$1.15 Million over asking price........

With the housing market being as crazy at the moment; but this article caught my attention.  The house was listed for $1.19 million and sold for $2.3 million.  This house is in Toronto but when you look at it, I wouldn't pay $500,000 for it, never mind over $2 million.  It looks better on the inside than on the outside.  I wonder if the buyers are going to tear it down and build a mini mansion in it's place?

We were out and about on Saturday having a drive by looking at some houses that caught our eye on MLS.  If you have bought and sold homes before, you like us know that the photos don't show everything.  We drove by three and of the three only one was a possibility and then it was too gut; which at our age is too big of a job for us.  Plus when I spoke to the real estate agent by telephone he was very abrupt, so that put me off.  A good sales rep would have asked questions about what we are looking for etc.  We are in no hurry to move so can take our time looking for the perfect home to retire too.

We are looking to move as we are fed up of paying condo fees that by this coming June will have increased by $120 since we moved here three years ago.  For what we get for that money it would be better in our pocket!!

We also got rid of our guy who shoveled the driveway of snow.  He confused the heck out of us, as we never knew when he was coming and most of the time we ended up doing it ourselves.  Plus it won't kill either of us to do it.  Mind you we got a blast of winter here on Sunday, so out came the shovels........

So what's new?

Well our son and partner got engaged on the weekend in Boston.  He took her to see the Toronto Blue Jays play the Boston Red Soxs at Fenway Park as she is baseball mad.  She said yes and as they already live together it won't be a long engagement, and I think they will be getting married early 2017.  Her ring is gorgeous, a real "bobby dazzler."  If you haven't heard of that term before click on this link for an explanation.  Thankfully our daughter "helped" guide our son in the right direction regarding the right ring, as he likes the "bigger the better look," and our future daughter-in-law has very small hands.  The ring he got is perfect though.

Still waiting to see our new grand daughter; as she is still inside of her mother's tummy.  Dd doctor took ill and so her C-section was postponed until next week; as long as she doesn't go into labour in between hands.  She is now 39 weeks.  Pain in the butt for everyone as everything was planned out.  However as long as mum and baby are okay that's the main thing.  So we should have a baby this next week now.

Due to all that phaffing about didn't get much of anything done this week.......

Little shocked to see my foot this morning:

I curled my toes over for the photo so you weren't exposed to my nasty toe nails!!  It's still quite bruised and it's been a week and a half now.

Finally, you know how you win some, you lose some?  Well this week we got our next property tax bill in the mail.  Seems it has gone down; yes I said DOWN, by $2 a month!!! 

Then we got our year end report from the Condo board and our condo fees have gone up by $40 a month!  Personally that is a bit much and they have forecast that next year (July 2017) it will be up by another $55 a month.  By then it will have gone up $125 a month since we moved in in 2014.  We will have been in the house two years next week.  After that last increase it will then be only going up a couple of percent per year.  They need to get the reserve fund up to a certain point in a certain amount of time as per law.  I am not impressed!

Off now to try and get as many groceries as possible for as little money as possible.......getting to be a harder and harder challenge nowadays though.

Old blog posts and gardening.

Dear Rose is reading through my old posts and commenting on some.  Which is a great thing for me, as I too then read the old posts as well.  I have also been in touch with bloggers that I haven't talked to in a long while.  Life goes on and we all end up with different priorities and sometimes blogs get left behind.

The gardeners finally cut the grass on Friday for the first time this year.  The sprinklers have not been turned on yet, and we haven't had much rain so the poor grass looks miserable to say the least.  I did talk to the gardeners; made sure I only talked to the one with a shirt with a collar on!!  He said lack of rain was the problem, so sent an email to the property management, who in turn sent an email to the irrigation (sprinkler) lot, as yet have no idea what's going on?

We are going to put a proposal in to the board to see if we can put a 2 foot privacy screen on the top of our deck to give us some privacy.  As everyone walking down the road looks directly into our deck.

It will go along both the side and the back of the deck (right hand side of photo.)

In this photo you can see a flower bed with a tree and shrubs in it, the left hand side of the photo:

This is a closer view:

That is all the builder put in?  What about the front?  Anything small and green are weeds.  The kids doing the gardens use a hoe and cut the tops off and that's it.  I need to dig them out myself.  With the aggravation we have had about another issue I feel about as much like planting extra plants as flying to the moon!!  Hopefully I'll get out of my strop and beautify the place up soon.

All garden maintenance is part of our monthly condo fees.