Monday, September 05, 2011

Homes: Ottawa house 2006-present

So I thought of a new series to blog about: I’m going to write about the places I have lived in, moving from the present to as far back as I can remember.

It was September, 2006 when V and I bought the house we now live in. Five years in one place, definitely a record for my adult life.

Our house is a little, 2-bedroom brick bungalow that was built in the 1940s. It has a brick exterior, hardwood floors throughout and a basement with potential that could be realized if time and money grew on trees.

Our house is great, but what makes it even better is the neighbourhood which surrounds it. As I’ve written about before, we live in a community filled with families, a neighbourhood sprinkled with parks and bike paths and a part of town quickly becoming one of the trendiest places to live in Ottawa.

The downside of this trendiness is all the development and construction, but the upside is that we keep getting more little cafés, restaurants, bakeries and specialty shops. We can walk to do almost all our shopping and both V and I can bike to work from home (admittedly he does it much more often than I do).

Having lived here now for 5 years, I definitely feel more of a sense of community and even ownership than I did with any other place I lived. I’m fighting alongside my community for public say in large-scale development projects; I’ve organized family-friendly events in local parks and schools and hung up knit-graffiti at my favourite haunts. I don’t think I’d be doing these things, at least not to the level I am, if this community and home didn’t feel increasingly like an extension of myself and my family.

We have a great back yard, a garden, a crab apple tree that we planted in the front a couple years ago. And although sometimes I wish we had some more space, or an extra room I could turn into my home office, I like the size of our house. It’s cozy and unpretentious. It’s filled with books and things we’ve collected over the years, including our memories.

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