180 WILLINGDON AVENUE

THE ESSENTIALS

This new listing is priced at $675,000.00. The house is a tastefully renovated and detached two-storey, and there are three bedrooms, 1.5 baths, and a detached garage. The annual taxes are $6355 (2018). It’s in the Winston Churchill Public School catchment area and is a comfortable walk to the university campus, as well as the lake and the downtown core. In short, we like it a lot.

There are open houses on Saturday January 19 and Sunday January 20. 2-4 pm both days. Any offers will be reviewed on Monday January 21 at 5 pm.

THE BIGGER PICTURE

Some Sunday mornings last summer I rode through the nearly abandoned university campus with my kids and then along Union St to Bearance’s grocery store, where we’d hang a left and head down to the Tett Centre. We sat at the water’s edge with something hot or cold, sweet or savoury, from The Juniper Café, marvelling at the blued steel surface of Lake Ontario, or the tight little fists of cumulus above, and the Island windmills turning idly, like something out of a Wyndham novel. Eventually we’d work our way slowly home again, coasting down the long hill past the Gord Downie Pier and the brilliant new park there.

It’s a lovely part of town; that’s the point. And Willingdon Avenue is at its heart, the last street you pass before reaching Bearance’s, and one that arrows in a stately way north, to the mad little roundabout, and it finally peters out at Johnson.

180 Willingdon is our first new listing this year, maybe half a dozen houses up from Union on the west side. A two-storey, detached stucco home with extensive and impressive renovations. Here’s the beginning of a list of features: a basement rec room that feels to me like something lifted from a Scandinavian chalet, a detached and insulated garage, a lovely courtyard garden, a main-floor family room, three bedrooms, one and a half baths, a whole flaming litter of gas fireplaces (well, three of them anyway).

It’s amazing how even a straightforward recital of details can make one sit up and take notice, isn’t it? But then there’s been so little to get excited about in these recent low-inventory months in Kingston. But just wait until you’ve had a look at the photographs of this home, and worked your way through the virtual tour. You’ll be as enthusiastic as we are, because it really is a marvelous family home situated on one of Kingston’s most desirable streets.

If the kids are still young you’ll probably walk them up to Winston Churchill Public for nine o’clock, and then at the end of the day hang out with them at a park, or sit with them on the patio behind the house asking them to tell you about their day. While they do that you’ll be watching their little legs kicking back and forth under the table. You’ll be biting your lip maybe, moved almost to tears by the machinations large and small that have brought you to this perfect moment in your life – surrounded by people and places you love more deeply than you thought possible back when you were just another of the smart kids riding to class, or singing down to the water to jump oh-so-casually into a lake connected remotely to the ocean and from there to most of the world and its six billion souls, none of them, it feels, more fortunate than you.

Here’s a link to the iGuide virtual tour. It’s full of 360 spins, and those are worth a trip in their own right, but there are floor plans here too, and a map so you can orient yourself.

And the Realtor.ca nuts and bolts are right here.