Hovel Hunters International, Episode 2: Keeping an Open Mind.

This home in the central city is listed at $92,900.00.

I don’t know if I’m looking for a house or not.

What I’m doing, I think, is keeping an open mind.

From personal experience, it’s real hard to buy a house and keep it for any length of time on the Ontario Disability Support Program. Back in about 1999, my elderly Great Aunt Ruth was in the old age home.

She’d been in there about a year and a half, and it was pretty clear she wasn’t coming out again. They’d originally talked her into ‘just giving it a try’ as she was a real bad diabetic. 

She’d fallen and laid on the basement floor for a few days until someone showed up or tried to call, and got no answer for a few days.

Luckily, someone had a key.

I made two or three offers, with the encouragement of my mother and my aunt, who looked after Aunt Ruth and administered things for her. At the time, they must have thought it was a good idea. I ended up buying the house with $1,500.00 down, (a gift from my grandmother), on a mortgage of $50,000.00. Aunt Ruth held that mortgage privately. I was never going to get any other kind of mortgage—not on ODSP. My big problem there was to keep the payments below $300.00 a month, as ODSP at that time was $930.00 a month. Back then, under the Conservative provincial government, there were never any raises in the pension.

We knew that very well.

She was a sweet old lady. When I called, or visited her at the home, she was always so happy to see me. And when we got to the end of that conversation or when it was time to go, she would be in tears. That was partly the up and down roller-coaster ride of the illness, and partly the sheer loneliness of getting old, and not getting all that many visitors although people did their best. It’s just one of the facts of life, for many people.

Here’s the thing. I knew what her previous gas and electricity bills were. It’s not hard to phone up and ask an insurance agent how much home insurance would be. The water rates had been split off a few years previously from the property taxes, and I could at least look at her previous, six-monthly water rates.

I figured it would take an average of $675.00, each and every month, just to keep the place. 

This obviously did not account for food, clothing, entertainment, telephone, or transportation.

It did not account for emergencies, and there was damned little slack in that budget. I had, on average, $255.00 per month to live on. I paid my property taxes quarterly, which meant four times a year I was coughing up over three hundred dollars, this on top of all other expenses…one February, it was really cold and the gas bill came in at about $270.00. That one hurt—I turned the thermostat down to 12 Celsius at night and brought it up to 17 Celsius in the day. There was no sitting around the house barefoot, in shorts and a T-shirt.

Four years later, I sold the house for $72,000.00. There was very little equity, a thousand, fifteen hundred or so, but my payments were small and it was a twenty-five year mortgage. 

Ultimately, I made about $22,000.00 for my efforts, and paid off roughly $48,500.00 plus the four years of payments, resulting in a price of $62,500.00 to my Aunt, or what the house might have been worth if it had been in any sort of shape when I bought it. Generally speaking, most sellers can't wait for a payout, as they're looking to either move into another place or simply liquidate in the case of an estate.

No one wants to wait four years, or accept a measly $300.00 a month.

It also took four years and a lot of work.

When I moved in, the front hall, the living room and the central hallway were pink. One bedroom was peach, one was pale green. It was all oil-based paint, thirty years old. I spent months block-sanding it and hitting it with Killz and Zinsser mould and stain-beating primers. 

My Great Uncle John smoked cigarettes, cigars and a pipe. They had heated with oil for many years. There was no header fan over the gas stove...the walls were pretty soaked with smoke and grease.

There was a pile of rotting curtains and fabrics in the basement. I took out an oil tank, complete with 175 gallons of heating oil from an old furnace—the place had been converted to gas heat in the 1970s, but that tank was still there. I took out a gas dryer and a gas stove and all the gas pipes, just to get rid of that constant smell. I took up rotten rugs, scraped up tile from the recreation room in the basement, took down an old antenna tower, and a 75-foot maple tree. 

A few pine trees came down, and I put a new roof on the garage. I insulated the basement, dry-walled it, and fixed a couple of leaks in the poured-concrete foundations. I never did paint—I had about five coats of white primer in all the major rooms, although I did do the kitchen in beige and dark brown, with white for the cupboards. When I was done, with hardwood floors everywhere except the bathroom and the kitchen, it looked pretty nice inside. I took out a 60-amp fusebox and put in a 100-amp breaker panel with 48 breakers. I rewired the whole house from top to bottom, putting in extra receptacles, and installing GFI circuits in the kitchen and bath...I put in a new toilet, and a new bathroom floor. I did all kinds of little jobs to make it look good inside, some of which only made sense if a person was planning to live there long-term. They weren't really necessary in order to flip a house. The outside at least had some 'curb appeal' or I probably wouldn't have gone for it in the first place. Oh, and if you're going to flip a house, don't take four years to do it!

When I moved out of there I weighed 178 lbs. I was riding my bike, and lining up at food banks. When my brother offered me a bit of work, I bought a crummy little shit-box of a truck and began driving to London, picking up two hours here and four hours there, stripping roofs and doing clean-up for him. He was doing a lot of aluminum shingles, which pays good and they’re a lot lighter than asphalt shingles, which weigh 90 to 110 lbs. per bundle. That was hard, for a middle-aged guy with three compression-fractured vertebra…I was starved for sleep. When the neighbours were partying, when they came and went, they were pounding their fists on the side of my house. It's who they were, I guess. That man, (one guy was the instigator, but he had a real big mouth and a lot of friends), must have disapproved of me very strongly.

It was a tough go, and the ODSP freaked when they saw that I had money. I was afraid to buy another house. I was borderline suicidal for a year and a half, but then I ‘lost’ my home in a story that is much longer. I will withhold much of that—

Here's the thing, okay. If you rent a place for the exact same price and move out four years later, you're not getting any of your money back. Not a penny. And at some point I will be 65 years old and finally free of the ODSP. That is a consideration.

Time has gone by and much of that pain, that trauma and that resentment has faded.

I don’t know if I’m quite ready to do it again, though.

When you’re on ODSP, it is just not worth taking the risk.

Buying a house, moving in, and then getting a letter from them saying you’re cut off is hard to deal with. They did that to me five times in the first year, but then I was also trying to start a business, which is legal as long as you follow their guidelines...

With the ODSP, you are guilty until you go downtown and somehow prove yourself innocent.

The same went for the neighbours, working class guys who probably didn’t much like getting up in the morning and going to work when some guy who ‘ripped off his elderly aunt’ gets to 'stay home and get paid to sit about doing nothing' buys the house next door and starts lowering the local property values merely by his presence.

END