314 RIDEAU ST - $435,000
The Essentials
A three-bedroom home opposite the Broom Factory, which means only two minutes from Doug Fluhrer Park and the Woolen Mill, and a fifteen-minute stroll from The Everly (and its kale salad, restored to the menu this week).
The Bigger Picture
I’ve lived in this neighbourhood for forty years, more or less, except for a half-dozen years spent writing and wandering and eating in Toronto before my son was born, and when I had no idea I’d wind up with my name on a business card next to a Royal LePage logo. Very weird, that winding road.
Truth is, I wouldn’t live anywhere else in Kingston. I walk up to The Elm for a coffee in the morning, and when time allows I take the K & P Trail down to Belle Park and then out to that glorious sinking island in the middle of the Cataraqui River. It’s an hour and ten round-trip, that hike, and the best part of many of my days.
I like that the downtown core is a fifteen-minute stroll in the other direction, and that I’m surrounded by good people. I wrote of Erika Olsen’s art last week that it “teems with life”. The same is true of the Swamp Ward.
314 Rideau St was probably built to house people working in the shipyards, or at the Woollen Mill. It’s a cottage, through and through, both modest and charming. There were once serious woods behind the house and now those acres are shared with ball diamonds and soccer fields. The crisp smack of bat against ball is as common nearly as a robin’s greeting in these parts.
The restored Broom Factory is directly opposite, pretty much, with its cafe and its concert spaces, its funky and low-slung red-brick architecture, its lone EV plug. Other side of Cataraqui St is the vet’s office, and behind that The Kingston Bouldering Co-operative (Google it).
The house itself is bright and well-appointed, with three beds and two baths, and a kitchen (with its own island) big enough for your choir group singalongs. There is a wooden beam strung with industrial lights that screams square dance and back forty barn life, though I don’t know why, and that probably says more about me than it does about the house.
There is a private-feeling deck out back, and a cinder-block shed. I’ve seen a few of those sheds in the area and someone told me they were used to smoke meats or fish, back when one could live in the city and do such things without it being labelled artisanal or niche.
Mostly I think what I feel about this little blue house is that I’m pleased I get to offer it for sale, that you can still buy a good house downtown in the low 400s. It feels to me a smart place to start the home ownership part of your life, or even to wind that stage up, and if someone tossed me the key I’d be mighty thrilled.
The Virtual Tour
The Floor Plans
The Gallery
