Let me please take a moment to describe what the house was before I get too in depth about what we were going to turn it into, and the long period in between.

It is three storeys; there are separate apartments on the first, second and third floors, and two apartments in the basement. A visit to the city archives reveals that there are no original plans for the house on file, but the archives have the permits from 1937 to transform the house into two apartments and from 1938 to transform the house into three apartments. The basement apartments were probably done (on the sly) in the early 1980s or perhaps late 1970s.

The basement has been dug down to 6 1/2 feet, but it still has a rather cramped feel to it. The basement also has a coin operated washer and dryer (none of my business, I suppose, but that seems a bit, well, cheap to me.) and that's where the furnace, water heater and electrical panel all are. The common area with all this stuff in it has been built around the location of the ductworks.

The first floor has the main entryway for all the apartments, which leads straight to the central staircase. On the right is the door for the first floor apartment. The bedroom is in the front of the house, there is a little cubby under the stairs, the living room is in the middle with the bathroom between the living room and kitchen. The kitchen is in a large 'L' shape, and leads to the back door. One of the main features is a long closet about 2 feet wide that runs from the kitchen to the bedroom - we speculated that it used to be a servants' hallway from the kitchen to the dining room. There is a stained glass window featuring a fleur de lys that looks like it's original to the house.

The second floor is a little more straight-forward. The front room is a largish living room (with an old fireplace, sadly, not working at the moment.), the middle room is a bedroom, there is a small bathroom and a closet and the kitchen is at the back of the house. There is a small room off the kitchen, about 8' x 8'. This is part of a two storey structure added to the back of the house so that the fire escape from the third floor can have a landing, catch an exit on the second floor and then proceed down to the back yard.

The third floor is shaped like a backwards upper case letter 'G' - the stairs open into the hallway, from which you either turn toward the front of the house to the living room, through the living room to the bedroom, through the bedroom to the bathroom, or you can turn left to the dine in kitchen. The fire escape is reached from a back door off the kitchen, and there is a deck which leads to the fire escape. This deck is one of the most immediately attractive features of the house.

The front yard is crushed brick; the back yard has been completely paved over except for a small area of interlock brick. The back yard is also dominated by the 1940s cast iron fire escape.

Throughout the house, there are the old hardwood floors and the high baseboards, high ceilings of somewhere that was really special. We found it charming, and we had the idea that we were restoring it rather than renovating. Certainly, the work that had been done most recently was the poorest in quality, but it hadn't lost the look of a century home.

As well, we were intrigued by some of the mysteries - what had that odd, long closet been before? Was there a fireplace on the first floor as well? What was behind that odd angled wall in the downstairs living room? Most importantly, what were we going to keep and what were we going to take out? That was what we talked about for many long nights between January and March of 2007.

I'll have to tell you about the plans, version 1a in a later post...

The new house - introduction.

I promised myself I would write this after the piano got moved in - we are moved into the new house after all this time! Hooray!! This place is the pine-box special, the house we're leaving to the kids, the only way I'm leaving is feet first - you get the picture.

The quick chronology -

Sept. 13, 2006 - My father died. It was the inheritance from him and from my mother, who died in 2001, that gave us the resources to take this on. They both grew up during the Great Depression and lived through World War II, and it was hugely important to them to save as much as they could and leave as much as they could to their children. I'd rather they were still with us, and I'd rather they had enjoyed themselves more in life, but this house is the greatest of many gifts they gave to us over the years, and I have to acknowledge that. Thank you, Mum. Thank you, Dad. I loved you both very much, and still do.

Jan. 2007 - The affairs and inheritance settled, my wife and I begin house hunting. We are looking for something fully detached, at least two stories if not three, and in our neighbourhood. The pickings in our immediate vicinity are not great, and everything we look at will require a fair amount of work. We are not daunted.

A sidebar - at this time, an Anglican church, de-sacrated, has come on the market. We are intrigued, and examine the possibility of buying it, renovating the church offices and kitchen into our living quarters and keeping the sanctuary, making it into a concert/recital venue. 3 nights classical, 3 nights jazz, Mondays dark, used as a rehearsal/recording space in the daytimes. We crunch numbers every which way, and the bottom line comes out the same every time - sell the current house for everything we can get, sell the car, sell the instruments, cash in the RRSPs and drain the bank accounts; live in the new space while we renovate, doing as much of the work ourselves as we can, and carry a massive mortgage. The end result was - we could squeak by, but there would be no safety net, and the least little thing going wrong would result in us losing everything but the clothes on our backs. Shelve that one under "lottery dreams". My daughter's piano teacher lives around the corner from said church - it sold to a Condo Developer, so we probably wouldn't have got it without a massive bidding war anyway. That's what I tell myself...

Finally, we find The House. It is a three storey, fully detached house built sometime around 1908 - 1910. It has been divided into five apartments - one each in the above-ground floors, and two in the basement. It has fallen between two stools in the housing market - it is too expensive/too much work for most sane people, but it is not generating enough rent to appeal to people as an income property, and the effort required to bring it up to code will cost too much for landlords. Enter us. We talk about it for days, see it three times and put in an offer. The house is inspected by the owner of the house inspection firm, who first asks what we intend to do with the place. When he finds out we'd bring it back to single family status, he says "That's good - I can tell you everything I see that should be fixed instead of just telling you what the code says has to be fixed." By the end of the inspection, he has a huge long list of what needs to get done, but he's also as charmed by the house as we are. We spend the rest of the morning over coffee talking about everything we might do with the place.

Ultimately, we want to restore the house to its pre-apartment state, and use it as a single family dwelling for the four of us - my wife, my two children and me.

Jan. 27th, 2007 - Our offer is accepted. We start the process of giving notice to the tenants. One of the tenants has a signed lease that goes to the end of June 2006 - everyone else requires two months notice. We are nervous about this, as it could turn out badly. Our fears are groundless - the three above-ground tenants leave at the end of February, the rear basement tenant leaves at the end of March. The remaining basement tenant, the one with the lease, is looking for a place with his girlfriend.

March 27th, 2007 - We take possession of the house and leave of our senses. First thing, we clean the place thoroughly because we have my daughter's 8th birthday party there on April 1st. It is a Harry Potter party, and the various empty rooms are done up as various bits of Hogwart's. One of the biggest hits of the party is the fact that the kids are allowed, nay, instructed, to draw self-portraits on the wall in permanent marker. What the hey, it's coming down anyway, but the kids are enthralled.

April 2nd, 2007 - The demolition begins. It is at this point that I should mention what exactly is going on - in Toronto, plans must be submitted to get a building permit, and these plans must be drawn either by an Architect or drawn by the home owner. They may not be drawn by the contractor. We stubbornly do not want to deal with an architect, and so my wife is drawing the plans herself. We have used up our allowed number of visits measuring the interior of the house, and once we have possession, we are free to measure as much as we like, with the exception of the front basement apartment.

We have, by this time, located and selected a contractor, Simon R. He is actually available to start as soon as we get the permits, but sadly, it takes us three tries to get them. Because of the delay, he takes another job in Leaside in Toronto, and he will start as soon as he is finished there. Meanwhile, I start on the demolition. The catch here is; I can't get a bin. Let me explain - we have a particular type of neighbourhood watch here; they can't tell you who scratched your car overnight, they can't tell you who stole your kid's bike, but they can tell when your back deck is 2" over the height allowed by the building code, and they call the inspector over it. So it is with bins - it's a red flag that some illegal renovation is going on, and even when you are doing what is allowed (eg. removing drywall is not a problem.), the inspector gets called. So everything that comes down has to stay in the house until the permits go up...

I'm going to leave it there for now - this chronology is too long-winded to be called quick! I'm going to keep writing more of it over the week. Please forgive a rambling old man - I'm just excited and happy, and I'll gladly tell anyone interested more than they ever wanted to know about the project.