My Big Show cohost Blair and his girlfriend Laura recently bought their first house. It was Laura’s birthday so they combined that with a housewarming on the weekend and we got our first peek inside. It’s a gorgeous little place, all finished inside and decorated with Laura’s excellent taste. It’s located in a sought-after part of the city, too. They did very well.Â
It made me think back to the first house I ever bought. My now-ex-husband Wray and I chose a duplex in Hamilton so his parents, who were living in a terrible part of that city, could move in with us and be safer. Their neighbourhood always seemed to have cop cars racing in for one reason or another. We knew a couple of houses on their street were drug dens. One day they saw a guy come out of a nearby home with a huge snake around his neck. It wasn’t the best area for a couple of seniors.
The house we bought was on the good end of a street that, at the other end, was one of those areas in Hamilton to avoid. Whenever we said the address, we always quickly added “south” so no one would get the impression we were on the notorious north end. It was within walking distance of Gage Park and the necessities of life were just a couple of blocks away. The house itself was a turn-of-the-century, three-story brick building with all of the high baseboards and character of that era. Wray’s parents lived on the main floor and we had the upper two floors, the top being the master bedroom in a converted attic. It had been painted bright yellow, ostensibly to lighten it, and had sloped ceilings. It was a pretty cool room but had limited closet space and a height restriction on furniture.
That house brought a lot of joy and frustrations. We were so broke and wanted to improve it so badly. We refreshed everything except that yellow bedroom, even removing the old cast-iron tub in the bathroom and replacing it with a modern shower surround. The tub was impossible to take out in the usual way, so the son of a friend gathered some buddies to shimmy it to the fire escape and then used a small crane to gingerly bring it down to the back of his truck. We hired a guy to paint the livingroom a deep, heritage red and he took a week to do it. I think he saw us as his rent-payers and we were worriedly watching the meter tick up on a budget we couldn’t stretch. We learned a lot about hiring contractors, getting things in writing and why you get what you pay for. We hired College Pro Painters to paint a stucco part of the home’s front and it may have been the best money we spent on that place. A friend built a deck off the back for the in-laws. There were millions of things that house needed and we did as much as we could on our own, including installing a beadboard wainscotting in the main unit kitchen and painting everything paintable, as well as paintstakingly removing 80 years of paint from the beautiful gumwood banisters and railing. I tore up the carpet in the livingroom myself and exposed beautiful hardwood underneath. The jobs never ended but there was a lot of pride in the results.
Our immediate neighbours were not ideal. On one side, the home was falling into disrepair. A teen and his mother lived there, and she was unwell. I only saw inside once and the kitchen was a nightmare of congealing food cans and trash. On the other side lived a man whose German Shepherd came after me one day as I arrived home. I didn’t make it into the house before the dog backed me onto the wall of my own home, up on his hind legs, his paws on my shoulders, barking his angry dog breath into my face. Wray had a chat with him about his “vicous” dog and the use of that word offended the guy and started a chain of events that ended with us finally calling the police to convince him to stop harassing us. So, we sort of kept to ourselves.
One day as I walked our dog, Lee Roy, one street over from ours, a large, familiar figure exited one of the houses. It was “Fat Pat” Musitano, the notorious mobster who years later would plead guilty to conspiracy to commit murder in the slaying of a rival. My jaw nearly hit the concrete even as Lee Roy’s tail wagged at the thought of meeting someone new. I asked around at CHML where I was hosting a talk show and was told the best way to keep your neighbourhood safe was to have a mobster living nearby. I had no idea. Across the street from Musitano lived the manager of a car dealership whose wife would soon end up on the cover of the Toronto Sun. She had been taking the Go train to Toronto and panhandling, making $100 or more a day, and returning to Hamilton before her husband got home from work. The reason? She wanted some “pocket money”.
All of this and more flooded back as Blair proudly showed us his new home. He and Laura don’t face the same challenges when it comes to the house itself. Theirs is beautiful and not in need of a million different fixes. They’ll want to change some stuff, all homeowners do. But no matter what challenges they face, whether with neighbours or with painters, I guarantee they’ll make memories that will last a lifetime.