2009-04-19 - 4:37 p.m.

....God bless our Bathroom Collection...

So, one ongoing topic in the teranika household is housing. We have been looking. Alot.

K and I definitely want to live in a place where we can finally put Susi in a separate room, with a door. Right now, the three of us sleep in a lovely, partitioned loft. We want more space, and a yard. We still want to be close to where we are now - you can't beat a five-minute walk to every shop in the neighborhood.

It's really hard to find this. We have seen lots and lots of old houses, euphemistically dubbed "fixer upper," "handyman special," or "Just waiting for your designer ideas!" ugh. We've visited our share of former grow-ops, and places that smell so awful that we've wanted to exit immediately. We've seen people count the garage as part of the square footage of the living area of the house, and people who counted an unfinished concrete/stone floor as part of the living space. All of these things are priced out the wazoo. Still.

Then we've seen our share of brand new developments. K likes to call them "the bathroom collections." Duplexes with 2 bedrooms and four bathrooms. WHY? It's fascinating to watch a 1400 sf house reduced to less than 1100 sf of usable space because the master bathroom is larger than some of the bedrooms I've seen in blighty's London house. There seems to be this thing here that everyone has to have their own bathroom - and there has to be one left over in case the neighbor drops by and we all have to poop at once? I just don't get it.

Another thing about developments in Funcouver. DARK. Dark dark dark colors. This I also just do not understand. Hey folks! We live in a place that RAINS NINE MONTHS OUT OF THE YEAR. I KNOW! Let's paint the walls GREY, and make the kitchen DARK BROWN!! Yeah! Because, I don't quite feel like I want to shoot myself in the head just yet, why don't we just give me that little extra SOMETHING. oy oy oy.

There's more. You know that you are living in a neighborhood that's going upscale when the new developments are all putting in WINE FRIDGES. Excuse me? Yeah, because it's really important for my $11-dollar of Chilean blend to be kept at the right temperature. This one just cracks me up. I've managed to go my whole life without owning a wine fridge. Who knew that I would need one as my first major appliance in my new duplex?? This so cracks me up!

So moving right along - let me go to this whole "open concept" thing. Let me tell you what open concept usually means. "Well, we don't actually want to cut into our profits too much, so we've added an additional unit to the complex, and given you one big room that won't actually FIT a living room, kitchen, and dining area, and so we are calling it an "open concept" - the "concept" being that you can choose which of the three you would like to have. huh.

I'm going to write something shocking here. You won't believe this...but at times I can be --GASP-- opinionated about what I want. I know. I know. But it's true. And K is even more so. You can imagine what fun it is to house shop with us - especially in a city that the recession and housing crash forgot. Kinda hard to consider paying more than half a million dollars for a tiny duplex full of bathrooms.