english

We got a visiting dog today. Her name is Happy and she is a Mira dog. Well, actually she is a Labernese: a cross between a Labrador and a Mountain Bernese, but since she’s owned by Mira she’s a Mira dog.
Mira is an organisation that provides helping-hand and seeing-eye dogs to people who need that kind of assistance. But before the dogs go into training they have to grow up first so the puppies satay in foster families until they’re one year old. One of those foster families is a reader of loglog and she asked me if I could take care of Happy now-and-then when she can’t take the dog with her.

Before I’ll do that I wanted to see how our dogs reacted to her, so I asked her to come by and see how the combination of Happy, Poupoune and Pepe would fare. Well, it turned out as expected. Pepe made friends and Poupoune just growled. Poupoune doesn’t like other dogs, not even cute little puppies.
Happy was a bit scared, she wasn’t used to being growled at.

So after this little experiment I decided it was probably a better idea to go to Happy’s house than to bring Happy into ours.

Halfway when tiling the bathroom floor of my client, I found out that we lacked a couple of square feet of tiles. Oops. Somewhere in the measuring and ordering process something had gone wrong. Probably the fact that we added a toilet to the surface that needed to be tiled and omitted a border.

Fortunately the missing tiles could be re-ordered and the next day I could finish the job. It looks gorgeous, although it has a bit of an op-art effect which makes the floor ripple.

The tiles originally consisted of little mats of 36 white or 36 black tiles. But since the client wanted a checkerboard-pattern they meticilously removed every other tile on the mats and glued a tile of the other color in its place. A huge amount of work, but it made my tiling job a lot faster. If I had to exchange tiles during tiling I probably wouldn’t have finished the job before the winter…

It’s Easter every day for Poupoune.

But instead of eggs she has to hunt for pig’s ears, carefully hidden by me. She is a hunting dog and loves the game, and also loves to eat them. And I love to see her jump up and down chairs to reach all the concealed treasures.

Finally I got to see in which house on Esplanade across Parc Jeanne Mance, Alison and her parents lived in when she was young. Her mother still knew the exact address and showed it to me.

These houses are now very, very expensive but 35 years ago her parents, still studying, could afford to rent them. The Plateau wasn’t yet the hip neighbourhood it is now, and houses where crappy and cheap.

I used to work on a house one block to the North of here, and I can attest that they look nice, but aren’t very well built. And because Montréal was (is) a poor city, landlords and home owners often had no money to spend on maintenance which made matters worse.

For some reason I like to cut things in two.

This old bath had to be removed while the floor that surrounded it needed to be left intact. The only solution was to cut this thick cast iron bathtub in two. Having two pieces also helped in carrying it outside since each piece was heavy enough as it was.

Maybe we can turn it into this.

Anne gave Alison a nice button.

Alison spent all day yesterday to bake this enormous cake for my birthday. It’s a lemon cake, filled with lemon custard and topped with a lemon sugar icing. There’s no fat in it, but lots of eggs and sugar, so it’s not exactly for people keeping a low-calory diet.

A friend gave me a really nice birthday present: He’s organizing a party for me on my birthday. There will be a lot of people that I don’t know (yet), but the best thing is that I don’t have to clean the house afterwards. What more could one wish for?

Since it wouldn’t be healthy to eat all of this cake alone, we’re taking it to the party this afternoon, to share with the other guests.

We’re back home now and they loved it. There’s not a crumb left.

Alison is baking a big cake for tomorrow, but this picture is merely here to proof to a Dutch friend of mine that we still have, and use, plastic milk bags around here. In the Netherlands they discarded those in the 70’s.

I’m going to help renovate someone’s bathroom next week and today she took me along to shop for a bath tub. She wants one of those old bath tubs with lion’s feet and she had been looking for a nice one (wide and long, but not too long for her bathroom) for a while. She thought she had found the ONE in a shop very close to our house so I went along for inspection. It looked alright to me, a bit pricey but she was not too bothered by that. The tub will be refinished with new email and repainted on the outside. When it returns from the re-finisher I’ll install new taps, a shower head and a shower curtain. But before that we have to remove the old bath first.

Too bad the tub doesn’t have lion claw feet but pigeon claw feet. If you ever been on the Dam square in Amsterdam you know why.

It’s pretty awful when, as a landlord, you have to go to the Régie du Logement (the rental board of Québec).

Our costs went up considerately compared to those of the old owner because the value of the building is much higher now so both our property taxes and the insurance premium went up considerably. We’re paying more than twice the premium as the previous owner, partly because she was underinsured.

Since we want to be good landlords we used a online form provided by the Régie to calculate exactly how much we legally could raise the rent. And even tough I showed them the calculations and I was willing to show them all our bills, all of our tennants refused the proposed rent increase. That is their right but still.

Our tenants pay a really low rent. We know, because we also enjoyed such a low rent when we were tenants. When I tell people the rent our tenants pay for their apartments they always shake there heads in disbelief. It could be easily twice as much.
The problem is that the rents were so low that the owner couldn’t afford the maintenance anymore. So we really have to increase the rent in order to be able to do some major repairs to the house. We don’t have much savings left and some things just need to be done in the next couple of years.

So to the Régie I went, expecting to encounter long lines of other disgruntled landlords. It was raining heavily and their offices are in an office building in the Olympic Village. So I wasn’t in a good mood when I finally got there. But no, there was nobody before me and a friendly man helped me with my application. He was handicapped and filling out my forms went rather slow so I asked him if I could help. “Yeah, sure!,” he replied, so I ended up copying the alterations he made to one of the forms to the other 11 forms.

Then they all got a big stamp on them, and I had to pay almost 200 dollars in fees.
Now we’ll have to wait for the day of the hearing, when the Régie will decide what the new rents of our tenants will be. I hope they will be high.

It’s difficult to be an evil landlord, but I’m getting better at it every day.