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

Not much renovating.

We've been busy doing everything but renovating lately. Shopping Main St., socializing, stilting, visiting the Okanagan, unpacking, stilting some more. The weather's been great: warm & sunny most days. Grouse Mountain's flash of white is turning dirt-coloured as the snow melts.

I love this neighborhood. Living on the Drive was great, but after 8 years... The heart of the Drive, around 1st Avenue & Commercial is still great, although longer-term merchants are getting priced out with rent hikes by greedy landlords. It's gone a little more upscale. You can tell how high the rent is by how spacious & open the stores feel. Places like Beckwoman's or Kitchen Corner can only survive when the rents are cheap.

What depressed me was watching the area around the Skytrain stations & 10th Avenue take a nosedive. When we moved into the neighborhood in 2001, the dealing was minimal & panhandling was common. 10th & Commercial is now a major drug dealing corner, with a regular crew of junkies & dealers crouching on the corners & creeping through the shrubs to shoot up or smoke behind the dollar store. There is a gamut of panhandlers to walk through when exiting the station. There's broken car window glass all over the streets & used needles in everybody's gardens within a 4-block radius. I no longer feel confident & safe about walking to the video store there in the evenings. That says a lot, as I've always felt that Vancouver is a safe city & I refuse to fear walking alone at night.

To be fair, I don't have a problem with panhandlers if they're not aggressive, or junkies, as long as they don't use my back garden to pitch used sharps. It was the dealers I was worried about. If anybody's going to be armed, I think it's likely to be them, the guys holding the valuable stash of heroin or crack.

Although Mount Pleasant used to be famous for its prostitution problems, they're long gone. Despite our proximity to Canada's poorest postal code, the Downtown Eastside, I see less wrenching poverty & no dealers on my way home from work. Nobody's doing 're-ups' in front of my home & I've never seen the cops stop anybody except drivers going through red lights.

"It looks like someone took the mountains away."

It's rainy in Vancouver today. The view is totally different when it's like this. On a clear day, we can see the mountains really well, but today it looks like someone took some scissors & carefully snipped round the buildings at the waterfront. It's just a wall of white beyond that. The spires of the church & the red gantries on the docks stand out even more against the cloud bank. The view is completely urban--rail yards, busy streets, parking lots, warehouses, buses, the Skytrain, office buildings, storage facilties. Quite a few trees poke up between all these buildings, but virtually all of them were planted--we can't see any natural forests when the mountains are curtained with rain clouds.

Living with this view for a few weeks now, I find it hard to believe I stayed 5 years in the claustrophobic confines of our previous place. The townhouse was three storeys tall, but there was really no view. You could only see houses & other places in the co-op, all of which were within a hundred metres of you. Here the next building in our view that is as high as we are is several blocks away. You might think that in an apartment building--stacked on top of & next to our neighbors closely--we would feel more closed in, but the opposite is true.

laundry & sushi

I've tossed aside all thoughts of renovating in favour of doing laundry. I've done at least 4 loads in the last 2 days & I can't wait to do more. It's such a novelty having machines right there in my home. It's nice not to have to hoard quarters for the coin-op too. Simple pleasures...

Now, if we could just get the kitchen unpacked so we can actually eat here, that would be great. We've been subsisting on bagels, cheese, beer & apples. Plus sushi. There's a cheap sushi place within walking distance; we ate there last night. We had chicken yakiudon, chazuke, california roll, negitoro roll & endless cups of tea for $11.50. Including tip & tax. Kishu Island is one of those "japanese" places that japanese people don't actually go to, which is owned by someone called Nguyen & entirely staffed by people who are not japanese. Not exactly authentic, but cheap & tasty!