136 Chatham St - SOLD

The Essentials

A two-bedroom detached red-brick home ideally situated between the Memorial Centre grounds and the downtown hordes.

The Bigger Picture

We listed this house not so long ago, in 2019, and I remember thinking it was older than it is. Led astray by its flat-topped, boxy look, I hypothesized that a century ago it might have been a post office. In my mind’s eye I saw the house itself as a letter-slot painted into the landscape. I had snorting horses tethered to a wooden rail out front, and fields and then forest stretching north to the edge of the world. Leather saddlebags scarred with bug and branch. The romantic in me ran amok. I paid no heed to reason.

The house still fascinates me. I don’t have to work very hard to see it as housing only a grand set of stone stairs that descend to the centre of the earth. In this new vision it becomes a portal. The centrepiece of a Jules Verne novel. Errol Flynn is a mile below its red square, leaping pools of lava.

The truth, of course, is more modest.

This is not a big house, quite the opposite. There will be no impromptu volleyball challenge in the living room on Friday nights. Truth is, there is barely room for hacky-sack. No, 136 Chatham offers the chance to live responsibly in a smallish set of spaces, to really enact the belief that bigger is not always better, usually isn’t, and that a tiny home is a desirable commodity, the foundation of an ethical way forward.

What you have here when you boil it down is a charming two-bedroom house with parking, some outdoor space, and very little in the way of foreseeable maintenance. There are sliding doors out to a private deck and very pretty sightlines wherever you park yourself. It offers, in other words, a condominium lifestyle without the monthly fees. and does that at a reasonable price, one that I thought we might not see again.