Tuesday, October 11, 2011

Goodbye, old house

I sold my house at the end of September.  I'd owned it since 1999, although it had mostly been rented out since 2004.  I sure bought at a good time- best investment I ever made, house prices more than doubled in those 12 years.  It was 103 years old, built in 1908.

Mine is the right hand side of the brick semi below:


I'll miss the house- it was very small, but it sure had character.  For those who knew it, come take a last look through...

Here's the living room- I loved the stained glass windows.




The kitchen...




This was the bike room, I didn't have a garage or shed so I kept them in this back room off the kitchen:



Let's go upstairs...


A contender for the skinniest bathroom in the world... loved the claw-foot tub though.  It was a small one, very cosy.


That's a stained-glass mirror over the sink, too.  The house had some charming touches like that.


The back bedroom.  It had french doors to open up the bathroom into it.


The middle bedroom- it faces south so it's very bright.


The front bedroom, it's the only normal-ishly (but still small) sized bedroom in the place:




The upstairs hall:



The back yard.  My most recent tenant was a gardener wannabe, which meant she got as far as removing my raspberry and other fruit bushes and all my perennials, and then lost steam and let it go to weeds.  Sigh.  For a house in my price range though, this is a very nice, deep back yard, with parking (that lower part of the patio is the parking space.)



I'll miss the atmosphere and the charm, and the wonderful natural light.  I won't miss the maintenance, the lawn mowing or shovelling, the thermostat that didn't do the "stat" part very well, the current foot-stomping and guitar-strumming neighbors on the other half of the semi, sharing a driveway with a madman on the other side, or the relentless insurgence of the local herd of very determined mice.  I also won't miss being a landlord... the tenant who razed the fruit bushes was also not too reliable with paying her rent.

My house... cloud and silver lining, all wrapped up together.  The neighbor who owns the other half of the semi bought it, so she can find someone now to rent it to who can put up with Strummy and Stompy.  I was on the brink of insanity from the noise, which I guess is a good thing, made it much easier to leave an otherwise really nice little house.

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