I just read an interesting article from the February 2007 Toronto Life (since I have a life I'm slightly behind in my reading about middleclass white Toronto):
http://www.torontolife.com/features/home-sweet-hellhole/print/
Home Sweet Hellhole
February 2007
Her plan was to move into a carefree condo in the Annex. How was she to know her neighbours were crazy, the building was crumbling and she would find herself overseeing a $1.8-million renovation disaster? By Ellen Vanstone
At about 2 a.m. one cold winter’s night in 2003, I got up to get a drink of water. As I drank the water, I looked out my dining room window and noticed a tiny flame on the balcony, probably caused by a discarded butt from an upper floor. Despite a raging winter wind, the tiny flame clung to life as I pondered what to do. I would have stomped it out, except the door was barred shut, due to the fact that my balcony had been condemned as unsafe two years earlier and, thanks to a bizarre series of construction delays, was still months away from completion.
Eventually, I called the fire department. When I heard the sirens arrive, I went down to let them in. I couldn’t buzz them in from my unit, because my intercom was broken. Soon, half a dozen burly firefighters were staring out my window at the now metre-high flames feeding off the burlap-wrapped, scaffolding-encased concrete slab that someday, God willing, would once again be a balcony. One of them removed the slider panes from my dining room window and squeezed out. We formed a bucket brigade with my mixing bowls. It seemed strange that I led the brigade while several able firefighters stood around my kitchen chatting, but we got the job done. After they left, I couldn’t get the slider panes back into their slots, so I simply leaned them into the open space. I was due to have new windows installed within the next few weeks, so there was no point in having it fixed.
In fact, because of instalment delays, the new windows didn’t arrive for two more years, during which I lived with a loose, rattling dining room hole. I suppose I could have picked up the phone and complained to someone until it was repaired. But I was distracted by other problems—the water in my kitchen remained brown and odorous no matter how long I ran the tap, so I had to fill kettles and Brita jugs in the bathroom. My rads blasted heat year-round, until a record cold snap when they went suddenly, icily silent. In the laundry room, the machines ate money and spewed foam. In the underground garage, puddles festered and concrete rotted due to a blocked drainage pipe that hadn’t been cleaned in 45 years. When the boilers conked out, two repair companies refused to service them because of illegal modifications that meant they could blow at any minute. The steel rebars had rusted out and disappeared in the column holding up the southwest corner of our 10-storey building, leaving crumbling concrete to hold up one-quarter of the structure’s mass. The roof failed. The superintendent quit.
Besides, even if I did pick up the phone and call someone to complain, the person I would be calling was me. Somehow, in all the confusion, I had become Madame President of the building’s board of directors.
At about 2 a.m. one cold winter’s night in 2003, I got up to get a drink of water. As I drank the water, I looked out my dining room window and noticed a tiny flame on the balcony, probably caused by a discarded butt from an upper floor. Despite a raging winter wind, the tiny flame clung to life as I pondered what to do. I would have stomped it out, except the door was barred shut, due to the fact that my balcony had been condemned as unsafe two years earlier and, thanks to a bizarre series of construction delays, was still months away from completion.
Eventually, I called the fire department. When I heard the sirens arrive, I went down to let them in. I couldn’t buzz them in from my unit, because my intercom was broken. Soon, half a dozen burly firefighters were staring out my window at the now metre-high flames feeding off the burlap-wrapped, scaffolding-encased concrete slab that someday, God willing, would once again be a balcony. One of them removed the slider panes from my dining room window and squeezed out. We formed a bucket brigade with my mixing bowls. It seemed strange that I led the brigade while several able firefighters stood around my kitchen chatting, but we got the job done. After they left, I couldn’t get the slider panes back into their slots, so I simply leaned them into the open space. I was due to have new windows installed within the next few weeks, so there was no point in having it fixed.
In fact, because of instalment delays, the new windows didn’t arrive for two more years, during which I lived with a loose, rattling dining room hole. I suppose I could have picked up the phone and complained to someone until it was repaired. But I was distracted by other problems—the water in my kitchen remained brown and odorous no matter how long I ran the tap, so I had to fill kettles and Brita jugs in the bathroom. My rads blasted heat year-round, until a record cold snap when they went suddenly, icily silent. In the laundry room, the machines ate money and spewed foam. In the underground garage, puddles festered and concrete rotted due to a blocked drainage pipe that hadn’t been cleaned in 45 years. When the boilers conked out, two repair companies refused to service them because of illegal modifications that meant they could blow at any minute. The steel rebars had rusted out and disappeared in the column holding up the southwest corner of our 10-storey building, leaving crumbling concrete to hold up one-quarter of the structure’s mass. The roof failed. The superintendent quit.
Besides, even if I did pick up the phone and call someone to complain, the person I would be calling was me. Somehow, in all the confusion, I had become Madame President of the building’s board of directors.
And so, on that dark night, as I said goodbye to the firefighters and then watched from my broken window as they climbed into their truck, headed back to a fire hall—which, I imagined, was a sturdy, well-heated building with a solid roof and functional plumbing—I felt the wind picking up, whipping past shreds of burnt burlap, straight through my rattling unattached slider window, and I wondered to myself, not for the first time, how did I end up in this property ownership nightmare?
It all started in 2000. I was living in a small two-storey house near Queen and Bathurst, a turn-of-the-century semi with a dirt floor in the basement and foot-thick beams, which, according to the home inspector, had probably been salvaged from a ship in old Toronto. I had the second-storey kitchen removed, renovated the original kitchen downstairs, glued the rest of the house together with several layers of top-quality paint and prepared to sit back and enjoy home ownership in that explodingly hip neighbourhood for years to come.
Unfortunately, every time I had a few thousand bucks saved up for a ski trip or an RRSP, the house needed something that cost a few thousand bucks: new wiring, new windows, new roof. The last straw was a leaky basement, which required something called parging, which would require a lot of digging, a big mess and could cost as little as a few thousand, said the contractor, but probably much, much more. I sold the house and bought a tidy two-bedroom apartment co-op, or condo apartment, or some such, in the Annex—I wasn’t sure what the difference between a co-op and condo was, exactly. The important thing was that my unit was four floors above a potentially leaky basement and five floors below a potentially leaky roof, and that all issues of leakiness in any case were now management’s problem, not mine.
I found the apartment through a private sale—advertised via a newsroom e-mail at the National Post, where I then worked—and there was an interview process. I met with two members of the board of directors, who were, like me, middle-class career women of a certain age in the kind of Annexy outfits that we believed put us somewhere between Queen Street artist and Rosedale matron.
They took me to the ninth floor by elevator, then up a dark stairwell and across a dim landing into a dusty rooftop storage room. It wasn’t fancy. That was good. I abhorred the idea of moving into a soulless high-rise, so the raffish aspect of this 43-unit mid-century modernist Annex co-op, peopled by characters who looked like me, was perfect.
I had brought letters of reference along with my pay stubs and was eager to show them how much money I earned—which, back in 2000, was a lot thanks to the Globe-Post newspaper war putting us journalists in high demand. My interviewers weren’t interested. They pushed the pay stubs aside. One of them asked, “Do you play the piano?†No, I answered. They looked at each other. Was the building interested only in residents with hobbies? Did they want me to join their musical group? Had I blown it? After more innocuous questions, they returned to the subject: Did I have any plans to learn to play the piano? Did I own a piano? Did I ever foresee buying a piano? No, no, no, I said; why do you ask? They shrugged, muttered and changed the subject. Very suspicious. But then I wasn’t entirely honest with them, either, in regards to those impressive pay stubs. After passing the interview and moving in, I immediately quit my job and started to write a novel, which had been my plan all along, having sold my house for nearly twice what my new apartment cost.
During those early, optimistic days, I felt like Marlo Thomas in the ’60s sitcom That Girl—independent single in a cool apartment with no pesky home-ownership issues. My novel was equally upbeat—a hopeful young woman gets a job as a copy editor at a venerable ladies’ magazine. My agent suggested I add “action,†but I wanted to take it slow and see where the character went.
It was pleasant work, mulling away in my new home office, surrounded by quiet, interesting neighbours. Jeno, the clean-cut architect who had renovated and sold me my unit, had moved to another suite in the building. Desmond, a retired journalist with angular features and swept-back silver hair, was president of the board of directors. The Australian woman next door was a furniture historian, whose undying gratitude I earned one night when she locked herself out and I climbed over the partition between our balconies to gain access through her balcony door. Among the building’s many seniors was indomitable Mrs. H., the building’s first resident in 1957, now a perfectly coiffed widow living directly below me who wore a hat, gloves and matching shoes and purse to walk to the corner bank. One odd man who used three parking spots for his two cars was rude on the days he drove his red Mercedes but politely chatty on the days he arrived home in his blue BMW. Tim, the superintendent, was a tweedy Irish intellectual pursuing a divinity degree. I was sometimes startled to step into the elevator and find him slumped languidly on the floor, desultorily polishing the brass trim, but he left witty notes, in which he quoted Hume or Locke to justify, for example, his assumption of my implicit permission in allowing fire inspectors into my unit.
In fall 2001, I attended my first co-op annual general meeting, which took place soon after I’d received a notice warning me not to use my two balconies. At the meeting, Desmond explained that our building’s exterior was showing signs of deterioration, and engineers from Halsall Associates had been engaged to investigate. The meeting simmered with tension, and I could tell Desmond was getting upset because his Canadian accent disappeared and his Ulster Scots accent took over, making him semi-coherent. Various shareholders kept objecting to arcane points of order or alluding sarcastically to mysterious incidents in the past, but Desmond kept things under control and moved on to “Use of musical instruments,†which explained the piano questions. A protracted war was being waged between an amateur pianist on an upper floor and a woman across the hall who objected to his endless repetitions of Debussy’s “Sunken Cathedral.†A rule was passed to ban new shareholders from playing musical instruments.
I found the meeting charming, as well as professionally useful re: the novel. I still couldn’t figure out what to do with my annoyingly passive, copy-editing main character, but I was now inspired to flesh out her office with gently feuding, fantastically eccentric co-workers.
Several months after that, in 2002, was an EGM—Extraordinary General Meeting—at which we learned that Halsall had estimated the balcony and brick-repair work at $642,680, which, spread out over 43 units, would require a special assessment of at least $15,000 per shareholder. I’d never heard the term “special assessment,†but it didn’t sound good. Wasn’t this a management problem? I paid my mortgage and my $400-a-month maintenance fees, and I had no desire to get involved in building issues.
The EGM then addressed the issue of “Con*version from co-op to condominium.†I had no opinion on the subject, but the eminently reasonable Desmond was for it, as was the building’s lawyer, while the naysayers kept going around in endless, inane circles about the problem of anyone—just anyone—being allowed to move into a condominium building. Perhaps it was the special assessment that made my fellow shareholders seem less charming than usual, but I found myself on my feet, saying, “Look, people, whether we live in a co-op or a condo, if I want to sublet my apartment to a bunch of drunken, immigrant, refugee, ex-con students tomorrow, there is no way any of you can stop me.†The motion to go condo eventually passed by one vote. For weeks afterward, little old ladies in the elevator importuned me: “Oh, dear, you’re not going to move out and let all those people move in, are you?â€
As for the $15,000 to fix the balconies, which I gathered should have been repaired years earlier, I phoned the real estate lawyer who’d handled my purchase and discovered that “caveat emptor†applies not only to non-refundable sale items at the mall; it also applies to structures that cost hundreds of thousands of dollars.
Still, I didn’t regret my purchase. It was the only way I could afford to buy into the Annex, where I’d lived off and on for 25 years and found more comfortable than Yonge and Davisville (too preppy), Riverdale (too CBC-ish), the Beach (too many strollers), Kensington Market (too ripe) or the downtown condo scene (too brand-obsessed). The Annex was a mish-mash of all the above, with a wide range of incomes and, increasingly, ethnicities. I’d grown up with the area, graduating from cheap Hungarian restaurants during my student days, to an endless supply of futon stores during my first-job days, to the current offerings of organic foodstuffs, sushi restaurants and exceedingly erudite clerks at Book City, CD Replay and Queen Video on Bloor.
Admittedly, some aspects were more colourful than others—such as the apartment high-rise immediately to the south of us, and by “immediately†I mean the building’s siding protruded seven centimetres onto our property. Its tenants played loud music and hurled beer bottles onto our driveway from the upper balconies. Squad cars were a frequent presence out front.
More alarming, though, was the upcoming deadline for my special assessment, which made it difficult to concentrate on the novel. My copy-editing main character had developed agoraphobia. Her favourite pastime, besides over-sharpening pencils in the electric sharpener, was to crawl under her giant oak desk and curl up for a nap with the company cat, Minxy. As balcony repairs began in late 2002, working at home became problematic in other ways. Incessant jackhammering made it impossible to talk on the telephone, or even hear it ring, increasing my feelings of isolation. What human contact I did have consisted largely of workmen appearing on the bedroom balcony every time I opened the drapes. Or, as I sat staring out the front window, pondering the non-existent narrative arc of my emotionally paralyzed heroine, another hard-hatted workman on a motorized scaffold would suddenly rise into view two feet from my face, like Martin Sheen’s slick head slowly emerging from the swamp in Apocalypse Now.
I found a part-time job, teaching journalism at Ryerson University, and decided to streamline my stalled novel into a fast-paced romantic-comedy screenplay. All would be well.
In early 2003, things got worse. The front of our building more or less imploded as the pipes burst in the unheated overhang. Emergency crews threw up plastic tents, then ripped open the soffits at the front and rear entrances and set up propane heaters. For months, our building huddled blindly within the enclosures while the heaters roared through thousands of dollars of fuel, which I was now starting to realize came directly out of our pockets. After spring thaw, repairs on the balconies and walls resumed, which was when the workers discovered the rotting concrete in the column that held up the southwest corner of the building. They stopped work on the balconies and threw up a $37,000-plus steel “brassiere†to support the building while they repaired the column, which cost tens of thousands more dollars. Then they discovered the crumbling concrete slab between the eighth and ninth floors. In December, we had another EGM and got a bill for a second special assessment of more than $10,000 each.
As the chaos escalated, I learned the difference between co-ops and condos. When friends, appalled at the year-round noise and construction debris inside and outside my building, told me to “Stop being such a wimp! Pick up the phone and complain!†I explained that there was no one to complain to. My building was designed and erected in 1956 as a then-experimental European-style co-op by modernist architect Wilfred Shulman, complete with his trademark mosaic-tiled pillars under the front overhang.
The residents each owned 100 shares (150 for each of the two penthouses) in a limited company, which owned the building and leased out the units. Since shares were not accepted by regular banks as collateral, residents had to obtain mortgages from a credit union. A proprietary lease governed the building, and by the time I moved in it had grown by hundreds of rules, bylaws and amendments added on over the years by various boards and committees. “But what if the roof fell in?†my friends cried. “Surely someone is responsible!†“Look,†I said, “if you and I and a bunch of crazy people bought a house together and made up a bunch of rules and nobody cleaned out the fridge or made the mortgage payments on time, and we let the roof cave in and the furnace blow up, who would care? That’s right—nobody. Get it?â€
Unlike New York, where apartment co-ops are the norm, Toronto is a city of condominiums. They’ve been regulated by the Condominium Act in Ontario since 1967, followed by an even more protective new Condominium Act enacted in 2001. When you buy a condo, you get a property deed, which you can take to any bank for a mortgage; and while each condominium building creates its own declaration, bylaws and rules, the Condo Act requires condo boards to conduct regular reserve fund studies to ensure the building is structurally sound, and to collect money in reasonable amounts over the long term to pay for regular repairs. In other words, the act helps to protect condo owners from surprise repair bills of, say, $1.8 million after, say, 50 years of neglect, bad management and delusionally low maintenance fees.
Like everyone else in the co-op, I tried to make the best of it. When Tim the super quit, another resident began doing the job on a temporary, voluntary basis, which inspired me to pitch in by polishing the brass in the single, malfunctioning elevator that served the entire building. It was harder than it looked: the Brasso fumes were intense, and lying on the floor to polish the bottom trim while the cab lurched up and down was nauseating, so I did only a little each day, eventually meeting most of the other shareholders in the process. Around the same time, Desmond—who was juggling endless meetings, phone calls and faxes related to ongoing, interrupted or overlapping construction jobs, plus the legal and bureaucratic details of the condo conversion, plus sifting though 70 résumés from prospective superintendents—asked if I’d go in his place to a neighbourhood meeting about a developer’s plan to build an apartment building in the parking lot to the north of us.
Over the next two years, I spent many hours trying to follow discussions about architectural drawings, zoning laws, site plans, shadow studies, arborist reports and intensification trends. I’m sure it was all extremely important, but I couldn’t help feeling that none of it was the least bit useful in terms of my novel’s copy-editing main character.
Observing my tolerance for endless meetings, Desmond then roped me into serving on the co-op board along with another relatively new resident, Kate. His pitch was that our building was paralyzed by factionalism and that unaligned newcomers such as ourselves could effect positive change. Kate, 22, a statuesque, footwear-obsessed brunette who worked in advertising, turned out to be an organizational dynamo. While I polished the brass in the elevator and went to neighbourhood committee meetings that year, Kate renovated the empty super’s apartment, commandeering a team of friends and volunteers to rip out the old kitchen cabinets and haul garbage while she organized the trades and made Home Depot her second home.
With special assessments becoming a regular part of my life, I had to get a full-time job. In 2004, I switched from teaching part-time at Ryerson to editing full-time at The Walrus. This, plus the neighbourhood meetings, plus my meetings with irate residents, engineers, our new condo-conversion lawyer and building surveyor, didn’t leave much time to write my romantic-comedy screenplay. I decided to expedite the research by mining my surroundings for material—transforming my copy-editing main character, for example, into a creative designer, dressed all in black, with a geometric haircut and a highly evolved aesthetic, who moves into a condo building famous in architectural circles for its classic mid-century modernism. Unfortunately, the badly maintained building has surface charm only (the metaphorical possibilities were endless), but a handsome young engineer helps her save the day.
I was also writing a board newsletter. The early drafts were filled with optimistic predictions: “We’re finally in the home stretch,†I wrote in the April 22, 2004, issue. Two days later, the board took Vicky, the new super we’d hired, on a tour of the building and discovered a raft of new problems.
There was a broken window in the 10th-floor mechanical room, through which we watched driving rain lash a dangling light fixture next to an open fuse box. In the basement, we discovered a log for the required monthly chemical treatments to prevent pipe corrosion in the boilers; the last entry was sometime in the 1980s. By the end of the tour I had listed 57 urgent to-do items.
I wanted to blame Jeno, the architect who sold me my unit, for luring me into such a crappy home, but he had his own problems. After probably saving lives, and certainly the building, by forcing the balcony repairs that turned up the rotten column that was barely holding up the southwest corner of the building, he had been evacuated from his freshly renovated unit on the eighth floor and sent to a hotel because his ceiling was under the crumbling concrete slab on the ninth floor. It would be nine months before Jeno was allowed back into his home. A year after that, his unit would be torn apart again as plumbers looked for stray galvanized piping that made several unmapped turns in the stack behind his kitchen walls.
Along with structural problems, there was the human factor. Some shareholders objected when we tried to replace the faulty intercom entry system with an entry-phone system because they did not have a phone (of any kind) and did not want to install one. An allegedly alcoholic letter carrier kept leaving the mailboxes open. A shareholder had moved out with no forwarding address, and the toilet in her unit was leaking, supposedly because another shareholder had somehow procured a key and was using her bathroom. There were complaints that a cult led by a child molester was infiltrating the building; complaints that a certain bachelor was entertaining “ladies of the nightâ€; complaints about smoke from indoor barbecues; complaints about affairs, stairway shenanigans and slamming doors after midnight; complaints about groups of roaming, insomniac seniors haunting the lobby before dawn and reading newspapers that didn’t belong to them. There was a rash of false fire alarms, which we were sure was “an inside jobâ€; ditto the deliberate scratching of the elevator, which had just been expensively rebuffed with a sealed matte finish, which meant I didn’t have to polish it anymore. The elevator’s licence had also long since expired, which no one had noticed because our property manager had gone AWOL.
The property manager, FYI, is not to be confused with the superintendent, whose main job is to clean. The property manager is paid to run the company—collect fees, create budgets, prepare financial statements and coordinate repair and construction work. Our property manager hadn’t returned any of my calls in three months.
In May 2004—now two years into my descent into home-ownership hell—Desmond more or less collapsed. Kate and I desperately hired a new property manager and strong-armed another architect in the building, Zenis, onto the board. We had already been using him to vet Halsall building spec documents, so we knew that Zenis was intelligent, extremely conscientious and relatively sane, which I now understood was a big plus.
With Desmond gone, I became president of the board by default. My Marlo Thomas days were well over. After selling a house in order to avoid fixing a leaky basement, I was now overseeing a $1.8-million construction job on a 10-storey building that would ultimately cost me $45,000 (and counting) above and beyond mortgage and maintenance fees.
I also had to run interference between Treasurer Kate, who fervently believed a penny saved is a penny earned, and Secretary Zenis, who equally fervently believed a penny spent now is a pound saved later. As they argued over complicated financial statements and engineering reports, I felt like Leonardo DiCaprio pretending to be a doctor in Catch Me If You Can, asking for an opinion in the hospital emergency room, then turning to the other doctors and saying, “Do you concur?†If Kate and Zenis concurred, I concurred, too. Throughout 2004, Kate, Zenis and I met constantly—up to three times a week for months. What pulled us together, finally, was the window issue.
The fight over replacing windows had been going on for years. Some shareholders wanted to keep their original 1956 leaky, single-paned windows. Some shareholders had replaced windows at their own expense, but with vinyl frames that didn’t meet fire code. One shareholder had triple-glazed his original panes with an elaborate system of storm-window add-ons. Some shareholders had sued the board over failing to maintain the building properly. One shareholder’s window had been sucked out by the wind tunnel created by the encroaching high-rise next door.
Finally, taking only eight times longer than scheduled and costing nearly twice as much as we estimated, the new windows were installed—in the middle of winter.
Our other great triumph was the condo conversion, which was rather more complicated than our lawyer had first given us to understand. Kate almost single-handedly completed that job, schlepping papers to and from the lawyer’s office on her lunch hour, knocking on shareholders’ doors after work, forcing people to sign documents, helping them find their old share certificates and figure out their mortgages, and getting them to sign over power of attorney to the board, so we could temporarily own everyone’s units while the shares were dissolved and the condo corporation was created. If this sounds crazy, it was. I worked with the surveyor on the building plan required to register the condo corporation. My job was to identify who used which lockers and parking spaces. After seven months, defeated by three different numbering systems on the lockers and a parking plan based on an arcane oral tradition, I gave up and our ex–board president Desmond stepped in to miraculously complete the job. We became a condominium corporation in December 2004.
I‘m sorry to say that I didn’t always demonstrate grace under pressure as Madame President. Frightened of angry shareholders, I hid—taking the stairs instead of the elevator, using the back entrance, sprinting down Spadina one day when a shareholder, still in her pyjamas, chased me out of the building with urgent complaints. Then I snapped.
It happened while Kate and I and several others were battling a broken pipe in our freshly repaired laundry room ceiling—wrestling a garbage bin under the deluge and batting away the wads of insulation hitting us on the head. When a shareholder approached and confronted me about a problem in his unit, I wheeled on him and yelled back: “Can’t you see I’m busy? Don’t talk to me. Put it in writing. I’m sick of being attacked like this.†My reaction shocked everyone in the room, including me.
Soon after, I found yet another in a series of nasty notes that appeared regularly under my door, accusing me of graft, neglect, stupidity—the usual. Instead of waiting a day or two to deal with it, I furiously scrawled a haughty response: “This constitutes libel. I will not respond to any letter that does not address me or others in the building in a courteous manner,†then charged out the door to personally deliver my reply. I shoved it under the letter writer’s door. I wondered if I should knock. I decided to tap the door with my toe, but it was actually more than just a tap. Then I ran away. I’m ashamed to admit any of this.
My combative phase ended during a visit from my sister. As we waited for the elevator one afternoon, its doors opened and the most intimidating shareholder in the building stood there and glared at me. I pre-emptively attacked: “What are you doing? Are you getting off or staying on?†Startled, he stumbled out of the cab and stepped aside. I jumped in and punched the buttons. My sister was horrified. “You don’t understandâ€â€”I went on the defensive—“if you don’t stand up to that guy, he can be a real bully!†She stared straight ahead, too embarrassed to meet my gaze. “It doesn’t cost anything to be polite,†she finally murmured. I could have answered that I wasn’t being rude to him to save money, but in fact she was right, and I was wrong, wrong, wrong. What was happening to me?
In retrospect, it didn’t seem to matter what I did. The building was immune to any agenda but its own. I theorized it had been built on a sacred burial ground and ancient gods were wreaking revenge on us.
My own turning point came on March 11, 2006, while reading the morning newspaper. A 30-metre light pole had fallen over on the Danforth, smashing a pickup truck and narrowly missing its driver. City authorities quickly promised to assess more than 600 other light poles along the Danforth. At one time I would have been shocked by this dangerous state of affairs caused by shoddy workmanship and/or lack of maintenance. But now I knew better. Five years after moving into my dream-co-op-turned-nightmare-condo, I saw the world differently—a world of chaos, conflict and destruction. I realized that it’s a miracle anything—anywhere, ever—works at all.
Around the same time, the full-tilt crisis we always seemed to be in calmed down as well—perhaps because there was nothing left to blow up or fall apart. Our board of directors started meeting a mere once or twice a month. We’d argue over which one of us would get to quit office first. Then we’d discuss issues such as a recent rash of neighbourhood break-ins and Kate’s plan to get “anyone with the legal right to carry a gun†to move into our building. I concurred, and indeed, at one point last summer, sent buxom young Kate—in a tiny T—to discuss real estate opportunities in our condo with two handsome young policemen sitting in a squad car outside the high-rise next door.
As for my writing career, I gave up trying to write a romantic-comedy screenplay and decided to create a TV series instead—a CSI-type show about a cynical, hard-bitten woman who moves into a decrepit apartment complex filled with the criminally insane where each week she tries to solve, or maybe hide, a bizarre series of construction-related murders. I cut the handsome young engineer as the romantic lead after one too many 8 a.m. meetings with Halsall, where one or another of them would invariably turn to me and, with curdling disdain, spit out something like, “Your building has no vapour barriers,†or “Your boilers are dirty and they’re not calibrated.â€
I briefly considered introducing a Thomas Hardy–type hero-labourer after we were suddenly forced to replace all the rotten galvanized pipes with copper throughout the building last year ($129,470). Unfortunately, the plumber-plasterer who came to work in my unit was more like an aging Mario than Jude the Obscure. I heard him shut the bathroom door and then begin noisily using the toilet, heaving, grunting and flushing repeatedly. I was apoplectic with disgust and rage. Finally, after an hour, he left the apartment. I put on rubber gloves and stormed over, prepared to swab down the entire room with Lysol, only to discover—no toilet! All the noise had been him removing the fixtures so he could get at the pipes behind the wall.
No matter. These days, with my new-found calm and seasoned world view in home-ownership hell, I’ve learned to constantly remind myself of one very important thing: It’s all material.
