There was a bit of a housing panic last week when Tania spoke quickly with the upstairs neighbour. They own this house, and since she is pregnant they’ve decided that they need more space, and have decided to sell the house, so they need us to be ready for the eventual tours of agents and prospective buyers. No more can we drop food on the floor and leave it where it falls. After living with a scavenger dog for years, this was never really a concern, and so in the week since the dog shuffled off this mortal coil, we are now nearly to our ankles in food waste. Who knew that that poor little dog snuffled back that many crumbs in the course of a week?

Anyhow, they offered to pay for storage and cleaners by way of being nice landlords, who don’t mean to cause us all this bother, really. They have to do neither, really, so that was cool to offer. My biggest concern was that we would be stuck with having to find a place to move or potentially deal with new landlords that might decide to give us notice the minute they take possession in order to move family into the suite. This caused me to consider a number of possible avenues, including making the search for new studio space that could double as (albeit possibly illegal) living space. Potential locations might involve the standard retail store / restaurant on the main floor, with small two bedroom apartment upstairs, or a big long warehouse space that we could pop up a wall toward the back, install a shower, etc.

As of last night I think that what I was plotting was to accept the offer of storage space, move some stuff here into it, and then also move the contents of my studio into it as well. This would allow me to tell them to take a flying leap, and I could look for studio and living space at my leisure, saving the rent for a couple months. I was pretty much set with this idea until this morning, when I ran into the landlord.

Their little girl opened their door to look for the paper, and I said hello; she had a story to tell me, of course… “Wichawd…” Landlord / Mom came out to catch me to make sure I was cool with everything. I said yeah, it sounds fine, and we’re pretty much ready to go, but that we weren’t likely to be ready for an Architectural Digest shoot any time soon, and that we’d gladly let someone come in to wash walls, dust corners, and deal with all the grody bits that we would rather not. I mentioned something about not being absolutely thrilled with the prospect of moving or dealing with new landlords, and she was a bit shocked.

“Oh, well we were kind of hoping that you’d come with us. I mean, the basement there needs work, but we’ve got all summer. I mean, you’re the best tennants ever” (emphasis was hers)

They’re freaks and we’re freaks. It’s all cool. Maybe we can even have some say in where walls and such go in the new place. I’m not sure if they’ve already bought it, or merely have an offer in on it and they have a subject to sale clause that they need to clear on this place. Either way, the place that they have in mind is about… 6 blocks away. We’re not moving more than 6 blocks in any one move from now on, it would appear.

I have a feeling that they’ll even cover moving costs / mail redirection / etc… that’s just the kind of people we’re dealing with here.