The only good roach is a dead roach.

I think the roach control (that we unfortunately paid quite a bit for) is working. Found another one hanging out next to the fridge & poked it with a stick: no reaction. Then I sprayed him with a lovely-smelling mandarin cleaner: a bit of twitching.

Theoretically, the little bastards will be 95% poisoned within 2 weeks. Their survival skills, which have enabled them to survive for millennia, work against them when it comes to poison. They're cannibalistic: when a roach eats a poisoned one, it'll die too.

Bleagh. I will be very happy if I never see one of those awful bugs again.

Mouse Memorial #2

Lil' Sniffy passed away suddenly on January 27th, 2008. He had a good life, snacking on crumbs, running about in the warm, dry cabinets & walls of the house. He will be missed by his 38 brothers, sisters & half-siblings, his parents & grandparents. In lieu of flowers, donations can be made in the form of overflowing bird feeders, crumbs on counters & open boxes of food in cabinets. A short service was held at the toilet, prior to flushing. Rest in peace, Lil' Sniffy.

RENT (not the Broadway musical)

As I’m leaving the land of really crazy rent (Whistler), it makes me wonder if rents are going to stay where they are in Vancouver. Compared to the rest of the country, rent in Vancouver is not that bad. It’s not the priciest, by far. But the real estate is, so why the discrepancy? Maybe the rents are going to have to go up in Vancouver soon to reflect the cost of buying. I’d have thought they’d be connected, as so many rental suites are condos or basement suites that someone bought as an investment or ‘mortgage helper’.

Or maybe the rents won’t go up. Maybe the competition from the basement suites & apartments that were bought waaaay back when real estate was reasonable will keep the rents down. Hm.

It’s an interesting issue for a lefty like me to decide how much money to ask for our ground-floor suites. There is an element of ‘landlord guilt’: I have now become one of the petit-bourgeoisie! Ack! I’ve got a red star tattoo! I used to be a card-carrying Socialist! I’ve joined the dark side!

On the one hand, $750 for a one-bedroom suite (heat, hot water & electricity included) seems high. That’s nearly 60% of before-tax income for a full-time minimum wage worker. I never paid that much in rent when I was renting, between 1997 & 2006.

On the other hand, $750 only comes out to about 20% of the average person’s before-tax income in BC. It’s in line with other places in our area. Theoretically the person who lives in our suite would not need a car, as we are so central. And while it’s true I never paid that much myself, it was because I shared with roommates. The last one-bedroom place I lived in was $700 plus electricity. That was eight years ago.

Part of my plan to assuage my ‘landlord guilt’ is to provide decent housing. Our plan is to fix the suites up beyond the point where they’re just ‘rentable’. I want to paint them completely, fix the bathroom floors & broken tiles, install proper emergency exit-able security bars, add cabinet latches… it’s a long list. I don’t want my tenants to resent me because I never fix anything. I don’t want my tenants to trash the place because it was in crappy condition when they got it anyway. I want to create a space that someone can make home & be proud of.

One day we will all look back on this and laugh

So I own a house in Vancouver. A single detached home worth well over half a million- it is creeping awfully close to 3/4 of a million, which is what the owners were originally asking. I got it at a bargain price in comparison.

But it is a project! For starters, we have discovered active mouse and cockroach activity, as my recent posts indicate. Secondly, I have a furnace that is on its last legs, and a lower suite with a toilet that is about to sink into the earth with whoever seats themselves upon this underworld lord's throne. I am facing a million DIY jobs and some of them I am not capable of doing myself. I have to prioritize and make at least one of the suites ready to rent in the next month or two, or the payments will slaughter my ability to save any money at all. Fortunately I won a $500 Home Despot gift card from my employer to help pay for some immediate things.

On the plus side, I now have a handy garage, covered deck and I can skip stones and bounce them off of boutique shopping hipsters on Main St. Despite being closer to what I want, this place is the quietest place yet, as traffic drops to almost nothing at night. I am finally in a house in the neighbourhood I wanted to be in.

I think that my social life will suffer considerably, as the only priority is getting the house in order and I think it will take a year or two of all my weekends to achieve this.

This is the price you pay for Exile on Main Street- which just may be the last best album by the Rolling Stones, so all in all, it's not a bad place to be.

No mousies, but furnace estimator finally crawled out of his hidey-hole.

It took a few weeks of trying, but the nearest plumbing and heating company's (3 blocks away) furnace installation estimator finally paid me a visit after I called him first thing in the morning and he let me know he *might* be able to come by at some point in the day. As it stands, he called me with about 10 minutes notice- good thing I hadn't left the house- and told me he was on his way.

When he walked into the basement suite that contained the furnace and hot water tank closet, he looked at the outside of the furnace, stooped down and opened the door to the heat exchanger and read the thermal output of the existing furnace 105,000 BTU and told me he would be recommending a 120,000 BTU unit, to help warm the downstairs suites. And that was about it. There was no measuring, no questionnaire to fill out, nothing. Without my barrage of questions, he could have been back in his truck in 5 minutes. And this I waited several weeks for.

One Modest (ex)Mouse.

Seems the cats (or "mousers", as I commonly refer to them) did their mousing job and left us a slightly snacked-on mouse carcass near their favorite spot next to the heater in the living room. It was quickly disposed of, kitties were thanked, and I resisted the urge to impale it on a spike as a message to the other mice.

Looks like we have more than just a historical mouse infestation to deal with. I'm glad for all the Tupperware we have now.

Surprise!

We're in, finally. After a gruelling 11-hour move, it's done. Now onto the unpacking & the surprises. So far there have been quite a few, some not so bad, some extremely frustrating. Here are the ones I can remember:

• The front door lock is so sticky that you'd think you had the wrong key every time you try to open it.
• There is a lot of mouse poo in the cabinets.
• There are no power outlets in the back two 'bedrooms' of the house. A single bulb in the middle of the ceiling of each, with an accompanying oddly-placed switch is all the electrical they've got.
• The hot water that comes from the taps is hot, really hot.
• There are no bathroom fans.
• The few electrical outlets in the house that we do have are set in the wall sideways & some aren't grounded.
• The windows are only three years old.
• The street we're on seems to be quieter at night than where we were before so I've stopped sleeping with earplugs.
• We can't seem to get CBC with the rabbit ears, only Global.
  
• The kitchen was really not clean. Bleagh.

Let's just hope that there aren't any worse surprises in store for us...

These boots were made for walkin'

These hiking boots have served me well over the years. Since I found them at Mountain Equipment Co-op fourteen years ago, they've tramped all over the North Shore mountains, the Stawamus Chief, the Okanagan & Manning Park. They were my snow boots for the once or twice a year that I'd need them here on the West Coast. I've strapped them into snowshoes on Cypress & covered them with gaiters to toboggan in Whistler. Yes, they've had a long & happy life.

So why am I writing about them in the house blog, you may ask? Because they gave their lives in our quest for real estate. I wore them the last time to tromp through the slush on the day after The Big Snowstorm (15cm of snow in Vancouver... My God!) when Traci & I went to all the house showings she'd booked that day. These boots kept my feet warm--though unfortunately not dry--through the trek all over Mount Pleasant & Riley Park. They may be a good part of the reason we got the house for under asking price with no other offers on the table: many of the other people booked to see the house on Sunday cancelled due to the weather.

Goodbye, boots!

ACK! Packing! 14 days to go!

I remember being relieved in early December when our possession date changed from January 1st to the 15th. I have no idea how we would have managed to move today. As it stands, I'm starting to wonder how we're going to get everything organized in the two weeks that we have left...

I am looking forward to a one-day move, though. Last time we had a month or two of overlap, which seemed like a great idea at the time. What that really meant was we had about 12 moving days, the last of which was just as stressful as the do-it-all-in-one-day model. I just keep thinking of the band-aid philosophy: peel off slowly, feeling each yoinked hair or rip it off quickly.

Theoretically this house will be a long-term home for us, so we won't be going through moving again anytime soon...