Category: Condo

"Crack & hookers. That's how to keep reformed suburbanites out and prices low."

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Dropped off the paperwork & cheques at the lawyer’s office today, for which I expect we shall receive an impressive invoice. Monday we will have keys!

.:.

I’m sorry…Ice Girls? Ice girls?!?!? Look, nobody deserves to get spit on, but…c’mon. There should be no bare midriffs on the ice.

.:.

Great post on BlogTO about the shift, if only a slight one, toward Torontonians requiring less living space. Whether to save money or spare the environment, it seems like a few more people are foregoing the suburbs for the downtown.

The ever rising cost of housing in the city, along with increasing concern on how our lifestyle and choices affect the environment has got a lot of home buyers asking themselves, ‘how much space do I really need?’.

The National Post is running a three part series this week that examines the backlash against ‘living large’. People are coming back to the city by choice, and their leaving their white picket fences and second cars behind.

I’m of this mindset, obviously. For the last five years we’ve lived in a 650 square foot (it’s not like we have kids or a car to park) apartment downtown. My love for living downtown ruled out buying in the suburbs, and I never wanted to own a house (or a car) anyway. I grew up surrounded by hundreds of acres of farmland, so living an hour from the city so that I could own a tiny patch of walled-in grass never appealed to me. We could’ve bought houses in mature, just-outside-the-core neighbourhoods like our friends CBGB and T-Bone did, I guess, but I like being right in the core…and I love my new view.

[tags]henrik lundqvist, blogto, toronto urbanation[/tags]

I'd like a gallon of the "Quietude" please

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My wife just arrived home with enough paint samples to tile our floor. I’m having trouble deciding between “hidden peak”, “nature retreat”, “amphibian” and “paramount”. All four are shades of gray, by the way. In fact, there are about 50 different gray samples sitting on the counter right now, all with equally helpful names.

[tags]paint samples[/tags]

Bring the sked

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Travel plans for the fall* are coming together. We’re very excited.

.:.

Our schedule for the next little while is becoming very clear. I actually don’t like having this many plans; I prefer to stumble into each day and do whatever, but that’s not in the cards right now. This weekend I have a paper to write for my course. Next week we have a busy social calendar and then I’ll finish off as much of my course as I can before we take possession of our condo on the 9th. Around this time the NHL & NBA playoffs begin. We’ll be cleaning, painting, etc. for the next two weeks (and ignoring most of the Hot Docs festival) until our actual move-in; a few days after the move I go away on course for a week. No sooner do I return than the social activities of May (the Santé wine festival, a reunion in Niagara-on-the-Lake with some Dal alumni friends, Victoria day, GB’s birthday) begin. June is fairly light, though I disappear for another course toward the end, and nothing’s really planned for July or August. I suppose I should be using that time to do the giant integrative paper that’s due in the fall, since September (between an abbreviated film festival, another week away on course and two weeks of vacation) is a write-off.

*Yes, we plan this far in advance. Make fun of us all you want; it was taking our time with planning and research that made the Rockies trip our best vacation ever.

[tags]vacation, sante festival, dalhousie university[/tags]

Nice car, great architecture, pretty sunset, blah blah…hey lookit, our condo!

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Staying at home today. Feel as if my gastrointestinal system is under attack. Will try to gather enough strength to drag ass to the drug store and collect some supplies. #1 on the list: Gatorade.

.:.

Today’s picture over at Daily Dose of Imagery has a nice picture of our new condo building. Well, I guess the picture is of the red Mini in the foreground, but you can see our building in the shot.

[thanks Jen!]

[tags]gatorade, daily dose of imagery, spire condominium[/tags]

Rock-grid coordinates SH735026

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After 3+ years of waiting, we finally got to see our condo today. Not a model, not a floorplan…our actual unit. There’s still work going on in the hallways and common areas, but our suite is (99%) finished. We had our inspection today. There were a couple of hiccups, but overall we’re pretty happy with it. The view’s even better than I expected, even if it’s all grey and wintery outside. I can’t wait to see it in the summer.

The only bad part of today was the attitude of the people who did the inspection with us. The first lady tried really hard to rush us through, and dismissed some of the things Nellie raised as potential issues. Granted, they were very small things, and the lady claimed that today was only about major problems, but everything we read told us that we should get everything acknowledged now. Then, when discussing the two major things down in the office, the people talked to us like we were morons and weren’t terribly helpful. That part was kind of frustrating, but it paled alongside the fun of actually setting foot in our own place. 5 weeks from today, we’ll be the official owners.

Nellie took a few pictures from the (rather huge) balcony too. I’ve put them in my flickr profile.

.:.

There are times when you wish Onion headlines were true. This is one of those times.

Calling it the planet’s last, best hope for saving rock music, the Guardians of the Protectorate of Rock announced Monday that they would take the extraordinary step of unleashing a never-before-heard Jimmy Page riff, hidden for decades in a mythic, impenetrable vault.

…

The Guardians said recent developments in the music world, such as the unaccountable popularity of the Dixie Chicks and Sufjan Stevens, have created a “perfect storm of lameness” from which rock might never recover. While Iommi refused to say when the vault would be opened, hard rock sources believe it will take place just prior to next month’s Fall Out Boy–Honda Civic tour, which many fear will suck the remaining lifeblood from all that still rocks.

Is Jack Black writing for The Onion these days?

[tags]spire condo, onion, jimmy page[/tags]

You don't understand…I need chocolate chip zucchini loaf

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Met CBGB for a bite to eat tonight. After dinner we tried to get some chocolate-y goodness at the Chocolate Heaven Cafe a few blocks away, but it closes at 6:00 (!?) on Sun-Wed.

.:.

Condo stuff is coming to a head now: we have our inspection next week, take possession April 9th, and move in two weeks after that. That gives us plenty of time to paint, move our stuff over, clean the old place, etc.

Getting the cats from one place to the next should be fun as well. Remember the opening scene from Jurassic Park? You know…”Shoot her!! Shoot her!!” It’ll be something like that.

[tags]chocolate heaven cafe, moving day[/tags]

b Profitable

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Here’s how today went:

  • Got haircut
  • Rousted Nellie out of bed and got some breakfast (well, brunch; it was after 12 by this point) downtown at b Espresso Bar. I like it there
  • Stopped in at Henry’s to see if they have the wide-angle lens we’vebeen looking for. They do. We shall go back soon and see if they’ll take our old camera on trade
  • Went to the condo sales centre. We just wanted another look at the model suite similar to our unit, but Nellie was convinced they wouldn’t show us if they knew we’d already bought, so we pretended to be in the market for a new condo. We had a look around, and also got an updated price list. This was interesting, as the one remaining unit like ours listed for $53,000 more than we paid, and our particular unit’s much better (much higher, 400 sq. foot balcony, higher ceilings, better finishings, etc.). Nice to know that 3 years of waiting has paid off fiscally…so far
  • Watch Montreal lose to the Islanders
  • Tried to nap
  • Bought groceries
  • Worked on paper for MBA course
  • Wrote this

.:.

After giving the Arcade Fire‘s Neon Bible several listens, I’m convinced it’s at least in the same ballpark as Funeral and has the potential to be just as good, if not as…I don’t know, epic. It has two brilliant songs, “Intervention” and “Antichrist Television Blues”; are they as good as “Neighbourhood #1” and “Rebellion (Lies)”? I’ll need a few hundred more listens to know for sure.

.:.

How cute is my wife? Tonight, while I finished up a paper for school, she watched Pretty In Pink in the other room. Wait, wait, that’s not the cute part (in fact, I find everything about that movie fairly repulsive, especially Molly Ringwald). Here’s the cuteness: when I took a break and went into the bedroom to watch a bit of the Raptors game, she slid a piece of paper under the door that said, in huge letters, “Je t’aime”.

Awwwww.

[tags]b espresso bar, henry’s camera, spire condominium, arcade fire[/tags]

In so deep as in, "Which way is up?"

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I’ve done something to my back. It’s tweaking like a bastard just under my right shoulder blade. I think it started with the benches at Eggstasy and my chair at work just made it worse.

.:.

We watched Miami Vice (imdb | rotten tomatoes) last night. I liked it, but I seem to be in the minority on that. I confess to being a full-on Michael Mann junkie; the way he shoots his films is enough to make good movies great (Ali, Collateral) and make great movies classics (Heat, Last Of The Mohicans). In this case it made a mediocre film good.

.:.

It’s (apparently) confirmed now: we take possession of our condo April 9th. That would be…less than 2 months. Our inspection’s only a month from now.

You know, this condo thing has been going on so long it’s felt theoretical. It’s almost hard to believe it’ll actually happen soon.

[tags]back pain, miami vice, michael mann, condo inspection[/tags]

Long live the Thunder Pit

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I worked from home today, so I could see the “construction” workers milling around in the condo building site across the street. I’ve mentioned this hole before: my brother named it the Thunder Pit after some pipe bombs went off there, and I commented on how freaking long it’s taking to build. It’s now been 4.5 years since I visited the sales center, and the site is still just a hole in the ground. Oh, they make plenty of noise in there, and built pretty ramps into the pit, and weld lots of stuff…but there’s still no building there!

Our condo was sold, begun, built (all 45 floors) and is about to receive the first occupants, all in the same amount of time it’s taken these guys to square off the corners of the Thunder Pit. I feel better about our decision every time I look out my window.
[tags]bloor street neighbourhood, spire, condo construction[/tags]

That's reassuring

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The National Post has declared our nearly-completed condo building to be “the most beautiful new tower in the city”. That’s nice to hear. It was a little nerve-wracking, wondering if our tower would end up being considered a blight on the skyline.

.:.

From an old issue of The Onion which somehow showed up in my feed reader today:

WASHINGTON, DC—Telephone logs recorded by the National Security Agency and obtained by Congress as part of an ongoing investigation suggest that the vice president may have used the Oval Office intercom system to address President Bush at crucial moments, giving categorical directives in a voice the president believed to be that of God.

$5 says this is one of those Onion articles that ends up being true down the road.

[tags]national post, most beautiful new tower, toronto, onion, bush, cheney, intercom[/tags]