Our first home! 4 bedrooms, 5 bathrooms, infinite cool.

It's an older house, redone. We paid just under 350k CDN for it, or at least the bank did on our behalf. I'm referencing the money because a) we are relatively poor and that's really cheap for the Toronto area and b) the place is so cool you might think we paid several billion dollars for it. We would have, but fortunately we got a deal :)


It's about 6 miles west of our current place, in the city of Burlington Ontario. We take possession Sept 30th. A really nice couple sold it to us after completely updating and renovating the place and putting countless hours of work and love into it. After their daughter heads to school this fall they are going to buy a place out in the country, so their loss is our considerable gain. You see, she's an artist and he's carpenter who fixes botched home renovations. Seriously, is there any better person to buy a home from? We did the home inspection last week and the inspector was nearly in tears "This is why I got into home inspection." and "If you don't buy this place, I will. There's nothing else like it. At all." and my favorite "Holy shi - sorry, I'll edit that out of the DVD I give you. I'm trying to be professional here, but there's just so much to look at".


We saw at least a couple of dozen homes before we found this one, and it's the only one that made me wanna barf with house-lust. Lisa was skeptical (the pics really don't do it justice) but once she saw the place in real life she fell in love with it as much as I did.

We immediately offered to pay their asking price, on the condition that they leave a whole bunch of cool stuff behind, like the stained glass, the dining room table (the husband made it himself and it's gorgeous), all the appliances and a bunch of the art and furniture. Basically we said "you may take the clothes in your closets but leave everything else". They are into the idea of de-cluttering their existence, so it worked out great!

I could hardly sleep this past week while waiting for our mortgage arrangements to solidify and for the home inspector to do his job, and being just generally buzzed on adrenaline at the idea of being in debt until 2 years after I retire :)

Oh, would you like some pics? Home, meet blog. Blog, meet home.

View of the front room. Note the textured walls. The front windows all open out completely - you could drive a car through if you wanted to.




Dining Room leading to front room. We have a 2-room kitchen, you can see one room on the left with a built-in stove. We have 2 ovens, good for entertaining :) Dining room table was handmade from old barn-board by the owner. All the woodwork in the entire place is shiny and flawless.



Different angle on the dining room. Note the stained glass - the house is full of it.



Some kitchen action. Note the gas fireplace in the kitchen, good for cold mornings :)



Off to the right you can see the main floor bathroom. We have one in the basement, one on the main floor and three more upstairs. The kitchen sink isn't stainless steel, it's this crazy brown smooth ceramic stuff.





Lets head upstairs for a few minutes and check out the master bedroom. Note the fireplace and the computer nook.



Note the awesome curved wall with major closet space behind. Off-camera to the right is the entrance to the ensuite bathroom, which is itself pretty insane.



More computer nookage and fireplaceage.




One of the basement rooms, which they use for tv. There's a bar on the right. The antlers kind of creeped me out but further inspection reveals they are paper mache and wire.



Off-camera to the right is the laundry room, art room and games room. They currently have the games room set up with fooseball, air hockey, a big vinyl collection and a regular table-top hockey game. Oh, and a whole pile of storage, along with a bathroom and some other stuff I forget now.




Let's head outside for a second to witness some real insanity. Our back yard is like a park, with 4 heated and insulated buildings with water and electrical service. All the smooth rocks in the pictures have faces carved into them.



This looks promising... the white framed-thing is more stained glass. It's seriously everywhere we look.



The inside of the gazebo, with water, electricity, bbq, tunes and a bar fridge.



From halfway down the back yard, facing toward the house. More buildings off-camera to the right.



My fingers are cramping from typing, so I'm off for a bit. More pics of the bedrooms, bathrooms and whatnot to come. They are all pretty wild - stuff like glass bricks in the shower and a complete bathroom in one of the bedrooms.

And don't even get me started about the staircase... :)