the daily snivel
There's No Place Like Home
... which is why, when the time came to get a new apartment in Ottawa, I moved back to the place I called home for the six previous years: my old home, located in Ottawa's fantastic New Edinburgh community near the Rideau River and the Governor General's (not to mention the Prime Minister's) official residence. It turned out that the people who moved in to my old apartment when I moved to Toronto this past August decided to leave early. As a result, my old landlord started posting advertisements for the apartment (to the extent that I was charmed when I saw an ad describing the place on the newsgroup ott.housing in February, without realizing it was actually my apartment that I was browsing over) and let the remaining tenants know that the apartment was available if they knew anyone who wanted a three-bedroom for March or April.
My good friend Mélanie, who lived in one of the apartments in the building, got an e-mail from the landlords about the vacancy and let me know about it. I'd really missed that apartment, and every time I came over to visit, I would walk past the ground-floor window of my old bedroom and feel immensely jealous of the people living there now. It infuriated me that there were interlopers living in my apartment, where I'd spent so many happy years, and that they clearly weren't taking very good care of it or the outside grounds. The hallway outside the front door hadn't been vacuumed, there was litter in the yard, and the back deck was crammed with garbage bags and detritus.
Naturally, the opportunity to reclaim my rightful place of residence was too much to resist. The only problem: the price. The apartment is an enormous three-bedroom unit that occupies the entire ground floor of the house (a tall, three-storey red brick building built early in the last century) and comes with a deck in the back yard and ample storage. Due to the way the Tenant Protection Act in Ontario works, a landlord can only raise the rent by a prescribed percentage each year (usually around 4%, unless they have embarked in some major capital upgrades), meaning that my long tenancy there had a rent essentially frozen at its 1999 price, back when the neighbourhood wasn't nearly so trendy and upkeep and utility costs involved in maintaining a property weren't quite so high. Once a tenant moves out, however, a landlord can raise the rent to whatever the market can bear. After I moved out, the rent went up. After the people who came after me moved out, the rent went up. Long story short: the rent was about $250 more expensive than it was a year ago.
Solution: get a roommate. But this only presented a further problem: how could I possibly find a roommate that I would not murder? My days of living with strangers and hating the way they piled dishes in the sink were long over, and no apartment was worth going to that. New solution: move in with someone I get along with really well! Mélanie was also looking for a new roommate, since she was living in a two-bedroom in the building and her current roommate, a polite, quiet, clean, and studious young woman, was going back home to Japan shortly. Between us, we could certainly afford the rent, and we definitely needed the extra space in the larger, three-bedroom unit to combine our shared possessions (humble though they are).
Having been enticed by the promise of a discount on rent if we moved in earlier, moving day was set for March 1. I actually took a day and a half off work (having missed a paltry total of 4.5 days, including the 1.5 vacation time spent on the move, in the entire eight months I've been working here) to get the move done. And this time I did the move right: I hired some large men with a stout truck and sturdy backs to cart my precious material possessions (which, after some heroic bouts of purging, fit into a space 1/3 the size of my current office) out of storage and into my old/new home, as well as moving Mélanie's stuff downstairs from her apartment to boot. I don't mind moving other people the old fashioned way (with gumption and elbow grease and the promise of beer and pizza as a reward), but when it comes to moving myself anywhere, I've decided that the only stress and hassle I want is when it comes to looking at the invoice from the moving company.
I started this post just after the move, but saved it and held it in limbo until I had a chance to finish it, which is from the vantage point of May, 2006, some two months after the big event. The apartment is shaping up nicely: not only did the landlords completely refinish one of the bathrooms (for we have two!) with new tiles and new flooring and fixtures, but they also put a new tiled backsplash in the kitchen and repainted the house (more on the paint job later, however), but the decorating is coming along splendidly. We have a beautiful office and guest room set up, featuring a great, bright, spacious workspace but also having a cozy little bed (which the cat, George, who I have missed terribly in my absence from this building, has claimed as his own but shares it magnanimously with guests when they come to visit), a dresser, and a wardrobe, and a bookcase with plenty of interesting things to read. The kitchen is perfect, with lots of light and counter space, huge cabinets, and personal touches making it homey and inviting. The living room is even more inviting than it's ever been. The only thing that needs to be finished is my own room, which I had time to half set up in the sense that everything is reassembled and more or less where I want it to be, but the space is still half-filled with boxes.
The only thing I have a desperate hankering to change is the paint. I don't know who was having a sale on pukey, institution-green paint (of the sort you see in old schools and mental hospitals), but my landlord plum cleaned them out, covering the kitchen with it in a way that completely fails to please the eye. The old paint was purple and white, and heavily chipped or faded in places, but it was actually preferable. When I have both spare time and money, I'm going to repaint the entire apartment. And there will be crown molding. Oh yes. There will be... crown... molding.
Comments:My good friend Mélanie, who lived in one of the apartments in the building, got an e-mail from the landlords about the vacancy and let me know about it. I'd really missed that apartment, and every time I came over to visit, I would walk past the ground-floor window of my old bedroom and feel immensely jealous of the people living there now. It infuriated me that there were interlopers living in my apartment, where I'd spent so many happy years, and that they clearly weren't taking very good care of it or the outside grounds. The hallway outside the front door hadn't been vacuumed, there was litter in the yard, and the back deck was crammed with garbage bags and detritus.
Naturally, the opportunity to reclaim my rightful place of residence was too much to resist. The only problem: the price. The apartment is an enormous three-bedroom unit that occupies the entire ground floor of the house (a tall, three-storey red brick building built early in the last century) and comes with a deck in the back yard and ample storage. Due to the way the Tenant Protection Act in Ontario works, a landlord can only raise the rent by a prescribed percentage each year (usually around 4%, unless they have embarked in some major capital upgrades), meaning that my long tenancy there had a rent essentially frozen at its 1999 price, back when the neighbourhood wasn't nearly so trendy and upkeep and utility costs involved in maintaining a property weren't quite so high. Once a tenant moves out, however, a landlord can raise the rent to whatever the market can bear. After I moved out, the rent went up. After the people who came after me moved out, the rent went up. Long story short: the rent was about $250 more expensive than it was a year ago.
Solution: get a roommate. But this only presented a further problem: how could I possibly find a roommate that I would not murder? My days of living with strangers and hating the way they piled dishes in the sink were long over, and no apartment was worth going to that. New solution: move in with someone I get along with really well! Mélanie was also looking for a new roommate, since she was living in a two-bedroom in the building and her current roommate, a polite, quiet, clean, and studious young woman, was going back home to Japan shortly. Between us, we could certainly afford the rent, and we definitely needed the extra space in the larger, three-bedroom unit to combine our shared possessions (humble though they are).
Having been enticed by the promise of a discount on rent if we moved in earlier, moving day was set for March 1. I actually took a day and a half off work (having missed a paltry total of 4.5 days, including the 1.5 vacation time spent on the move, in the entire eight months I've been working here) to get the move done. And this time I did the move right: I hired some large men with a stout truck and sturdy backs to cart my precious material possessions (which, after some heroic bouts of purging, fit into a space 1/3 the size of my current office) out of storage and into my old/new home, as well as moving Mélanie's stuff downstairs from her apartment to boot. I don't mind moving other people the old fashioned way (with gumption and elbow grease and the promise of beer and pizza as a reward), but when it comes to moving myself anywhere, I've decided that the only stress and hassle I want is when it comes to looking at the invoice from the moving company.
I started this post just after the move, but saved it and held it in limbo until I had a chance to finish it, which is from the vantage point of May, 2006, some two months after the big event. The apartment is shaping up nicely: not only did the landlords completely refinish one of the bathrooms (for we have two!) with new tiles and new flooring and fixtures, but they also put a new tiled backsplash in the kitchen and repainted the house (more on the paint job later, however), but the decorating is coming along splendidly. We have a beautiful office and guest room set up, featuring a great, bright, spacious workspace but also having a cozy little bed (which the cat, George, who I have missed terribly in my absence from this building, has claimed as his own but shares it magnanimously with guests when they come to visit), a dresser, and a wardrobe, and a bookcase with plenty of interesting things to read. The kitchen is perfect, with lots of light and counter space, huge cabinets, and personal touches making it homey and inviting. The living room is even more inviting than it's ever been. The only thing that needs to be finished is my own room, which I had time to half set up in the sense that everything is reassembled and more or less where I want it to be, but the space is still half-filled with boxes.
The only thing I have a desperate hankering to change is the paint. I don't know who was having a sale on pukey, institution-green paint (of the sort you see in old schools and mental hospitals), but my landlord plum cleaned them out, covering the kitchen with it in a way that completely fails to please the eye. The old paint was purple and white, and heavily chipped or faded in places, but it was actually preferable. When I have both spare time and money, I'm going to repaint the entire apartment. And there will be crown molding. Oh yes. There will be... crown... molding.
You might want to have a look at the Ontario Tenants Rights website.
