Our New House near Oak and 25th
posted at 3:40 pm
on Jul. 20, 2008
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So, we got a new place. Yay!
We actually signed the papers a little over a week ago, but I’ve been so busy, I haven’t had a chance to blog about it. I have, however, had a chance to answer a LOT of questions about it, so here’s the deets:
* It’s a 4-bedroom 3-bathroom house. It’s 2500 square feet. It’s in Shaughnessy, one block from Oak Street and one block from King Edward Ave. (25th).
* It’s built in 1952, and it’s a rancher style house. It’s one main floor, and has a finished basement.
* The upstairs has a joined living room / dining room with a fireplace. It has all 4 bedrooms. Some of those bedrooms will become Hop Studios and one will be our bedroom.
* The upstairs bathroom is entirely pink mother of pearl tile and has no electrical outlets.
The downstairs has:
a) the two-car garage
b) what one would call a rumpus rom if one had just awoken from the ‘70s
c) 2 large storage rooms
d) a grody bathroom
The house used to have a concrete back patio, but there was a 1,000 gallon heating oil tank underneath it, and they had to backhoe that out and fill it in. So now there’s a potential mud slick there, and I plan to put down sod or concrete paving stones. Something like that. It’s a small issue.
The house is really perfect for us, and costs only about $100 more than we would be paying at our current house (when you take out Matt’s rent, and you add in the rent increase that was coming in Sept. before they decided to sell).
The only downside is that the house is going to be bulldozed into the ground and demolished in one year. Yeah, see, it’s on a really large piece of land, and the rich (I assume) Chinese (I assume from his name and his property manager) man who bought the house wants to knock it down and put up as big a house as the land permits.
Considering the lot is 15,000 square feet, and assuming he gets permits for 45% land usage, that means he’s going to build 7,000 square feet of house on the property. Woah. He’ll probably get the permit and the contractor and the plans made in a year, and that’s when our lease runs out.
So a year from now, we’ll be moving all over again.
And part of me hates that. A lot.
But another part of me remembers that we lived in Paris for a year, and lived in Coal Harbour for a year, and I lived in Calgary for 6 months during a college break and I lived in Hungary for 9 months, and Susie’s moved a lot too. A year is a LOT of time. Time enough to do all sorts of things, and for all sorts of things to happen.
So we’re going to get a year in a house that’s wonderful for us, and then we’ll see what will happen. Maybe the owner will simply give it to us for being such wonderful tenants. Um, yeah. If not, we’ll be in a good place to buy. I hope the market is, too.
