I was on the radio this morning. Not doing my Celtic radio program — no, I was talking about this project and this very blog.
I won’t go into to whys and wherefores of how it happened, (luck played a very important role) but shortly after nine this morning, I was talking to Ian Power of the Home Discovery Show, which airs on the Corus network across Canada and on CKNW here in Vancouver. We were talking about why someone (us, in particular) would want to build a laneway home, and why we want to move out of our nice, comfy condo.
If you missed it, you can hear the chat again next Saturday or by going to the audio vault and clicking on January 20 at 9 am. I’m on right after the news.
It was great fun, and terrifically exciting for me. So in a couple of weeks we will be doing it all over again.
I liked chatting about our new home, and I’m looking forward to the next time. And I am very, very thankful that on the radio no one can see what I look like at 9 am on Sunday morning.
It seems that every where I look, I am seeing stories of tiny apartments.
Here’s 8 rooms packed into a mere 350 square feet.
GIZMODO – The Tiny Transforming Apartment That Packs Eight Rooms into 350 Square Feet from Gizmodo on Vimeo.
It’s a very good place to start (cue Julie Andrews), you need to know if you can build a laneway house.
What does the city say?
Well, you can go to this site and see what the city says. There are restrictions (I may have mentioned those before) but you can link to and download the laneway-housing-howto-guide.
And that is a handy thing to have as you start your adventure. I read it and re-read it about fifty times when we started talking about building our own.
Our condo is really for sale. It’s official. It’s listed at our realtor’s website, at Craigslist, and at MLS. You can take a visual tour here. I’m of two minds — of course I want to sell it! But still, we really do love our condo, and it will be hard to say good-bye.
We’ve had about five viewings so far, so keep your fingers crossed that it sells quickly. Or not. (See, it’s that whole two minds thing).
We’re totally going public with this, Cal has mentioned it on his podcast — it’s really happening!
Laurel and SherVin from Novell met with us to talk about the final plans for the laneway house. The concepts we approved at a previous meeting are now being turned into blueprints that the city will approve. What we saw this time was basically what we had approved before, but the constraints of trying to get the most in the least space have led to the mechanical room and the laundry being moved. Laurel told us about the challenges of getting everything exactly right, only to find they were .2 square feet over the limit, and it was literally back to the drawing board. It is definitely designed right to the last square inch. The plans are still everything we wanted, and we are still very excited.
The blueprints will be before the city by mid-February, so everything should be ready for a start at the beginning of April. That seems so far away now, but I know it will be here before we know it.
A truly tiny house has been designed — and you can get the plans from the designer, Humble Homes, at a reduced price this month.
Check out a video tour of the Athru Tiny House here.
Bit stunned by the pace of what’s happening. We signed the forms with the realtor, pictures of our condo have been taken (yesterday) and today we have 3 realtors going though. We are packing boxes every day, tossing stuff like crazy (anyone need a pair of lady’s inline skates? Anyone?) and have rented a storage locker near the new place to put everything we won’t need for the next six months.
The price we are asking is $525,000 for the condo. If we’d sold a year ago we likely could have asked for more, but the market has softened since then, and let us not be greedy. It’s above the city assessment. C’est la guerre.
And speaking of the French having a word for it…..check out this last word in garage makeovers in Bordeaux. It is tres chic, and although I don’t get the bean bag in the sitting area, everything looks great. Perfect for a pied a terre.
OK, enough with the French words. I have exhausted my vocabulary, anyway.
Thanks to the Smallworks blog for putting us onto the French makeover.
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Artist and Desert Dweller with Big City Style.
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