NEW TOMORROW!

135 JAMES ST - NEW PRICE

135 James St is reduced by almost $25,000 this morning. The new asking price is $435,000. For a two-storey Inner Harbour home set back from the street, with a separate double-deep garage connected to the house by a covered breezeway. It seems so obviously like something you should consider, don’t you think?

25 WELLINGTON ST - NEW PRICE

The majestic and marvellous limestone home situated at 25 Wellington St has been relisted this morning at $1.375M, down from $1.5M. Which is not to suggest for a minute that there was anything wrong with where it started. It’s just an acknowledgement that it’s an odd, soft market and an uncertain world, and sometimes that can make for the rarest sort of opportunity.

THE LISTINGS AT A GLANCE

It’s always reminded me of a farmhouse, some clapboard remnant of Kingston’s sparser past, but I’m dead wrong, apparently. Still a fascinating Inner Harbour property.

More than 50 off-grid and glorious acres, a three-year-old two-storey cabin, a bunkie at the pond, solar power…

I have been excited about the possibility of listing the marvellous limestone home at 25 Wellington St since late fall. Without wanting to tempt fate I mentioned it (in hushed reverential tones) to a few colleagues and friends. I wandered past. This is before the first snowfalls. I re-read its history (the same family has owned it, tended to its needs, lavished attention on it, since 1963), and I pictured myself on its grand staircase, or on the narrow stairs down to the basement (where the kitchen used to be). And when the contract was mine, I began to strategize, and to pull the threads together, to fill the rooms with flowers. It is an exciting listing for me, and perhaps a once-in-a-lifetime possibility for you.

At the western edge of Benson Lake, which is part of the Rideau System and connects to Indian and Mosquito and Loon and Newboro, and also to Chaffeys Locks, a much-renovated and four-season home or cottage with its own boat launch.

I walked these 98 acres with the seller back in the fall and haven’t stopped thinking about them since. I went over again last week to strap a sign to the gate. I clambered down to the shoreline other side of the road, dug shards of pottery from the cliff, stared south (a little sadly) towards America. Afterwards I walked to the pond near the back of the land and marvelled at the variety of landscapes I’d moved through. There was something surreal about the experience, as if I was as likely to run into cheetah or hyena as I was tweeted birder. I could breathe better, and think more clearly. I wanted to both laugh and cry, sleep and run.

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