Far above the city, I feel like I’m home

Do you know how much $85 worth of groceries weighs? More than you’d expect, unless all you’ve bought is chips — in which case let’s face it you could probably do with the exercise.

I have a habit of overbuying at the store, which I only notice when I am walking home, as I mostly do now, instead of driving home, as I did less than a year ago. At least it gives my arms a workout.

The husband and I sold our house last year and, as an experiment, rented a condo unit for a while to see how it would fit our current betwixt-and-between lifestyle. Betwixt because our older kid has moved out but returns home now and then to do his laundry and have dinner, and between because his younger brother is away at university for eight months of the year but is home the rest of the time. One requirement for our condo experiment was that the location had to be central enough that I could walk most places, like the grocery store, or take the TTC. It had seemed ridiculous to me for quite a while that, even though our house address said the city of Toronto, we were basically living a two-car, suburban lifestyle. 

So we sold many, many things on Kijiji (it’s amazing what people will come and haul away for $20) and had a giant garage sale and stuck some stuff in storage and threw out some other stuff and donated a bunch more. And then we packed up what we had left, and moved into a two-bedroom rental. We kept both cars but at the end of this summer, we feel like we can get rid of the older one.

That’s because after a couple of months, the condo lifestyle was clearly agreeing with us. We had never been what you might call handy; once one of us (him) tried to “fix” a brand new washing machine and it cost us something like $200. And I kept trying to like gardening — really, I did — but green is clearly not my colour. Every year I would buy a pretty pot for the porch right around the long weekend in May but by July it would be as dead as could be.

As for snow shovelling, well, even the hardiest of us gets real sick of that in February. But as condo dwellers, we spent some of the coldest nights of the year lounging around in the hot tub (#sorrynotsorry).

So, even though we had planned to rent an entire year before deciding to buy, when the chance came up a few months ago to purchase half a block from our rental, we did.

We learned a few things while shopping for a condo in Toronto, like: You can probably have a den, or a dining room, but you can’t have both. We decided to stick the dining room table in our “den”; it can double as a desk.

Another tip: A condo that advertises “Great for outdoor entertaining” probably means that you can’t fit more than one person in the kitchen but that two (skinny) people can squeeze on to the balcony if only one of them is holding a drink.

Also, what seems like a dream to one person is the opposite to someone else. Hands down the favourite thing that I saw was a loft, converted from a church. But the same abundance of large metal beams and slanted ceilings that made me love that unit turned out to be the exact opposite of what the guy I live with wanted.

After a while, the floor-to-ceiling windows that seem to be standard issue in Toronto impress less than the things you really need day-to-day, like the amount of counter space in the kitchen or the amount of time it takes you to get to the subway on a rainy day. Other things that you think would be deal breakers are not. For instance, I’m no fan of heights and yet here I am, 17 storeys above the city, sitting on the balcony as I write.

It’s an interesting view. If I look north, and a bit to the west, I can see a church down the street from the one where we were married. A block away, to the east, I can see my old high school, the same one our kids attended. And if I get up my nerve and go to the end of the balcony and peer south, some days I can see the lake.

But the balcony looks a little bare. Maybe I need to go back to the grocery store and buy a pot of flowers. I think that I can carry it home.