Category Archives: Laneway House

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.

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.

Don’t you just hate it when people start blogs and they go great guns for a month or so and then it just peters out?

Yeah, me too.

So DH and I were in the middle, or rather closer to the end, of the process of interviewing realtors to find someone to sell our condo.  We had seen two, both of whom are very good and conscientious, and we had one more interview Saturday at noon with the realtor who had helped us buy the condo.  And at 11 am on Saturday morning the phone rang. It was my father, calling from Nelson.

My 85 year old mother had suffered a severe stroke.  They weren’t sure what the situation was, but she had made it clear that she wanted no invasive procedures to prolong her life.

Everything stopped.

Suddenly nothing mattered except getting up to Nelson.  I made it through the interview with the realtor.  My sister got me listed on a flight on Sunday to Castlegar, the closest airport, and told me that she was coming with me.

The next week was spent sitting bedside in the Nelson hospital watching my mother in a coma. My sister sat with me sometimes but she was also getting my Dad set up for independent living in his condo.

Mom slipped awayon Christmas Eve.

So everything has been put on hold with the LWH.  We have chosen the realtor, but haven’t filled out the forms yet.  We had to cancel an appointment with the designer to sign off on some design papers. I am back in town trying to get caught up and then we will go ahead.

We’ve signed the Part 2 of our agreement with the builder, so they are going ahead with the detailed plans for the laneway house.  The people up the hill in the big house got some (sort of) bad news, their current budget will not allow them to completely finish all the plans they have — they are going to have to cut up the remodel into smaller projects.  Right now they are looking at gutting the basement and completely building the studio suite, roughing in the rest of the basement to finish later.  When the laneway house is in place, of course, their property will be worth a lot more, and they could borrow enough to take on some of those other tasks.  They just don’t want to get in over their heads financially now by taking out a larger loan.

I am tidying up our shelves, so I put away some of the family photos until we are in our new home.  We’ll have to stage the condo to sell it — clearing out our personal belongings so potential buyers can more easily see themselves in the place.  We don’t want people thinking that they’re in OUR place, we want them to be able to see their things here.

We’re also replacing the builder-grade vanity bar lights in the bathrooms with new fixtures.  After we’d painted the bathrooms, DD suggested we swap out the ubiquitous bars with something more stylish.  We checked out the big box stores, but they were quite pricey and we want to do this as thiftily as possible.  We also looked at Craigs List, but most of the stuff there were fixtures people had pulled out of their bathrooms — the same ones we were replacing.  We wanted something nicer — but we know that one of the first places people make changes is in their bathrooms — why spend the money on something they are just going to tear out?

Then I remembered Restore, the retail outlet for the items Habitat for Humanity have donated.  It’s not just used stuff — although there are lots of used doors, shelves, and fixtures.  It’s obvious that sometimes builders get too much tile or flooring for a project, so the remainder goes to Restore.  We nipped up a couple of Sundays ago.  There were lots of friendly people to help, and within a few minutes we had found our lights.  Still in the box, they are easy to install and look great.