Mar 21

Mar 21 Living The Condo Life

Okay, enough of the serious stuff. If you are looking for more information on Covid 19, you’ve come to the wrong place. My medical degree is in drinking cheap red wine, not solving the virus. However do stay tuned in and practice safe self isolation.

Most of our friends no doubtably are aware that we moved just over two years ago. After a very lengthy time living in the “Beaches” neighbourhood of Toronto, we decided to try a new experience. We had lived in two different houses in the neighbourhood and we had some incredible moments there - the birth of our daughter, raising two fantastic dogs and hanging out with great friends/neighbours. However, as I’m sure most of you do you may have some sort of “master” plan.

I thought I had one (okay, I did) but like a lot of things I had kept it somewhat to myself.

For the last few years the real estate market in Toronto has been crazy and as I was approaching a certain age (quiet), I wondered if now was the time to take the equity we had accumulated in the house and downsize to something smaller?

For a number of reasons I thought we should consider making the change - not for financial as we had no pressure to move as the house was paid for. But sometimes you just have a feeling in your gut that it’s time for a change.

I asked the “team” what they thought and I fully expected to get completely shut down. However to my great surprise my query was actually received very positively. My daughter’s school was/is further west of where we were living and I’m sure she thought we lived a million miles away from her friends. We also were spending more and more time at the tennis club which ironically is very close to her school. So, once we were on the same page - figuratively speaking - so the hunt began.

We hired a local real estate agent who my wife knew and felt comfortable with. We came up with a price and a long list of things we had to do to get the house ready to sell. So, you think this part is easy? Guess again because you have to stage the house - my only comparison is someone telling you need a complete makeover before you go on that first date. You have to clean the joint from top to bottom, de-clutter, paint, fix things and do everything you don’t actually want to do.

Fortunately, there was a “plan B” because friends of my wife had expressed interest in moving a bit further south from their current location. They liked our house and after a bit of back and forth we were able to finalize the purchase.

Doing it this way made our life easier as we didn’t have to go through the staging and now it was time to actually find a new place to live.

In today’s world you can literally find everything on the internet and one of the sites I was looking at constantly was https://condos.ca/ You can filter the site from top to bottom and knowing that location/price were the key categories we decided to start to look at a few areas that we thought made sense.

We had been spending a lot of time in the https://www.thedistillerydistrict.com/ of the city. They had built a state of the art YMCA there and if you put your “vision” cap on you could see that this is going to be a hot area eventually. We also asked the agent to look at places around the Yonge & Davisville area.

Our agent set up some appointments on a Saturday and out we went, including with Sarah. We started down in the Distillery district and we went into a few units but it quickly became apparent that with many of the new builds you are giving up size.

I now call these boxes in the sky. Two bedrooms were typically 850 to 1,000 square feet and the “kid” gave the thumbs down very quickly. We then looked a few units in the Yonge & Davisville area, and again nothing was quite ringing the bell. I started to think that this wasn’t going to be so easy.

It’s one thing finding a place that’s perfect for two but for three people you have a different set of challenges. Ms. Sarah at one point during that day took my phone and logged on the condo.ca site and found a place what she thought was interesting and said to me “what about this one”?

I had seen it previously in my searches but for some reason I didn’t take it very seriously because I thought it might be too far west? We noticed they were having an open house the very next day (Sunday) and we were waiting patiently at 11 am when it opened. As soon as we walked in “we knew this was it”.

In its previous life the building had been a Toronto Hydro storage facility and was converted into art-deco lofts in 2009. I learned that they call this a “hard loft.” Every unit in the building is different (as I found out later) and this particular unit has three levels. It has 16 feet ceilings in some parts with the duct work showing. You can enter the unit from inside the building or from the outside on the ground floor. The main floor is the living/media area, the second floor is the kitchen, bathroom and bedroom and the third floor is the master bedroom with the master bathroom/walk in closet and the overall square footage is around 1,200 square feet.

The price had just been reduced and in one day we bought it - I don’t fool around.

Of course it had been staged to sell however pretty well everything was original so we knew that there would be some obvious changes we would want to make but sometimes you have to live in a place first. The easy things were cleaning and painting and we did all of that prior to actually moving.

We made a decision to bring almost nothing from our house. First of all the look of our previous furniture was not keeping with the design direction we wanted and secondly a smaller space means you have to learn to live with less. Furniture needs to be smaller, less intrusive. “Less is more.”

So we began the big purge which for me was easy, but I do appreciate for some it wasn’t simple. I mean you paid good money for things so who wants to get rid of them? But, smaller spaces means you have no choice. You don’t need 24 coffee cups or 36 pairs of pants -if you catch my drift?

We took the first year to settle in and learn to find the new normal. We eventually decided to tackle the first big renovation which was the kitchen and floors.

We replaced the brown laminate flooring on two levels and and we ripped out the old lower kitchen cabinets and replaced them with new and larger cabinets. We also replaced and increased the size of the counter space and added a new backsplash and upgraded some of the appliances.

We had to move out for about 6 weeks and this was very stressful as our beloved Ms. Daisy (dog #2) passed away during this time. The condo was not really ready to move back into but we made a joint decision to come back because we were very upset and we needed to get our feet back home.

The main floor went through very little change aside from the new flooring. You can’t see it but I have a very nice work area (computer etc) in this room and it’s very comfortable to watch television or just chill.

Once we finished this renovation we took about six months off and eventually decided to tackle the second floor bathroom. As I had earlier said everything was original and Ms. Sarah, who is the main occupant of this bathroom asked for a stand up shower to replace the bathtub. And since she has enough cosmetics to open her own store she would need a bigger vanity with more storage.

We should have replaced the floor in the third floor master bedroom when we replaced the floors during the first renovation but we didn’t.

I rationalized this way - I had no place to put the bedroom furniture.

We decided to replace master bedroom floor around six months ago and what it difference it has made. The flooring through the entire condo is now a light grey engineered hardwood and it doesn’t show the dust/dirt as easy as the brown laminate did.

The final renovation we just finished in the last few weeks. We had been discussing what to do in the master bathroom for quite awhile. As storage is a challenge in most condo’s we knew that we wanted to solve that problem. I also wanted to get rid of the bathtub and replace it with a nicer, larger walk-in shower. We decided to try out a different contractor this time and we think they did a very good job, on budget and on time. They were easy to work with and very responsive and best of all - we didn’t have to move out but there sure was a lot of dust.

So, we’re all done. Okay, I always have a few more ideas but generally the major things have been dealt with. You can replace furniture etc but that can be done when needed.

Friends ask me do we miss the house? I miss a few things - the BBQ, the front porch and your neighbours. We do have a communal BBQ on the rooftop and we have a nice gym in the building but it sure was nice to simply step outside and fire up the BBQ. But these are the compromises you make.

You don’t meet people as easy as you do in a house but we do have a small sitting area out front and we hang out there (when the weather cooperates). Of course Sheila likes to go out and greet every dog that walks by.

We are about 300 metres from the Dupont subway, a 7 minute drive to the tennis club and about a 10 minute drive to Ms. Sarah’s school. We do find ourselves walking a lot more in the city exploring new new “old” neighbourhoods.

Now that I’m home more, I have time to clean, cook and do laundry and since the space is smaller it doesn’t take much time to clean. Everyone seems happy and so, all in all it has worked out very well. I realize it’s not for everyone but for us it seems to work. So, that’s it. Thanks for reading.