A window on Vancouver's real estate market
By Jonathon Narvey on June 14, 2006 - 10:02pm
I did a really bad job putting up the blinds in my apartment.
I'm going to have to spend another $100 to replace the ones I destroyed.
Since they'll be on special order, I can look forward to a few more
weeks of being woken up at 5 am as the sun comes up.
Of course I'm disappointed at this confirmation of my Homer Simpson-level of handyman ability. But my feeling was somewhat muted by today's reminder that no matter how badly I screw up a window treatment, my home will still gain value in somebody else's eyes.
The latest figures from the Canadian Real Estate Association (as summarized by the CBC here)
show that home prices in Vancouver went up an astounding 23.7 per cent this year. It's not quite up there with Calgary (up 43.6 per cent), but nowhere else even comes close to the Texans of the north, either.
Growing up in the relatively stable real-estate market of Winnipeg (which rose this year at just under the national average of 12.9 per cent), I had no idea that property could rise in value so quickly outside of a postwar reconstruction sort of scenario.
For my sake, this bubble better keep on blowing. I've got a few more jobs to do around the apartment and I plan on screwing them all up at least once.
(Thanks to Jenny Lee Silver on Metroblogging Vancouver for alerting all of us to the CBC article with the Canadian Real Estate Association figures)
Welcome to the club, Jon....At 4:30 a.m., the
birds start flapping & squacking all over the place,
and then a five, the sun comes up shining in my
northerly window. My cure for that is "blackout"
drapes - drapes with a rubberized and lightproof
liner. Expensive, but worth it. Got the idea from
a trip into the Arctic for a few months one summer.
Up there, when it's daylight practically 24 hours
a day in summer, they need something like that.
Meanwhile, there's always the aluminum-foil cure.
Tape some aluminum foil over the window, and overlap
the strips a few inches to avoid leakage. When your
new blinds arrive, you can crumple it all up into
neat balls that will drive the local wildlife crazy.
And while it's up there, the neighbours will get
all that reflected sunlight at their places.
The aluminum foil idea sounds pretty neat. If I focus the aluminum into a sort of cone, I wonder if I can focus daylight like a laser to zap the people going to and fro in my back lane. Worth looking into.
Put the foil on the inside of the window. I had once put it on the outside because I was running into interference with the blinds. But the noise from the wind against the foil was worse than sunlight in keeping me awake.
Enjoy your new place. I just moved into a new place myself and it's taking some getting used to. Where's the light switch for this hallway? And what did I do with that box of important contents?
If blocking daylight is your goal then try some wooden blinds that overlap. They make them specifically for that purpose.