It’s been official for more than a week now. We received a call on Alex’s phone on Friday, July 30th at 12:41pm letting us know that the sale of our beloved apartment was closed. The proceeds have since then shown up in our bank account, and our mortgage balance is now a big, fat, relieving 0. It’s been a thrilling ride, this whole first-home-ownership thing, what with the renovations and all the drama attached. Since I never got around to posting pictures, I guess now would be a bittersweet time to walk through the journey we undertook in the last 2 years and a few months…
Awesome blue-gray carpet, available only in the 90’s.
Freshly painted with “builders’ beige” / Someone took the blue theme very seriously
The solarium, another specialty from the 90’s.
The first month we owned the place, we lived in our old rented apartment. We proceeded to recruit our friends to destroy the fixtures and hoped to piece it back together in a month. Not so much. Major roadblock – needing a building permit from the City of Toronto because we wanted to take apart the non-structural wall for the solarium. Yes, I said non-structural. The end result: an additional month of concrete floors and construction mayhem.
Carpeting underneath washer/dryer = bad idea! / Taking apart beige kitchen
Ripping out carpets only to discover possible pee stains in the styrofoam lining?
We put down laminate flooring, built a second bedroom, installed a new kitchen with granite counter top, got new window coverings, painted and painted and painted some more, and laid out the apartment with our new snazzy furniture by July 2008 – three months after we became owners. The only place we didn’t venture into renovating yet was the bathroom.
A month later, the toilet upstairs burst in the middle of the day and flooded our apartment. Thankfully I was home and noticed it in time so there wasn’t a lot of damage…I heard the upstairs apartment had everything covered in a few inches of water by the time the flood got to our place! Anyway, the silver lining in this incident was that we promptly had our ceilings repainted by the condo board as part of the damages, and by January 2009 we also upgraded to engineered hardwood flooring because the laminate floorboards were starting to curl up from the moisture – all for free!! In the mean time, we also upgraded all of the lighting fixtures and put up the kitchen wall tiles to complete the renovation work.
Lastly, in late 2009, we tackled the bathroom renovations. It was a difficult month that I referenced to in this post, where we went to the gym on the 33rd floor to use the bathroom everyday. I know. The only positive thing I could see was that the bathrooms in the gym were seldom used, so at least they were most likely quite clean and well-maintained. After that month, our renovations were complete, and talks quickly turned to selling the newly renovated apartment.
A rain shower and a bathtub. I’d say that’s the thing I’m missing the most right now.
Anyway, now we’re in a little one-bedroom apartment in the Beaches, trying to figure out our next big adventure. We had a lot of fun with our first apartment, and I’m definitely looking forward to the next renovation project in the future where I get to play with another colour palette and look. We’ve kept some key pieces from the apartment that I love, too. This little place is quaint but so far, I have to say, I miss some of the taken-for-granted condo amenities from our previous place – free hydro and built-in AC would be nice right now in the middle of summer, for instance! Oh, and never underestimate the power of the garbage chute.
Hope you had fun browsing the pictures and thanks for sticking it out! The complete set is on Flickr here if you’re interested to see all the rooms!
