The joys of home ownership: fait accompli

Well, it’s done. After all the years of imagining, and all the months of signing this and gathering that and then waiting, it’s accomplished. I’m in the new place.

In truth I’ve been moving stuff over slowly since the closing. Books, DVDs, and video tapes mainly; there were a lot of them. But they were all over there, along with most of the loose stuff in various drawers, by the time the big moving day came.

P-Doug had helped me break down my queen-size bed on Wednesday so I’d been sleeping on the mattress and box spring on the floor, kind of Japanese style. When I woke up just before 5 Saturday morning, and noticed my cat Max sniffing the cat carriers I’d set up. I figured strike while the iron’s hot, and I managed to quickly get him into it. Twinkle came into the bedroom, wide-eyed, looking at Max, looking at me, trying to figure out what was going on. I carefully dressed, willing her to say in the room till I could shut the door, and she did. I cornered her there when she tried to get away, and gently coaxed her into the carrier. It was a lot easier this time than when I took her to the vet. No blood loss on my part this time. Bonnie, I think, somehow knew the drill; she was hiding in the lining of the couch. I got her out and carried her to the bedroom, and with a little trouble, got her into the last carrier. Again, no scratches. The first job was to get them over and settled in the solarium of the new place where they’d be out of the way, but able to see us bringing in familiar things. I had that accomplished by 6 a.m.

Larry had decided to hang with friends Friday night. I needed his help to pick up the rental truck and when he wasn’t home by 7, I had to call him. Luckily, he picked up. He sounded like he’d only just gotten to sleep. Even so, he was back not long after 7:30 and we were at the rental place ten after eight. By 8:30 or so we were up the street at McDonald’s having a quick breakfast. Jay called while we were there, letting me know he was already at our building. We had to dash back.

Alongside Larry, of course, and Jay, I had the help of P-Doug and G and my manager from my previous job. Most of what we had to move by Saturday was just the big stuff I couldn’t move on my own. Took us a little over two hours to get everything into the van and about an hour to unpack it, but another hour to get it up into the unit (I’m informed that I’m supposed to say “unit” now instead of “apartment” because it’s a condo). Once the van was unpacked, Larry borrowed it and Jay went to help him move the gigantic TV friends of his gave him when he moved in with me nearly two years ago. Jay took off from there, and my former boss went home because her daughter had to get to a birthday party.

Once the move was finished, I could let the cats out. Max and Twinkle immediately started exploring, but Bonnie stayed in the solarium (when I’d first settled them, she wouldn’t even come out of the carrier). Hours went by before she even stepped into the living room.

After that, I took Larry, P-Doug, and G to Pizza Hut. We hung around there for about two hours, I’d say. P-Doug and G went home from there, and Larry drove me back to our place, where I picked up my car and drove home to... my place.

P-Doug had kindly put my bed together for me while Larry and I were dropping off the rental truck (grand total, $72). I went to bed about 10 and sort of lightly dozed for two hours. I remember thinking I couldn’t recall when the bed had felt so comfortable. It was the first night in nearly two years I knew pretty much for certain that Larry wasn’t in the next room, or that there was essentially no chance he’d be unlocking the front door at two in the morning coming home. It was a mixture of faint relief and lingering melancholy.

Sunday morning the Rogers guy came back again, between 9 and 10, I think. The week-and-a-half clusterfuck of getting cable turned on got solved, slowly, over about 90 minutes. He also managed to get the internet up and going before he left, much to my surprised; I’d been anticipating THAT taking weeks as well. After that I did a little shopping for things I needed, then back to the old place to help Larry move things into storage (more on this in a moment) and move some of my own stuff we’d left behind for reasons of space. As it turned out, he really didn’t need my help moving stuff to storage, so we just moved my stuff over.

Monday evening I came back to pick up luggage and a table, with the intention of sweeping up and mopping, but only the sweeping got done. Larry and I went down to the Wal-Mart in Agincourt and, once again, bought stuff we needed. Larry didn’t have a pot to... cook in... ;) so that was one of the things he bought. I promised to come back Tuesday night to mop the floors.

I didn’t.

I came back to mop the floors last night, Wednesday. When I got there, at quarter to six, Larry wasn’t home. There was still some stuff in his bedroom, but not all that much. I swept it out. I ran hot water into a bucket and mixed in disinfecting vinegar and soaked the places where the cats had puked up hair balls over the last few months, hidden from sight. I guess it was about seven when I was done. I took a red dry erase marker and wrote REDRUM on the bathroom mirror for whenever Larry got home. :) The last things I needed to take, mops, brooms, buckets, I took with me. As of 7 last night, I was 100% moved out. Only took a bit of May and essentially all of June, but it got done.

Tonight, with only hours to go before I can’t legally set foot in the place anymore, one last look, with Shelly, who’s still living in the building, in attendance. Larry might or might not be there; I have no idea. If I had no idea when I’d see him when we were both living there, I have that much less idea now. But I need to turn in keys and the laundry card and my garage opener. Hopefully I can get my deposits back.

And so, there it is. I remember when I started working in Markham, over 11 years ago, before the dotcom crash, and my manager telling me we all had stock options and in a year or so when we went public we’d have hundreds of thousands of dollars and I could buy a place... I really believed that. I thought I’d live there for just a year or two. Never imagined the last of my youth would evaporate in the place. But I liked it. Stem to stern, the place had my comfortable ass-groove worn into it. I saw all seasons there. If they’d ever turned the building condo, I’m pretty sure I would have been happy buying it. But it was rental money out the window month after month, so once Larry budged me by talking about moving out sometime this year, it was time to move on.

Which reminds me. Larry’s tale.

Larry’s job affords him significant (read: I’m jealous here) vacation time, and he decided to “take May off”. Despite this obvious easement, he didn’t manage to find a new place to live in the five weeks he was free to look around. There was always something he didn’t like. One Friday in June (I guess it was the 3rd, given the timelines here), I was driving home from the new place along the circuitous route that avoids all the traffic and lights, and I passed an apartment building I’d passed several times, and it suddenly struck me to inquire. I stopped, and it being just after 5, the woman who ran the building, who had no personal skills whatsoever, refused to see me. The man who worked with her (possibly her husband) finally cajoled a “yes” out of her as to my inquiry if there were any single bedroom places available. I told Larry when I got home, looked up the prices, and he went over the following Monday and finally landed a place. But when the time came to arrange the move, they wouldn’t let him move in on the 25th, the day I was – we were – intending to move out. He finally wrangled an okay to move in on the 30th. Well, on the 15th, they apparently got fired, and Larry’s verbal permission to move in a day early disappeared with them. So, for the past week or so, he’s been bombing his stuff into storage to smooth over the handful of hours between leaving our old place and moving into his new one (which happens this evening, essentially). All this despite the fact that I signed the deal March 13th. So the lesson here, kids, is when you know three-and-a-half months ahead of time you’re going to be moving, you might not want to wait till the last handful of weeks to actually find your next home. (Or, actually, for your roommate to find your next home.)

I went to Mars with DEVO

I've known Dig since we were both twelve, and we've been through a lot in all that time. We keep in touch and we're still pretty much the same guys to one another we were way back then. Just before we turned 16, he brought a tape over to my house with a song by a band I'd never heard before. It was Freedom of Choice by DEVO. I really thought it was something. Not long after that we moved several cities away. Dig and I stayed in touch by mailing goofy little tapes we'd make... I still have most of them. As I settled in at the new place, something, I'm not sure what now, reminded me of DEVO and I started buying their albums. I sort of gave back to Dig by sharing the music and it became a touchstone for us.

He works downtown now right at Dundas Square and a couple of days ago he learned that the music festival playing there was headlining DEVO. I never got to see them when I was a kid, but we made a point of it yesterday. A couple of his friends from St. Catherines came in and after a trip to a pub on Isabella and an Ethiopian restaurant, we nearly missed the start of their set. We arrived just as they started. We were way back, and could barely see them, but there they were... DEVO. Man, was that something.

They did a set of about an hour, during which time they went through a couple of costume changes. When they threw their DEVO hats out to the crowd, oh man, did I ever want one. They came out in the yellow jumpsuits and it was like I was 16 again. Seeing that was a real kick. Everything they played was stuff I knew, but then, I know most of their stuff. They "left" the stage showing the video of the DEVO Corporate Anthem, but then they came back and Gerry asked us if we wanted to hear one more DEVO song... we had a "choice". And they played it... my first, my DEVO non plus ultra: Freedom of Choice. And Dig and I sang along with it. I'm not joking when I say I had goosebumps.

But not a DEVO hat or shirt to be bought! Strange! I wanted to give these guys my money and I couldn't give it to them.

So... Mars. Not surprisingly, I dreamed about DEVO this morning. Dig and I were winners of some ultra-fan contest and along with about a dozen other people, we got to hang with DEVO. At some point, we all went to some cottage on Mars with them where were could see Phobos and Deimos skating through the Martian sky. We had to put on special breathing apparatus to go outside. It turned out it was all just a joke the band was playing on us. They played a few pranks on us but it was in good fun and otherwise they were really cool to us in the dream.

Then I woke up and told you! Tah dah. :)

I, Homeowner: the first few days

And so, there it is. I’m a homeowner. I can’t quite believe it, but it’s the case. I owe a lot of money, of course, but I’m the registered owner. Imagine that.

It’s strange being on the other side of those three months of planning and doing and long waiting. A sort of through the looking glass feel. In many ways, nothing changed. I’m still living in the same place; will be for almost a month yet. The real difference is there’s now this place in the city I didn’t have the right to go into before that now I do. On the other hand, a place I’ve called home for 11 years is about to vanish from my life. I won’t even be able to see it from the street. Can’t help feeling bad about that.

Well, here’s how it all went. I got the call on Friday just after one in the afternoon. My boss had given me permission to head out once I got the word, so I did. Took the subway to the bus, got off at the lawyer’s place, got handed a little envelope with the keys in it. The deed. Made a joke about expecting the Queen to fly over and tap a kneeling me on the shoulders with it. Then I left. My lawyer had told me that I became the registered owner at 1:14 p.m. I looked at my watch as I waited for the bus; it was 2:12. I hadn’t even owned the place quite an hour yet as I stood there. Bus to a subway to a subway to a bus. I guess I got home about 3:30 or so. I headed right over.

When I got there, I tried to go to the office to give them a void cheque for the condo fees but they were having a managerial meeting so I couldn’t. Never mind; I went up to my new place. Opened the door and stepped in for the first time. I hadn’t ever noticed it myself before, but my mother was right: the previous owner had been a smoker. I sort of wandered around the place for a little over half an hour, just trying to take it in. Tried the office again but no go. Headed home... my “real”, current home.

I’ve been avoiding the busy main streets and taking a residential roads route to and fro, and on my way back I passed a handsome apartment building I’ve admired before. This time it occurred to me to stop and inquire about one bedroom places on Larry’s behalf. It was seconds past five and they stood on ceremony that it was after office hours, but I did at least wring an acknowledgement that they had one bedroom places for rent. I got the contact info and brought it home to my roommate. I looked the place up online and found that they were renting for $850 including utils (but less parking), and that impressed him. As it turns out, he went over on Monday (today’s Tuesday), liked what he saw, and filled out the forms last night. I expect he’ll be dropping off the application today. Last night we decided to synchronize the moves; we’re both now aiming for Sunday, June 26th (was planning for Saturday the 25th but one crucial helper isn’t available for that day... right now, all it means is changing the date I’ve reserved the elevators in the two buildings).

Anyway, I’m getting ahead of myself. We decided to make Saturday washing day. For the first time in over a decade, I’d be able to do a wash without having to leave my place, spend money, or put a card in a slot. Larry suddenly remembered he had to help two friends, so he would have to come by later. P-Doug also agreed to come by, mostly for company, but as it turned out he was a big help. We brought over laundry, some dishes, my laptop and flat screen (for videos), laundry, and the patio table and chairs. I washed the chairs in the shower while he put the table back together. The patio stuff, which is currently in the dining room there, is only meant to be temporary. Since my balcony’s enclosed, it’s of little use to me, so it’s going to Larry, assuming he gets the place today, or another with a balcony. But we had to have some place to sit and do things, so that was the solution.

P-Doug and I took a quick excursion on foot to the new mall down the road. On the way we passed a garage sale where I spotted a sort of feline-looking version of a My Little Pony that I called “pink thing” and determined to get as a mascot on our way back. Larry called on my cell just before we got to the mall to ask if he should pick up a twin size mattress and box spring down in East York we’d seen earlier in the week. I asked him to, so he picked it up and headed north to meet us. We did a quick tour of the mall and headed back, picking up a Trailer Park Boys video at Rogers on our way. Alas, the garage sale closed up shop in the meantime so I missed out on “pink thing”.

We juggled cars so Larry could park his truck in my spot and the three of us managed to get the bed up to the spare room in one shot. After that, it was time to get down to business: laundry. I put in a load, added the detergent (I know, I know, backwards), and turned on the washer. It hummed, but I didn’t hear any water. We started fiddling with the in valves; opened them right up. Nothing. P-Doug looked under the sink but only found a cut-off valve for the dishwasher (boy, am I glad he found that). He advised me to call up the Maytag folks, but I figured it couldn’t have gone south in the 36 hours the guy had been out of the place. So, I hauled out the drier a bit and we had a look. Sure enough, P-Doug spotted the cut-off valves and opened them, and we were off to the races. Or the washes. At about this point, Larry, being bushed from all the running around, begged off to nap on the new mattress, still wrapped in plastic. P-Doug stuck around till about 6 watching Fall of Eagles with me, and headed home.

Larry woke up not long afterwards and we drove back to current neighbourhood to transfer money at an ATM and get a couple medium pizzas, and we headed back. While the washer and drier did their thing, we watched the Trailer Park Boys ep, and then more of Fall of Eagles. We ate one of the pizzas; I put the other, less a slice, in the freezer. Needing to go back to work after a month off (!), Larry went home about 8 or so, leaving me alone with my laundry. I did the last drier load and headed home myself between 9 and 10, leaving most of the laundry there (why move it twice?). And that was my first day.

Not long after I got home, Twinkle hopped up on the couch and merrily peed on it.

Sunday I went to Canadian Tire and bought a Bissell carpet cleaner with some upholstery attachments. First of all, I want to get the smell of cigarettes out of the place. Second, I’d like to take care of the carpets. Third, with Twinkle-cum-Tinkle now having far more soft, plush target area in her future, I figure this is probably going to be a sensible investment. I went over to my new place intending to get a start on doing the carpets, but two things stopped me (not counting lethargy): first, they recommended vacuuming beforehand, and my vacuum was at the current apartment; second, you need a Phillips screwdriver to attach the top to the bottom of the thing with four screws. So, I watched a little more of Fall of Eagles, ate a few slices, and took off. I spent the rest of Sunday throwing out videos I’ll never watch again, and packing most of my DVDs into a box.

This evening, I’m taking Shelly over to have a look at the place (and I’m thinking of bringing the vacuum to save myself the trouble tomorrow), and then we’ll have dinner at the local Firkin pub, as we often have before. Tomorrow (I’m working 10-hour days to take Wednesdays off this summer) I’ll bring that box of DVDs, vacuum the place, and get a start on cleaning the carpets. So, for any and all what’s interested, that’s where we’re at.
 

 

Systems

Well, today is actually a calendar month from moving day for me. The 25th. Two days from now is the closing. I was out at The Working Dog pub with P-Doug on Sunday and he casually reminded me that, come Friday, I don't have to tote my laundry down to the second floor and spend money doing it. No, I can now drive it ten-to-fifteen minutes across town and do it essentially for free. So, the plan at the moment is for me and Larry to take the patio furniture over to my new place on Saturday and set it up in the dining room, plug in his laptop and the flat-screen monitor he sold me, and screen some movies while we indulge in a few loads of laundry. I've asked P-Doug if he'd like to come along and kind of christen the place; I envision pizza and (for them) beer.

Last night I went with Shelley down to Sunnybrook Park at Leslie and Eglinton. She and her fiancee found an off-leash enclosure there on the weekend and she's entirely taken with the experience. I basically just went along to keep her company, but as she found plenty of other women down there doing the same thing, I think I'll take a pass in future. It was, however, really interesting to watch the interactions of the two species: the dogs tearing around all over the place, full of energy and excitement, the place barely big enough to contain their joy; the humans, clustered in a tight circle, chattering and laughing, standing still and coolly mastering this little bit of the universe. It made me wonder what it would be like to cross over.

It did happen, just a bit. The dogs didn't utterly ignore the humans. They made occasional attempts to involve us. At one point, a large black poodle charged up where I was sitting and dashed off with my sandal in an obvious attempt to get me to give chase... if not me, then the woman who looked after him, who in fact did. For their part, the humans interacted with the dogs by -- well, first bringing them there in the first place -- but mainly by asserting control: planing off the extremes. Not too rough. Not too affectionate (ahem). Not too thirsty. Not too far. Leashes, throwing sticks/balls, bottles of water with matching bowls. Systems. Fail-safes. Provisions.

...You know, now that I come to think about it, buying a home is a little like being one of those dogs... excitements and new experiences under systems.

Goings and comings

Saturday I decided to undertake a sort of grand slam of photographic archiving projects I’ve been meaning to accomplish for a while. Since they were nicely arranged in a more or less straight line westward, it was actually fairly handy to manage. In order, they were Westwood Plaza in Etobicoke, the unopened stretch of Sheridan Park Drive in Mississauga, and the reconstruction of Barnstable Bridge and its environs on Lower Base Line in Milton, which has gone into heavy overtime since last winter.

Since I had to talk to someone overseas on Skype at 3 p.m., so I had a tight self-set deadline. I left around 9:30 in the morning, heading west on the 401. I took the 427 south and backtracked a bit along Dundas Street to where it meets up Bloor Street and Kipling Avenue in a complicated intersection, called, not surprisingly, Six Points, which names the neighbourhood as well.

What little I know about Westwood Plaza (I’m not even sure if it actually is called “Westwood Plaza”; the theatre there is... was?... called Westwood Theatre) is that it opened in 1951 or so, when it was really on the edge of town... outside town, really; barely suburban at the time. It closed in 1998, I’m told. I can only remember being there once: in August of 1995, to see A Goofy Movie with friends. Not long afterwards, of course, it gave up the cinematic ghost. A karate dojo and a driving school remained in the plaza for a while, but even they eventually drifted away. I heard recently that the place is due to be razed this year, so I thought I’d better get going and take pictures of the place if it really was my intention to do so at all.

Six Points is an intersection where three major roads intersect, and in 1961, Metro undertook to rebuild it for serious traffic by means of ramps and bridges in a complicated jumble that, for all its ugliness and confusion, does allow traffic to get where it’s going (provided you pay attention to the signs) with a minimum of holdup. Supposedly the city now wants to untangle Six Points and recreate the at-grade intersections, with the idea of rerouting Dundas Street slightly to the south to avoid intersecting Kipling and Bloor where they intersect (in effect, ending the six “points”). If that happens... whether or not that happens... Westwood’s done for. Dundas would be routed through the land it now sits on. But even if Six Points isn’t changed, the city’s made other plans for the land.

Next stop was Sheridan Park Drive at Mississauga’s west border. It’s a strange street that’s really just two nubs of a street, connected by a big soup bowl of another street, Speakman Drive, in a relatively nice industrial park. Sheridan Park Drive is part of the road allowance of The Queensway, a street that was constructed west from Queen Street in Toronto near the Humber River in the 1950s and eventually made its way across most of Mississauga. Mississauga has a few valleys, though, and never connected all the chunks of The Queensway. Eventually one became Blythe Road, and another Sheridan Park Drive. I discovered it while getting seriously into maps in my early 20s, about half my life ago now. I used to wonder why they disconnected it. The truth, as I just discovered recently, is that they never actually built it. Sheridan Park Drive’s abandoned middle isn’t abandoned at all... it’s merely unopened. Well, again, change is in the air, and it looks like Mississauga’s intending to open that stretch at some point fairly soon. So I thought I’d record it.

I was down there years ago... decades ago... to look it over... one of my first little “lost road” expeditions, actually. I’d forgotten just how nothing it was. An impassible tract next to a cleared hydro corridor, which now features a bike path (I honestly can’t recall if it was there the first time I was there). It had been my intention to walk its length and record it for posterity, but it was so unimpressive that even I, uncharacteristically, decided “why bother”? I took some shots at either end, and I drove the parts that are currently open, as well as recording what Speakman Drive currently looks like, and left it at that.

Finally was the follow-up of the construction of a new two-lane bridge taking Lower Base Line across East Sixteen Mile Creek. Lower Base Line is known through most of Toronto and Mississauga as Eglinton Avenue (till around 1970, it was called Base Line Road in Mississauga), but Milton is still pretty rural and apparently don’t cotton to them thar new-fangled ideas and city mouse names, so... Lower Base Line it remains. Halton Region, of which Milton is a constituent municipality, also includes such retained bucolic, if perplexing, nomenclature as Upper Middle Road, so there’s every indication this is how it’s going to stay. But anyway...

I used to do a lot of riding around Halton in the early 90s with a buddy whose hobbies included just driving around, listening to music and shooting the breeze, so I saw quite a bit of backroads Halton. The two one-lane bridges on Lower Base Line, and the little parks adjacent to them, were reasonably familiar to me; even more so to him, as he reputed them to be make-out spots par excellence. About ten years ago, Halton decided these two one-lane, wood-decked bridges couldn’t cut the mustard and the time had come to replace them. The first is the more easterly of the two, which I discovered just this weekend is called Barnstable Bridge. Its successor was built at least two or three years ago... I have photos of it about that old... but it’s down in the valley and servicing it with a road that will bear, and safely conduct, the traffic was another matter, so it’s sat unused beside it for all that time. Till now. The road was closed at the heights last winter, and the new road is currently being constructed, mostly on the west side right now. I found out about that last week, and was excited by the prospect of getting some shots of this going on. This was really the jewel in the crown of the expedition this weekend.

I got to Sixth Line, didn’t read the sign, and decided Lower Base Line was closed at that point (it isn’t). So I drove up Sixth Line to Britannia Road, over to Fifth Line, and down, for the sensible reason that the bridge is much closer to Fifth Line than Sixth.

The route down on the west side is currently really torn up, because they’re putting in the drainage infrastructure. Fantastic photographic opportunity! But a daunting hike I almost balked at. Looking it over, it was just plausible enough that I decided to take it on. It meant a lot of climbing into ditches and back out again, balancing on scraps of the road about a foot wide, and dealing with mud and gravel, but I’m proud to say I took it all on and bested it. Coming through, I had a reasonably easy trek down into the valley.

The road’s being vastly widened, and they’re putting up an impressive curving retaining wall. The road now leads straight to the new bridge instead of snaking down to the little one-laner. When I got there, I was chagrined to find a family of four camped out on the old bridge. Just my luck. I worked like a sonovabitch to get down there, and the shots are ruined by the Joad family on a $2 Saturday outing. Uncharitable, I know, but I was thinking nerd daggers at them the whole time. I also noticed that the road on the east side was still intact. They’d come down a nice, even, paved stretch from the Sixth Line side. I could have been miffed but I wasn’t. If I’d come down that way, odds are I would not have bothered with the construction at the top of the Fifth Line side and I would have missed some valuable shots I got making a virtue of necessity, so it was just as well.

I shot what I could without being intrusive and headed up to the far side. There was construction equipment blocking the way at the top... apparently Lower Base Line was open that far. I noticed the family’s beat-up sedan at the top and recognized it as a car so badly maintained that I’d noticed it passing me going the other way at some point (you tend to notice things like a hood held shut by bungee cord). While I was up there, a middle aged couple came by in a pickup truck and we exchanged some brief polite chatter on the construction going on below. As they drove away, I heard the family on their way up the road. Thank goodness! The dad jokingly remarked to me “they” were ruining “his creek” down there. Having the place to myself, I was able to finally get some shots of the old bridge before facing the reverse trek up the west side and through the obstacle maze back to my own conveyance waiting for me at the top.

 

I guess I’ll have to follow this up in the late summer or early autumn... it’s due to re-open in October. We’ll see. I’m anxious to see if they preserve the old bridge for the park-goers. Its pier and decking date to the 1960s, but since no one’s even sure when its supports were first laid down, I think it warrants keeping it around, so long as it’s separated from vehicle traffic.

I made it back in time to talk to my buddy overseas, by the way. :)