http://www.thegridto.com/life/real-estate/rental-illness/
_Thu Oct 6, 2011_Real Estate
Rental illness
On Wednesday, August 10, my boyfriend of six years proposed.
“Maybe we should get married so we can make money on the wedding,” he said. “Then we’ll have a down payment.”
This was Day 14 of our apartment search, and we were getting desperate. For the amount we’d be paying on a new place, we could carry a small mortgage, but we didn’t have a down payment saved. And even with a budget of $1,800 a month, we couldn’t find a place to live.
My fault. I was the one who insisted on moving. We had a decent one-bedroom in a three-storey building on Roehampton Avenue near Yonge and Eglinton. It didn’t have air conditioning or a balcony, and the elderly couple next to us argued day and night, but we lived there happily for four years. There was one problem: our superintendent, a surly, paranoid man who threatened to call the police on me for parking in the driveway to unpack after a week up north. When the toilet broke and he stuck us with the $250 plumbing bill, we decided we’d had it. We gave our 60 days’ notice. Continue reading
