Tuesday, September 06, 2011

Homes: Ottawa condo, 2006

Before V and I moved into our current home, we lived in his condo in the south end of Ottawa. It was a 2-bedroom place on the 8th floor of a tall tower. We weren’t far from the airport, but far enough from most other things that we both had cars and used them daily.

The tower we lived in was one out of a pair of identical condo towers. Nearby were other similar stacks. In the grounds around us was a small pool, a duck pond, lot of parking spaces and a path leading to a strip mall. There were condo rules such as ones forbidding us to dry laundry in our solarium (a rule I violated repeatedly).

I’d never lived in a condo before moving in with him – and never as high up as the 8th floor either. I found it an interesting perspective, to look down on trees and buildings below – or directly below to asphalt and parking garages. But while the view could be pretty – and watching storms rolling in quite spectacular – I didn’t like being so far off the ground, so far removed.

I moved in with V in January of 2006 – and we were there until we moved to our house in the fall. I’d been moving so often before this that I brought very little stuff of my own – basically just several boxes of books, my clothes, some pots and dishes and various random things. So while we were there it felt very much like living in someone else’s space.

I don’t know when we started talking about getting a house together, but it must have been fairly soon because I remember that condo as always feeling like a stop-over place. Or maybe that was just hangover feeling from the very many stop-over places I’d lived in before.

V had painted the condo in some strange fit of inspiration – rooms bright red, blue or yellow. He’d tried patterns with tape and borders for a rather, um, interesting effect. When we decided to sell the place I repainted all the rooms in subtle tones of beige, mushroom and grey – and we both agreed we should have painted much earlier.

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