Last year, Sophie and I bought an old duplex in Ville Emard. After years of living and teaching in Quebec's far north, we figured it was time to make end our northern sojourn and return to what we used to know as normal Canadian living.
When we began looking for a house, Sophie was nine months pregnant with Evie, our second child. I had dreams of moving into a three-bedroom (6 1/2) duplex in The Jean-Talon Market area in Montreal. A short visit to MLS showed me that that was not going to happen.
The first place we looked at was in Point Saint Charles, a traditionally poor but ever-gentrifying Irish neighbourhood just Southwest of downtown. We were actually living in our friends' house in the Point when we began looking. The duplex we saw on Reading street had some of the elements we were looking for: 3 bedrooms (sort of), a yard (or something that resembled one), and close to public transit. It was listed at 280,000. However, it faced a bottled-water factory, and it needed tons of work. It was like a wake-up call for me. I couldn't shake the feeling of dread that I was experiencing. "Is that all we're going to get?" I kept thinking over and over. Successive visits to 20 or so similar properties in Montreal's "worst" (affordable) neighbourhoods kept confirming my suspicions.
Then, one day while we were visiting properties with our real-estate agent Leo, we decided to take a look at a duplex featuring two 800 sq. ft. 2 bedroom apartments in Ville Emard. "It's too small," I remember saying before the visit, "but let's go take a look at it anyway."
We walked up to the house and rang the doorbell. A young couple and a yappy dog greeted us when we arrived. As we walked in, we could feel it. We didn't say anything to each other, or even make eye contact, but we both knew that this one had potential. We went to visit the upstairs tenant's apartment. We found a fifty-something year-old woman who was extremely surprised, even upset, to find out that the property was for sale. Marie-anne asked us immediately, "Which apartment are you going to take?"
"The downstairs," I replied as I walked into her apartment. I almost immediately regretted what I had said when I saw how cute her apartment was. "But we have two kids," I continued, "so if we buy it and decide to stay, we will take the upstairs in five-to-ten years."
"By then, I'll have found a man and be gone," she laughed.
We left her apartment, walked down the stairs, and without even asking Sophie, as I was awkwardly straddling Leo's hockey stick, which blocked the entrance to his silver BMW, I declared,"We want to buy that duplex. How do we do that?"
"Slow down," he replied. "You have to consider..."
"You don't know us," Sophie cut him off, "we know what we want when we see it. We decided to have children together six weeks after meeting each other."
