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...

27days to go!

Anybody have any boxes they're not using?!?

30 days to go...

It's hard to believe that we'll be living in a house in only a month. We haven't been in the condo very long, but we've gotten to know the neighbours a bit, just enough to be a little sad to leave them. However, I'm not unaccustomed to moving: this house will be my 14th home. I've gotten used to the security of being on the third floor of an apartment building. I'll really miss the view we have from here when we go. It's such an open vista & really beautiful at the moment, with a dusting of snow on the North Shore peaks.

I have been thinking about some of the surprises that we'll find once we've moved into the house. We've never seen it on a clear day, so we only have the word of the listing realtor that it has a mountain view. I thought of another surprise this morning: there's a rhododendron in the front yard, but we have no idea what colour the blooms will be. Hopefully our home inspector has forewarned us of all the other issues with the house, so there won't be any nasty surprises to discover. He was very thorough, but we're keeping our fingers crossed.

Pictures of the Main Floor & Exterior

Here are some photos of the house, inside & out. Some are taken from MLS & some are ours.

The Ground Floor

These are a few shots of the basement suites. Know anybody who's looking for a place in February or March?

ohmigodthisisabigprojectohmigod

The awesome scale of what we are taking on, compared to doing renos on a simple two-bedroom condominium is starting to sink in. First things first and the first things are big. I'm trying not to think of that awful comedy "The Money Pit", but it keeps cropping up in my mind. However...

Location, Location, Location.

Onwards & Upwards!

This blog is soon to be mis-named: we are moving into a house!

Here are some photos from MLX & some taken during our inspection...

Sunbathing, anyone? South-facing semi-covered deck!The kitchen needs a *little* work...The master bedroom

These last two are taken in one of the basement suites.

The 'new', improved condo

It's been ages since I've written, partly because we've been soooo busy with work on the condo. I'm not sure I'd call all this stuff 'renovations', most of it is pretty minor, or staging, but check it out:

Summer Hiatus

Not much has happened lately, except for taking delivery of a new fridge and fighting for a discount, since it arrived dented from shipping!

Summer is Lisa's busy season at work and with her stilting ventures and the weekends have been full of things to get done outside of the house, so renovations are largely on hold for now. I mean to spend my spare time planning the next steps, drafting revised floor plans, setting timelines and doing exploratory surgery on my walls to find out what parts can be removed. "Ah, but the best laid schemes of mice and men..."

Bicycle renovations?

Bikequiz

1. Do you have a bike? (If not, but you want one, skip to question #7.)

2. Does your bike need maintenance/repair? (If you answered, "I don't know" to this question, see #3. If you said yes, skip to #9)

3. Does your bike make noises like a male elk in mating season?

4. Have you hit a large object with your bike or been hit by a large object while on your bike recently?

5. Have any bits fallen off your bike lately?

6. Do your brake levers pull most of the way back to your bars when you try to stop? (If you donBikequiz't know what brake levers are, proceed immediately to question #9)

7. Do you want to get a cheap, sturdy, functional bike?

8. Are you interested in rescuing a bicycle, as opposed to buying a new one from the store?

9. Do you sometimes/often/always feel intimidated by those bike shop guys?

10.Would you like to have a bike mechanic that you can really trust?

11.Do you want to learn how to fix your bike?

If you answered "Yes" to any of these questions, you should check out JETT GRRL Bike Studio! You can get a bike, get your bike fixed, learn to fix your own bike or even just learn how the thing works...

1925 Adanac St. BACK door
Vancouver
604.255.5097
jett_grrl@hotmail.com
www.jettgrrl.com

*This posting is unofficial word-of-mouth advertising from a rider who's halfway through the beginner workshops. Tracy's awesome!

Form vs. Function

I just removed another 'handyman special' addition to the place. I tend to refer to these lovely little additions as vestiges of Frank. He had installed two wooden rods at about 6' high over the bathtub, parallel to the shower curtain rod. I think they were meant for drying clothing. They do function quite adequately as a towel drying spot, but the things were ugly as hell. Also a bit of a hindrance to anyone over 6' tall who wanted to get clean vertically. Our catsitter-on-retainer, Mike, had some serious issues washing his hair in the shower while he was here.

Had Debbie Travis seen this place before we started on it, I think she would have had an aneurysm. I can't count on my fingers & toes the number of bizarre, stop-gap customizations that ol' Frank did to the place. He seemed to take pride in using hardware for some other purpose than intended, like towel rack brackets to hold up glass shelves. Usually his ideas would require some extra bits of wood & double-sided tape to hold it all together. Imagine Macgyver as an interior designer, & you'll have an idea of what we're dealing with here...

Next on the list is the odd, wooden handle in the tub enclosure. It looks like a paper towel rack made in a grade eight woodwork class.

SPRUNG!

Our building actually has one of the nicest gardens around the neighbourhood. Spring has revealed that fact.

CLICKY