular-as -clockwork income. Alan said well if all landlords are like that, Baņuta and I will be homeless, and that word ‘homeless’ dropped deep into the well of my being. I’d been reading an autobiography by a man escaping from the Nazis and I actually thought well, at least I’m not lost in the forest in the middle of the night drenched to the skin in the pouring rain with all my belongings in a single suitcase and not knowing where I am or where I should go or where my family is. Even before the Mavety landlord said yes, I was far from homeless. And if he’d said no, we’d move on to the next place. Still, I’m so glad the ordeal has ended. We can be homeful in the ugly mansion of Mavety.
We are so grateful to our tireless, patient, funny, friendly, always helpful real estate agent Mandy Man, who, as Alan would say, put up with our shit. If you are looking to buy or rent, look no further. We won’t miss looking at houses but we will miss looking at houses with her.
We can live without our garden, and we can even live without our blog. Your shadowy presence kept Alan and I going, so thank you from the murky bottoms of our hearts. Until we find another topic to keep ranting about, adieu.
P.S. I started a new blog, inspired by this one, about my reading. It’s called Funny, You don’t Look Bookish and you can join it here. And if Alan and I go hunting again — we’ll get in touch.
thinking...
Ok we’ll ask the office what to do