YOU may have heard that house prices here on the North Shore are higher than a weed-smoking mouse sitting in the Pope's hat.
With my typing man's wages I haven't yet found a way to take that first step onto the property ladder.
It's a little tricky given that, according to all the media reports, the ladder starts in China. I think my family might soon be ready to take that first step though - we're eyeing up a Canada Post mailbox just off of Lonsdale Avenue. It's a little cramped, but I'm sure we'd get to meet a lot of nice people who don't know how to use the Internet yet. Incoming mail really opens up a great view corridor as well.
Really though, we're a long way away from putting together the scratch to buy a nice house here. Or even a haunted house here. Or a good-sized garden shed.
While that reality is a little tough to swallow, there is one great benefit to renting that all you North Van fat cats in your 900 square-foot, $900,000 bungalows don't get: no painting.
In fact, renting has allowed me to fulfill one of the goals I set soon after graduating high school: avoiding all forms of manual labour.
Me: "The toilet won't flush."
Landlord: "Hmmm, maybe if you have a look at the tank, it may just be. . . ."
Me: "OK, Bob Vila, just let me know when the plumber is coming. Preferably soon - gotta poop."
I never allowed that beardy Canadian Tire guy to make me feel any less of a man because I didn't know how to grout my own ball joints or whatever. I'm happily married now anyway - I've got no reason to go flaunting my sublime use of caulk.
My illest will, however, is reserved for painting. There's good reason for it too.
Back when I was in high school - before I pledged to avoid a life of grime - I took a summer job working with a painter. It was one of those hire-a-student gigs and the company was a Mennonite painting crew which I took to mean more honest and harder working than your average brush men. I later realized this particular fellow was more honest, harder working and more inclined to low-ball a Grade 11 kid rather than pay a real painter to do work a real painter should have been doing.
I showed up to the Day 1 worksite - a farm not far from my small prairie city - gleeful about the $8 I was going to make every single hour for the next eight hours of my life. Chaching.
Say, boss, do you pay mileage too? No? OK, that's cool.
I got out of my pickup truck - I did say it was the prairies, didn't I? Even book-learnin' softies like me drive trucks on the prairies - and my new chief started to explain the job.
Boss: "We're gonna paint this but first we got to sand it all down."
Me: "The door there?" Boss: "Nope, the whole thing."
Do you want to know what he was talking about?
A barn. A whole goddamned barn! Sorry if my language offends your pacifist Mennonite ears, but I'm not sure if the West Coasters realize how big barns are. Picture your house, and then picture a giant goddamned barn!
The boss passed electronic sanders to me and his son - family member, more savings! - and then hopped back into his van and drove off to another job site to paint bikinis on swimsuit models (probably).
I fired up the sander and pressed it up against the dirty old wood. Hey, this is kind of fun. Wait nope, not fun.
Oh boy, my hand is numb. My arm is numb. This is the worst ever. OK, time for a little break to regroup. How much time left in the day?
Seven hours, 59 minutes and 15 seconds. Uh oh.
Three days later we were still sanding, only now we were doing it on the other side of the barn inside a pen that housed an honest-to-God bull. At least we weren't covered in red. Then we started painting. You'll never guess what colour.
No worries though - by this point death by goring seemed like a pretty good option.
Our next job was at a house much farther away from town.
Say boss, can I get the odometer rolling before I get to work? No? Alright.
In the house we were renovating, my boss put me into rooms I could do the least damage in but I still managed to destroy an old vacuum. Not my fault though - no one explicitly told me not to suck up that rubber glove.
My final job was actually in town - yay! - and at a seemingly fun place: a cereal factory. Do we get to paint the frosting on the flakes?
Nope, you get to stay outside and sand this 50-foot silo. Here's your ladder. After I spent four hours sanding the same tiny patch of paint three feet off of the ground and deathly afraid to climb one rung higher, the painter and I decided it was time to part ways.
Later that summer I got another hire-a-slave student job knocking down an old manure shoot and installing a new manure shoot on a pig farm. It was a huge step up over painting.
Since that summer I've managed to stay almost completely callous free, my elbow grease reserved solely for shooting basketballs, hoisting beers and writing rent cheques.
As for all you homeowners, enjoy your chores - if anything breaks in my little borrowed castle I'll be sure to send you the bill.
