Monday, November 13, 2006

Presenting: House of Brian

Finally some down time to be able to sit down and write about the great city of Vancouver. To bring you up to date, I have found a job 2 days after I made it to Vancouver and I spent the 3 following weeks living out of a hotel room searching for an apartment to call our home. I'll probably go more in detail about my job and such but right I'll be going over the basement we have found. So anyway, we finally found a place in North Vancouver after making many phone and late nights doing research and classified papers. We moved in 2 weeks ago and are still in the process of getting settled in and acquiring the right furniture and ALL the fun stuff with everything involving moving!

Without further ado we have found a decent sized basement suite in a cul-de-sac at the base of a mountain with a short drive to the local ski hills. The neighborhood is very nice and quiet. There are a lot of riding trails nearby and I can't wait to test them out once I have my bike over. Mountain biking is pretty big around here so I should be able to meet fellow riders relatively easy and go on treks and stuff.

The Neighborhood

Checking up on Desert Storm

So anyway, one of the main features of our basement suite that really made us want the place even more was the gorgeous backyard. The landscape here is pretty stunning: there are a bunch of plants (some tropical) starting from the driveway going to the back of the house to a fire pit with a deck surrounding it, there's also a creek going through the plants and the landlords have an upper deck overlooking all of this.

The Backyard

View of the Fire Pit

The inside comprises of a large kitchen with new-looking appliances, a spacious living room with a gas fireplace (that ended up being my room - details to come), a large bedroom, a small bedroom, bathroom and shared laundry room.

Le Kitchen

Living Room w/ Fireplace for the Romantics

Rob's Bedroom (No Romance There)

The 2nd bedroom turned out to be smaller than I originally viewed it and since I had lost the coin toss to get the bigger room, Rob and I decided to switch around the suite layout. The small bedroom will become the TV room so to speak and I was going to be living in the living room. To give me more privacy, we hung some curtains to block off the view from the kitchen so it does end up looking more like a room than a living area.

Our landlords are really nice (so far) and they just happen to have bought the house not that long before we moved in so the place is kind of new for both of us. There's a bit of work that needs to be done with the cable hook ups and the internet access and so forth but the landlords are really good about it and willing to improve the house.

Once we are fully settled in I will post new pictures to show everyone the final outcome of our home.

So long!