A few years ago I noticed that one of my neighbors had really gone all out and decorated their whole front yard for Halloween.
Faster than you can blink I had my camera out and I took a series of Halloween pictures.
These are a few of the decorations in my neighbors yard, and yes, they did their property up again this year, with a few changes of course.
and then there’s the Mummy?
I hope that you’re having a great Halloween! What are your plans?
Over the last few months it seems like 30% to 50% of our neighbors have thought about selling their homes. I’m amazed at all of the “for sale” signs that I see as I walk through the neighborhood with our dog.
The house immediately beside me and the one on the corner (two houses down) are still up for sale. Both have been up for sale for about a month. The housing market here in Toronto has apparently slowed down a bit … not drastically, but there’s been a few articles recently that say it’s slowing down. Hopefully my neighbors homes sell soon. I’m curious as to who our new neighbors will end up being. Hopefully we’ll get along ok!
If the other houses that I see up for sale on neighboring streets are sold soon they’ll be a convoy of moving trucks roaming the neighborhood soon! LOL .. like that will happen.
Are there any homes for sale close to your house? Are they selling slower than they normally do?
Well our new neighbors, the one that bought the house from our Karaoke neighbors and officially took ownership of the home sometime in May finally moved into their home last week.
They must have rented a small moving van, but I think that wasn’t enough as I saw several of their friends vans and cars loaded with moving boxes after their moving van was gone.
They still aren’t finished their renovations though. They currently have no ceiling in their living room, dining room and kitchen! They are waiting for their contractor to come and get the work done. It will be nice when it’s done though because they are putting pot lights in the ceiling. It will have a very nice modern look. Chris and I feel bad that their renovations are finished because it was us that suggested that they tear out their ceiling! Oh well … it will look nice when it’s done.
One of our other neighbors moved out of her house about two weeks ago and we’ve seen some people going inside the house a few times in the last day or two, so maybe the new people are about to move into that house soon too. Maybe they’ll be like T and C next door and renovate first before they move in.
Last Tuesday when T and C officially moved into their house Chris and I dropped by and gave them a box of deserts from a local bakery as a house warming gift. They were taking a break when we visited so we ended up talking with them for at least an hour. We both really like our new neighbors. Hopefully we’ll become friends as time goes by.
I wrote a post on one of my other blogs about a week ago about the number of houses close to us that have gone up for sale lately. They’re selling like hotcakes it seems!
I’m pretty sure that there was a news story a few days ago where some real estate companies were saying that house sales were slower than normal this past spring and so far this summer here in Toronto, but the way houses are going up for sale and being sold within a week or two I don’t think there’s a problem in this particular neighborhood.
I’m glad our housing market is doing so well. I keep hearing about people losing their homes in the US or requesting foreclosure help. I think it’s particularly bad in California if I’m not mistaken. I hope it doesn’t get that way here in Canada. Our economy has been doing better than the US economy since 2001. It’s starting to have some trouble, but as I said hopefully things don’t get that bad here.
One neighbor just a few houses down sold her house in just under two weeks and to the best of my knowledge it went for about $350,000. Her house is pretty much the same as ours so I guess if we put ours up for sale we’d get somewhere around that price too. Good to know but we aren’t planning on selling anytime soon.
I just hope that all of our new neighbors are nice people. We have a great neighborhood and we are all fairly friendly – at least to say hi or wave at each other when we see one an other if not actually visiting each others homes.
On Sunday night Chris and I were going to have a nice steak barbecue dinner to celebrate my Google Adsense Break through. However, our neighbor had borrowed our BBQ as he was having a big family dinner and much to his dismay he discovered that his barbecue had suddenly stopped working.
Lucky for us, when Chris went over to get our BBQ he asked us if we wanted to join them for dinner as he’d cooked up several extra steaks, chicken breasts and lamb. I wasn’t feeling that great and since I’d meant our dinner to be a bit of a celebration we declined his offer for dinner. So … he loaded up two plates full of meats, grilled veggies and desserts!
The food he gave us was enough for four people!
Needless to say we didn’t barbecue our steak that night. We ate our neighbors bonanza of food. We also opened a bottle of Red Wine. It was an Australian Shiraz-Grenache. The wine was lovely. It reminded me of a beautiful Merlot that some doctors that I used to work with make in their Grimsby Winery – Thirty Bench.
We had a fantastic meal, accompanied by a wine that I’ll be sure to purchase again. In fact we enjoyed that wine so much that I’m thinking of joining a wine club so that I can try new wines regularly. We aren’t big drinkers, but we do enjoy a glass of fine wine every now and then with our meals.
As for that steak that we were going to have on Sunday evening … well we had it this evening. I’d put a marinade on it on Sunday and leaving it on that long turned out to have been a great idea. The steak was great.