I’m not exactly trying to keep things “fair” by following up last Friday’s blog post where I interviewed my Dad about his real estate experiences in the 70’s, 80’s, and 90’s with a subsequent interview with my Mom, but rather, I figure my Mom can provide a different perspective.

At the risk of sounding sexist, those were different times, and mothers and fathers had different roles.  My Dad saw the real estate experiences from a financial standpoint: the prices, offers, interest rates, etc.  My Mom, on the other hand, tells stories about the neighbourhoods, the process of buying and selling, and what she’s looking for in a home as a mother, on behalf of her children.

I got two very different stories, as you’ll see below.

For those with a serious interest in real estate (and I assume that’s just about everybody reading this), I would encourage you to take advantage of the best real estate show possible, in HD, live, and that’s by sitting down with your parents or grandparents and asking them about their experiences.

Perhaps a chat with my wife’s grandparents is on tap next.

“Grams, what was the market in North Bay, Ontario like in the 1950’s?”

In the meantime, here’s my mother’s perspective on the Toronto real estate market from 1978 to 1992.

Enjoy!

David: “So, what did you make of last week’s story with Dad?”

Mom: “I loved it!  You know I did.  What a trip down memory lane, although I must say that I also really enjoyed looking through the photo albums to get all these pictures.  We were a really active family, always doing things.”

David: “I wanted to get your take today on the market in the 1970’s and 1980’s, but from a different perspective.”

Mom: “Well, Dad knows all the details about the offers and mortgages and stuff.  He took care of all that.  But I found every place we ever lived in.”

David: “Really?”

Mom: “Yes.  Dad liked to delegate, and when it came to the first house, he simply said, ‘Carole, go find us a house.’  So I did.  We were living in an apartment on Saint Mary’s, which I also found, after living off-campus near Osgoode Hall in an apartment for young married couples, which I also snagged.  That was a great find.”

David: “What was the process like in 1978, trying to find a house?”

Mom: “I mainly looked in the newspapers, and drove around looking at ‘FOR SALE’ signs on lawns.”

David: “You realize how old this sounds – looking in newspapers, right?”

Mom: “Well it’s not like we could just jump on the Internet!”

David: “I know, I know.”

Mom: “I was driving a Ford Pinto back then, which is the car made famous because it had to be recalled.  It kept spontaneously exploding.  Oh Dear.  Thankfully, ours never exploded and we’re here to tell the tale.  Dad was driving a Pontiac Firebird.  So I was pregnant with Julie, and I would drive around the city looking for FOR SALE signs on lawns, but also carrying the newspaper with properties circled.”

David: “Where were you looking?”

Mom: “Midtown, mainly.  Your Dad and I both grew up in Downsview.  I was on Invermay Avenue at Bathurst & Wilson, and your Dad, I think, they were in Don Mills, but they were all over the place through the years.”

David: “Who wanted midtown?”

Mom: “Your Dad.  His office was downtown and he wanted to be near the subway.  I was teaching in Richmond Hill so I was driving.”

David: “What kind of houses were you looking at?”

Mom: “All the houses were disgusting.  Just awful.  Old, musty, full of furniture, decades worth of stuff.  It looked like your aunt and uncle’s house.”

David: “Haha okay I meant, like, what size, and where?”

Mom: “Well we needed three bedrooms and a backyard.  We were looking in the midtown area, and I walked into an open house off Mount Pleasant and that’s when we met Ralph.”

David: “Ah yes, the infamous Ralph!”

Mom laughs.

Mom: “The one and only!”

David: “You know a real estate agent in my office read the blog last Friday, and emailed me to say even though I didn’t use his last name, she knew who he was?  She dated Ralph in the 1970’s!”

Mom: “It was a small world back then.”

David: “So Ralph picked you up as a buyer eh?”

Mom: “Well, I never thought to hire a buyer agent.  You didn’t do that sort of thing back then.  You’d just look for FOR SALE signs and call the agents.  I called hundreds of agents.”

David: “In 2020, you’d be every listing agent’s worst nightmare.”

Mom: “But I didn’t know there was such a thing as a buyer agent!  I would have loved to get some help; you think I liked driving around and around?”

David: “Single woman, alone, 5-months pregnant; Ralph must have been licking his chops.”

Mom: “I guess he picked me up then, we weren’t working with any agents.  I was tired of calling all the names on the signs.  Plus, he was the one that said those magic words…”

David: “Oh, I know where this is going, I’ve heard it before.”

Mom: “…..have you ever considered Leaside?”

David: “Had you?”

Mom: “Are you kidding?  I’d never heard of it!  Neither had your Dad.”

David: “I guess without Google Maps back then, people didn’t know every single area and intersection in the city.”

Mom: “We both grew up in Downsview and went to school out of the city.  We moved downtown in mid-20’s.  We didn’t know where the hell Leaside was!”

David: “So I have Ralph to thank for my childhood, and basically the rest of my life that spawned from there?”

Mom: “Well, I was still the one that found Airdrie!”

David: “What was your first impression?”

Mom: “It was a breath of fresh air!  Compared to the stuffy, musty houses we had seen.  This was clean, and they had opened dup the stairway so there was no railing along the wall.  A bit dangerous for kids, but we didn’t think about those kinds of things back then.  It just opened the whole place up.  They had taken out the hallway wall, you’d just walk right in, and there was the house.”

David: “So it was open-concept before open-concept was a thing.”

Mom: “Yes!  Except for the kitchen.  The kitchen was a tiny, original Leaside kitchen.”

David: “What else comes to mind about that house?”

Mom: “The bathroom on the second floor had this really old black-and-white tile floor, so I went out and bought a piece of yellow shag carpet and fit it perfectly to the floor and glued it to the baseboards.”

David: “This is funny.  Those black-and-white tiles are now back in style, and the idea of a yellow shag carpet, in a bathroom, of all places, is about the worst thing I can imagine.”

Mom: “Well this was 1978, so what do you expect?  I also wall-papered the whole bathroom with really 70’s wallpaper.  I mean really!”

David: “How many houses did you look at before this one?”

Mom: “None.  This was the only house Ralph showed us.”

David: “Oh my God, you’re the dream client eh?  Ralph picks you up at an open house, he shows you one house – which you found, and then sells it to you?”

Mom: “It was a lucky find.  I saw it and went home and told your Dad, ‘This is the house.'”

David: “What was the buying process like?”

Mom: “There was no hurry back then, absolutely no rush.  No panic, and you could take your time.  Not like with Parkhurst three years later.  That was different.”

David: “When did you decide you outgrew the house?”

Mom: “It wasn’t a huge house, but we made the most of it.  The basement was semi-finished, although you’d probably call it ‘unfinished’ today.  There was no ceiling, it was all open.  There was a single toilet next to the washer/dryer; it had a wooden seat, it was odd.  But it was nice to have in case you had guests, or somebody had to take a really smelly dump.”

That’s my mother.  I love her.

Mom: “The basement made a really great playroom for the kids.  And bedrooms were fair sizes, although you were in a crib, and Julie was in a bed.  I think gramma’s old single bed, the one with that yellow throw….”

At this point, I’m overwhelmed with a flashback to this disgusting bed that followed us from every single house.  A yellow slip-cover with brown flowers that hid the fact this was an actual mattress, and not a bizarre, oddly-shaped couch.  The smell.  Ugh.  The texture.  Eek.

David: “That?  That’s where it came from?  From Gramma?”

Mom: “Yes, it belonged to your Dad’s mother.  Where else would we find something that ugly?”

Mom laughs.

David: “So Julie is a toddler, I’m a baby, and you decide you need a bigger house?”

Mom: “Well we didn’t move far!  We were out for a walk one day and we saw Mr. Goulding putting a sign on his lawn.  Parkhurst was one block from Airdrie.  It couldn’t have been more than a three or four-minute walk.”

David: “Were you actively looking?  I mean, you were only at Airdrie for three years.”

Mom: “Airdrie was a great starter home, but your Dad always had the itch for something bigger.  We didn’t want to share a bathroom with the kids when you guys would get older, and in those days, this was a luxury you could afford.  We wanted an ensuite bathroom.  We wanted a main floor powder room.  It’s so much easier with kids.”

David: “Parkhurst didn’t have a main floor powder room.”

Mom: “And that was the only flaw!  Well, I mean with the layout.  The finishes were just terrible.”

David: “Okay, let me come back to the finishes at Parkhurst in a minute.  What was the process of selling a house like back then?”

Mom: “Process?  They came and stuck a sign on the lawn!  Thud.  That’s it!  Process.  There’s your process!”

David: “Well, what was it like?  What guidance did they give?”

Mom: “No guidance.  Not just Ralph, but Duncan neither.  Nobody ever told us to tidy up.  There was no staging back then.  Every house that was up for sale was in the same condition for showings as it was that morning when the kids were playing, or that evening when you were having dinner.  I mean, most of the showings were when you were playing with the kids, or during dinner.

David: “Really?   You didn’t leave for showings?”

Mom: “Of course not!  Nobody told us to.”

David: “So what happened for showings?”

Mom: “You’d get a knock at the door – ‘Hi, we’re here to look at your home,’ and that was it.”

David: “That’s so awkward.”

Mom: “I was sitting in the kitchen one day, we had a little half-circle that folded down from the wall, because the kitchen was so small.  And I’m sitting there, with Julie in the high-chair, and you wrapped up, and some bitch says to her clients, ‘Now this is the kind of kitchen you don’t want.'”

David: “Oh my God, Mom….”

Mom: “Yeah, she says, ‘You can’t even swing a dead cat in here,’ and then walks out.”

Mom drops some more choice words which I’ll leave out.

Mom: “Agents had no shame in those days.”

David: “Trust me, they still don’t.”

Mom: “Time and time again, you’d see some woman in her 60’s shuffle through with buyers, and they said whatever they wanted.  They acted like we weren’t even there.”

David: “And this went on for three months?”

Mom: “As you wrote in the blog last week, Ralph was a dud, and we got rid of him.  Then Duncan listed the house and sold it pretty quickly, so we were on to Parkhurst.”

David: “Okay, so you were saying that Parkhurst had really bad finishes?”

Mom: “Mr. Goulding built a great house; a topped-up bungalow with an extension off the back so there were four bedrooms, three bathrooms, and a great basement playroom.  But the finishes were terrible.  The kitchen floor was white, stick-down linoleum tile that showed every single scuff mark.  So we replaced that with a tobacco-colour.”

David: “Yeah, from white to tobacco.  Huge improvement.”

Mom laughs.

Mom: “It was 1981!  The kitchen ceiling was a dropped-down ceiling like you’d find in an office, with those long, fluorescent bulbs.  And then the baseboards, oh, dont’ get me started.”

David: “Sounds like there’s a story here?”

Mom: “Well the baseboards were this terrible one-by-four with no detail, just flat and white.  So eventually your Dad got a carpenter to come in and install real baseboards.  But of course, of course, he put in unfinished baseboards.  Through the whole goddam house!  So who had to stain them?”

David: “Oh boy…”

Mom: “That’s right, me.  I’ve got three kids, and I’m down on my hands-and-knees with can of brown stain, and a rag or a paintbrush, I can’t remember.  The whole house.  The whole damn house, I did it all.  And I was so mad when I found out later that we could have just bought pre-finished baseboards!”

David: “You got over a decade out of that house.”

Mom: “We did, and it was a great house.  The one thing I forgot to mention was that it had a huge back deck which was amazing for entertaining!”

David: “And also for falling off, and breaking your arm.”

Mom: “Yes, the great backyard-rink experiment of 1989!  But in my defence, I was drunk when I fell down those stairs.”

Mom decided, on New Year’s Eve, that she was a great skater and that 10:45pm would be the perfect time to head out to the Fleming Family Backyard Skating Pad, which, of course, was nothing more than shoddy, uneven layers of ice.  I can still hear her scream as she went down those stairs.  New Year’s Eve isn’t the best time to need an x-ray, although if I remember correctly, she didn’t go until January 1st.  Alcohol numbs the pain…

David: “So you started searching for a larger house, I assume, in the early-90’s?  I wrote a blog last year in which I said that I remember you and Dad were always going to open houses.  Every weekend, he’d say, ‘You wanna see a house?’ and that the search was constant.”

Mom: “I don’t think that’s true.  We had busy lives, three kids, with friends, birthday parties, events, traveling.  I don’t know that we had time to open-house as a hobby.”

David: “Where were you guys looking?”

Mom: “Dad wanted to get a larger house, and in those days, Leaside didn’t have any.  It was all bungalows, semi-detached, and the detached houses that did exist weren’t that big.  We had a 4-bedroom with a family room on Parkhurst, and it was about as large as you got, in those days.  Your Dad wanted to look in Lawrence Park.”

David: “Yeah I remember my biggest fear as a child was having to move schools.  When I heard you were looking at Yonge & Lawrence, it scared me.”

Mom: “Well we stayed in Leaside in the end.  Your Dad found this house with Duncan, and I don’t even think I saw it.”

David: “Really?”

Mom: “No, I don’t think I did.  I don’t remember touring through it.  I just remember your Dad coming home and saying, ‘Give me every penny you’ve got,’ and then we bought a house!  I was happy for your Dad, he always wanted a bigger house, and he got to keep his family in Leaside.  He got to put on an addition like he wanted.”

David: “Anything else memorable about the purchase?”

Mom: “Well, I remember we bought it from a couple who were divorcing, and I thought that was a bad omen.  Who knew, right?”

David: “Ah, we’re all better off.  And what was the sale of Parkhurst like?”

Mom: “Well, you know the lawyer that bought the house came in with a really low offer right at the start, something like $320,000 and we were priced around $400,000.”

David: “Yeah, I had written that last Friday.”

Mom: “Okay, but your Dad didn’t tell you was that when Duncan first called us to tell us about the offer, Dad refused to go to Duncan’s office to meet the buyers and go through the offer!”

David: “That’s what you did in those days?  You sat with the buyers?  That would never happen today.”

Mom: “Yes, and Duncan was representing both us as sellers as well as the buyers.”

David: “Yeah, even that’s pretty rare these days, and the public hates it.”

Mom: “So here’s the best part: your Dad tells me, ‘Carole, go and meet with Duncan and the buyers, and listen to the terms.  Then pick up their cheque, and ceremoniously tear it up in front of them, and tell them we’re not interested.'”

David: “Oh my God, geez Dad!  Okay, so what did you do?”

Mom: “I did what he told me.”

David: “Mom!”

Mom: “I picked up their cashier’s cheque, and I tore it in half, and left it on the table.  They were nice people.  Oh well.”

David: “Mom, you’re not supposed to tear up certified cheques!”

Mom: “Maybe it was different back then, who knows.  But they weren’t hurt, obviously.  They came back a month or two later and bought the house for like forty-thousand more.”

David: “Okay, so Parkhurst is sold, we renovated Bessborough, and moved on September 30th, 1992.  What do you remember?”

Mom: “Well I remember the house wasn’t exactly finished.  I mean, Keith finished the build and renovation, but the house was far from done.”

David: “What do you mean?”

Mom: “Well, we didn’t have a back deck for at least a year.”

Suddenly, I’m picturing this!  I’m in Grade 7, home for lunch, sliding the back door open…

Mom: “Yep, we just had the door to nowhere!  Like a six-foot drop or something.  You’d fall to your death.”

It was probably 2 1/2 feet, maybe three.  But yes, it was a door to nowhere.

Mom: “We had my sister Dale’s engagement party in 1992, and we had to tell people, ‘Don’t go out the back door, there’s no steps.’  It was ridiculous.  People had to go smoke dope on the front steps.”

David: “Really, eh?”

Mom: “Yes!  They couldn’t go out back or they’d fall and break a leg.”

David: “No, I meant, the dope smoking.  At an engagement party in a backyard?”

Mom: “Oh, I dunno.  Maybe a handful of people.  There would be more now.”

David: “What else about the house sticks out?”

Mom: “I wanted everything to be practical.  I remember your blog about my reaction to a pedestal sink in the boys’ bathroom.  Well, what good was that?  A pedestal sink for two soon-to-be teenagers?  They need a vanity!  They need storage for hair gel, and shaving cream!  So I had your Dad rip it out and put in a cheap vanity from, oh, I dunno, Home Depot wasn’t around back then.  We also had this massive kitchen with no island!  It was like a bowling alley!”

David: “Oh, man, you know what I remember the most about that kitchen?  We had two microwaves.”

Mom laughs hysterically.

David: “Seriously, I guess the buyers of Parkhurst didn’t include our microwave in the deal, we took it with us to Bessborough.  But we had a new kitchen at Bessborough with a built-in microwave, so we just plopped our existing microwave on the kitchen counter.  It stayed there for fifteen years!”

Mom: “It’s amazing, we were so disorganized.  This big, new house and everything.”

David: “I remember everybody that came to our house did a double-take, and said, ‘Why do you have TWO microwaves?’  Like, who has two microwaves?”

Mom: “You know what else we never had?  In all those years, with three kids?  A four-pop toaster.”

David: “So true.”

Mom: “It’s not like we had Amazon back then.  Everything was an ordeal, you’d have to pack up the kids in the car, drive to Zellers, or Sears, Simpsons, or Eaton’s, park, walk around, find the right aisle, and hope they had something in stock.”

David: “It’s amazing we all survived with only a 2-pop toaster.”

We both laugh.

Mom: “And our front lawn, oh, Jesus.”

David: “Yeah, I remember.”

Mom: “We didn’t do any landscaping for over a year!  Your Dad wanted it ‘done right’ and so there were all these plans.  It was a jungle!

David: “I was playing softball one night at Rolph Road School, and our coach said, ‘If we win tonight, Fleming will cut his front lawn.’  It was that bad.”

Mom: “The neighbours were threatening to call the police on us!”

As you can tell by now, we were well into “reminiscing” territory, and the stories about buying, selling, and renovating houses were just about through.

The view from my mother’s eyes was exactly that: from a mother’s eyes. 

She looked at the emotions at play, and the functional and practical sides to a house.  She conjured up memories about how we used the space in the houses, what features were good or bad, and how she interacted with other market participants, ie. buyers, sellers, and agents.

As I said at the onset, I didn’t want this to come off as sexist, ie. Dad takes care of the financial side, and Mom looks after the kids.  But I got both their stories, and these are the memories they had.  It was a great division of labour, however old-fashioned this looks now, in 2020.

And it gave two great stories to tell!

Next week, I interview my dog, Bella, about what it was like moving from a dog breeder’s home to our condo in 2012.

Just kidding.

Folks, have a great long weekend, even though every day is Tuesday to most of us.  See you next week!