One major activity that my wife and I have been working on is house shopping. My wife enjoys checking out MLS on a regular basis and until recently we were only casually house shopping.
Well, sure enough a couple of houses came up we liked a lot and fit our price range.
We checked out houses mainly in the west end, Barrhaven and Kanata. Anything inside the greenbelt was outside our price range but we liked the bigger lots, mature tress, the unique house models and looks of the neighborhood. But despite these likes it just was not worth it for us.
At the same time new houses seemed to increase in price weekly. Sure enough they were soon out of reach. A few good points about this is that modern home owners tend to not want a backyard, front yard or even a driveway they own themselves. We saw plenty of large interior houses but they were mainly townhomes with shared driveways and postage stamp backyards.
This process really tested my personal environmental ethic though. I have been and continue to be an environmentalist, but perhaps more moderate than my days of living in a tent and paddling around northern Ontario 4 months of the year.
Now I do own a house, have a 2 car family, a dog , a cat and a loving wife. But I still have a nagging feeling of making the wrong environmental choice. After all we should be decreasing urban sprawl, decreasing commuting distances and trying to live better.
Ottawa does have its 20/20 vision city plan, and a strategy to increase intensification. However how this plan is panning out in reality does not look too friendly. Barrhaven is still a bedroom community, I still work for a government department not planning on moving away from its current location, the bus system still has little incentive and town homes just are not that appealing.
Driving throughout Barrhaven there are plenty of examples of where townhomes loose their appeal. Here is my running list, although not exhasutive it gives you an idea of what I mean:
- Neighbours separate their driveway using cinder blocks
- Some choices in colours of siding and exterior paint just should not happen
- Some driveways are painted on one side and crumbling on the other
- As far as I can tell there is no FIREPROOF firewall separating neighbours.
- The houses in the centre of the row need to use a "right of way" to get to the backyard with the lawn mower, but the end units block it off.
- The backyards are just too small
- current occupants still hear noises through the walls
Among other reasons as well we opted to not buy a townhome. We also opted to by previously owned. I fully expect our next house to have issues. I mean who wouldn't expect something wrong? But we already know the major issues with it.
As friends that have bought new have shared, a new house does not mean a perfect house. The house settles, cracks appear, things shift. At least with a previously owned house it has done most of its shifting, cracking and settling.
Construction material was another issue for me. I am one of those "weak" people with those "environment" allergies. You know the kind caused by off gassing of carpet adhesive, mold and dust in air ducts or a poorly ventilated house cased in plastic.
Those new fancy pre-fab 'I' beams created using woodchips and resin? Not only do they love to off gas (yes there are high quality ones that are better), but they also drasticaly decrease your escape time in case of fire. They tend to melt instead of burn. And when all these new resins burn you'll be lucky to survive the toxi gases in the case of a fire let alone the heat.
You CAN still build a house with "natural" materials (wood, concrete, steel), but you'll pay for it as an extra from the major builders.
So after all this critique of new home construction, the cities dimming 20/20 densification vision and neighbours who have a difficult time getting together to drink beer and figure out how to co-exist what did we do? Where did we go? Have we sold our house yet?
Well we currently live off of Claridge drive near Woodroffe by Farm Boy and we found a nice place over on the older side of Barrhaven on Kennevale by Marry Honeywell school. We take possesion on Febraruary 28 and have yet to sell our current place. This is stressful for sure, holding tow mortgages does not sound like fun.
Our daily mantra includes the following positive self talk:
- We bought our current house, surely someone else will
- For 15 years someone has lived here
- It is a great starter home
- Thanks to the Home Reno tax credit we upgraded a bunch of stuff
- and finaly... IT ONLY TAKES ONE BUYER.
So the waiting game continues. I may provide more updates as time goes on.
Good luck if you are shopping for homes, do some research into house design and building you'll learn a lot.
Cheers
