Liar, Liar, Pants on Fire - North End Adventure

The North End Adventure

My office at the time, being in the north end of the city, prompted some business from that area. Indeed, I wasn’t nearly as prolific with my sales as some other people, but nonetheless, I managed to pick up the odd bit of business, usually because it was my turn to get the call. That’s what happened when I went to the house on the corner of Inkster and McGregor.

The house was a stately two storey building, custom built by the owner in about 1940 or so, when Inkster Boulevard was a relatively posh area of West Kildonan. The owner, whose name I don’t recall had a sheet metal shop in the downtown area and while he was more or less retired, still went in to the office daily to keep himself busy. He and his wife had slowed down considerably and the big home was far too much for them. I remember them to have been very dignified, sociable people, although I don’t recall much else. In any case, it’s not them I wanted to write about, but rather my buyer who called on my advertisement.

Mrs. Cherewick called me up to enquire about the place. She sounded like a gruff old teacher with her pointed questions. She was indeed a teacher at St. John’s College on the U. of M. campus as I found out later. She was quite guarded about her reasons to relocate from the university area where she and her husband had their home. Finally she admitted she was putting her husband into St. Josephs Nursing Home because he was suffering from Altzheimers syndrome and needed more care than she was able to give him.

I have to concede that I was a real estate agent, not a social or medical worker, and I had no idea at the time what she was talking about. Suffice it to say that she was depositing her husband somewhere that she would be closer to visit. In the mean time, she wanted a home that was a little bit classy, having an illusion about the character of the Inkster Boulevard district. Ten years earlier she might have been right, but now, not so much.

I asked if I should come pick her up (having a curiosity about her own home and circumstance) but she said no, she would meet me at the Inkster house. She came by herself and we started through the place. It was very nice, she said, but too big and too much work for what she had in mind.

The long and the short of it was that she wanted to be in the general area, in a (sort of) classy neighborhood and nearer to her husband. She could certainly commute to the University. I suggested I might come over and look at her place to get an idea of her lifestyle. It would help me to determine what might suit her. She agreed reluctantly and I went over.

HOLY CRACKERS! What a property! I don’t remember the exact dimensions of the river lot but it was at least an acre running right back to the Red River. The back of the property behind the house was covered in plants, shrubs and trees, none of which should survive the Manitoba winter, but yet thrived here. The back of the lot was two tiered with the house sitting up fairly high, which I imagine was because the street was a dyke built after the 1950 flood. 

The house itself was a modest one and a half storey home, well designed and well kept, which was somewhat of a relief to me. So Mrs. Cherewick was not an uppity sort of woman and would be reasonable to deal with. I even got to meet Dr. Cherewick, a horticulturist with enough degrees after his name to make up a whole alphabet. He happened to be quite lucid at the time and was describing some of his plants to me. I could see the tension melting from his wife’s face as we were chatting. She must be under a terrific amount of pressure and I felt a certain empathy toward her.

After looking through her home which she had listed with a couple of high rollers from another company, I left to do my due diligence and begin looking for a place for her. By a stroke of extreme luck I found a place in West Kildonan on the street right beside Kildonan Park. It was a single story two bedroom home of an age a little newer than her old place in Fort Garry and called her up immediately. The place was a little further out than she had expressed, but it was right across the street from a major park with flowers and trees and all sorts of nature and only about two minutes from the house on Inkster Avenue. This was an upscale neighborhood and in my mind it was ideal. Mrs. Cherewick agreed after seeing the place, but she wanted to bring her son to look at it too so I arranged another appointment for a Sunday afternoon.

You can imagine my surprise when what seemed to be the whole family showed up for the viewing. I don’t recall now whether the house was vacant or the owners were just out for the duration. Suffice it to say I had my hands full shepherding that whole bunch through the house and getting them back outside. I left them on the front lawn in animated discussion about the merits of the house and the area on the promise from Mrs. Cherewick to be in touch with me.

Well the whole business took a strange twist in the coming days. I had been working with a local structural engineer whose bi-level house I had for sale and took an offer on. He’d make a perfect candidate for Mrs. Cherewick’s house I thought and showed it to him. I was right. He was pretty well dazzled by the lot and the planting on it. It was right up his alley to grow grapes as he had done at the bi-level. Even the house suited them. Any changes were no big deal for a structural engineer, he said. But there was one thing that bothered him, that was the lot size.

Armed with a survey certificate, my engineer client set out to determine whether he’d got more land than he had bargained for – or less. It was less. The property you see wasn’t perpendicular to the street and that’s where the discrepancy lay. Well, when you’re attached to the largest engineering firm in the province, it’s not too hard to make a case out of land discrepancy. You see, the agents had taken the dimension on the street as the property width instead of taking the perpendicular measurement.

I was getting gladder and gladder that it wasn’t my listing. As for the two high rolling listing agents, I heard they left the business shortly after that, never to be heard from again. And the engineer, well he got a bit of a deal (I don’t know how much) and he was happy.

And Mrs. Cherewick, well she got moved over to West Kildonan, entertained her family and visited her husband regularly. She was happy. So that was that.

Liar, Liar, Pants on Fire - The Sign Painter

The Sign Painter

There’s one more nasty story I’ve got to tell before moving on to more decent folks.  I had been working in the north of the perimeter along the west side of the river on some commercial property which I’d leased to a local grocer when I came across some vacant land owned by a local architect. Of course I had my signs up and we were working toward building an upscale residential community along the river.

That’s when I got a phone call from a very well known sign painter. He was the go to guy around town for the window paintings he specialized in. It turned out that he had bought a large old house on Scotia Avenue not far from the property I had listed. I guess he saw my sign there and decided to call.

I arrived at a rather large, rambling old bungalow, not much to look at on the outside, but it had a neat enough yard leading all the way back to the river. At first glance, the place certainly had potential. Once inside, I was pleasantly surprised by the brightness of the place. Well of course, the sign painter could paint more than just signs. He had knocked out a few walls and combined the living room/dining room into a large sitting area, somewhat like a lounge with ample seating, coffee and card tables etc. The whole thing had the appearance of a social club.

Then we went downstairs. Well what a surprise THAT was. Leather couches and chairs all facing the giant television on the end wall. The other wall had an old wood fed stove with a warming oven like we used to have on the farm – but it wasn’t hooked up to a chimney or anything.

“I rent this place out to groups of people wanting to have a quiet, relaxing weekend and just party a little. It’s ideal!” the sign man said enthusiastically. He walked over to the oven and opened the warming oven above. It was crammed full of VCR’s

“There,” he said. “Entertainment galore: I picked the whole bunch up from a German fellow. These are good stories.” He stuck one into the VCR player and turned it on.

Well, I’m no prude, so I watched, looking for some sort of story line. There was none. Finally I could make my exit. But before I could do that, he felt obligated to explain the whole business to me.

He’d had this marvelous idea to rent this place out to groups of people to do what they wanted to do. He wouldn’t be involved in anything but collect the rent. And to furnish the place from time to time as needed.

His wife on the other hand expressed the sentiment that this was absolutely the stupidest idea he’d ever had, and if he didn’t get rid of the place soon, he wouldn’t have his home either.

I finally got to get a word in edgewise and told him while it was an interesting idea, it was way out of my league and I couldn’t help him.

I went back to the office to breathe a little clean air.

Liar, Liar, Pants on Fire - A Bizarre Adventure

A Bizarre Adventure

One day I got a call from a fellow looking for a country property in my area of business. He was looking for a house on acreage. He had some pretty specific requirements. Firstly, it should be a spacious house and garage. Secondly, it should be as far as possible from a school so his children would be picked up first and delivered home last in the day. Well that was an odd request and I laughed, being sure he was joking. He wasn’t.

It turns out he and his wife were running the general store just east of the Teulon turn off on Highway 8, just north of Clandeboye, which they had turned into a Gulf Oil bulk dealership. It was the old Carter’s General Store where my folks had shopped at back in the day when it had been a country store. So that established an immediate kinship and I put a considerable effort into finding something. And find it I did. By blind luck I discovered a large, rambling vacant property almost made to order. The place had been vacant for some six months or so and the owner was anxious to sell, so we went in and had a look. The place more or less met their needs and he said to me, “Let us think about it.”

Well he obviously didn’t have to think too long because the very next morning he called me at about nine o’clock, saying he wanted to make an offer. But there were conditions he didn’t think I could meet.

“Well, try me,” I said confidently. The main condition was that he needed possession that very day by 6:00 p.m. – actual physical possession. He would pack up everything from the store and move it into the house at six o’clock. They didn’t have that much stuff anyway and his wife was very efficient, he said. I don’t quite remember all the flurry of putting this altogether or even the selling agent’s name, but somehow it all went together and by six p.m. the buyers were in the house. Fortunately we got to dump all the legal issues on the lawyers and go on with our business.

That was more or less the end of the affair except for a couple of footnotes. I guess when Gulf Oil went to check the tanks on possession of the sale; they found a considerable discrepancy between what was there and what was recorded. I didn’t know much about it because I hadn’t been involved in that end of the property sale. Quite frankly, the less I knew about it, the better I liked it. I didn’t bother to visit my buyers or even call them on the phone. There’s a time when you have to cut bait and move on. This was it. I desperately wanted to find some NICE people to do business with. Not that I didn’t make a good living from the Sicilian mafia or the drug induced crazies or the mortgage defaulters, but it was getting a bit much for me. It seemed that was all I was running in to. It was time to take stock of the direction of my real estate career and reset my GPS system toward that kind of clientele. Surely there must be some decent home buyers and sellers around. I would focus on them.

Liar, Liar, Pants on Fire - My Financial Friend

My Financial Friend

Having revealed my adventures on the arrangement of my financial advisor friend, I suppose I should elaborate a little on our relationship. He had called up wanting to know if I had any place in the country up near Beausejour for sale. He wanted to be closer to his cottage in Bird River. Well I didn’t have one, but I was sure if there was something there I would find it. Sure enough there were a couple and we went shopping. Wouldn’t you know it, he was extremely interested in the most expensive one. I shouldn’t have sold him short because it wasn’t too long before he had put the package together.

It was about four or five months before I heard from him again, this time to come and have a look at what he and his wife had accomplished. They put on a fondue party for the four of us and we made a night of it. They had indeed made many changes to the place to suit their needs and in fact, had plowed up a fair patch for a garden to the wife’s delight. It turns out that THAT was the sticking point to not selling the cottage. She had a formidable garden at the cottage and she wasn’t about to let that go to waste.

Next thing you know, I get a call to go look at the cottage to determine its value. They’re going to be out there on the weekend so his missus can dig out some of the root plants to transfer to their new house. “Sure” I say, “glad to come. Where is it?”

He gives me directions and on a bright sunny morning the Missus and I are off to spend a pleasant day on Lee River. It was absolutely beautiful scenery as we drove along, being careful not to miss the turnoff. We found the right road and turned down it to get to the cottage. It was fairly straight so I got up some speed until suddenly there was nothing in front of us other than blue sky. HOLY CRACKERS! I was about to drive off the face of the earth! I put on the brakes and crawled on further, thinking about the flat earth society. Creeping to the edge of the abyss, I discovered a steep slope that headed straight into the river. Fortunately there was a turn off just before you drove into it.

So this was the Lee River challenge. It was just like the adventure of the BB hills off Strathcona Street in Winnipeg. If you didn’t do a hard right at the bottom of the hill, you ended up in the drink, only in Winnipeg it was a big oak tree as Lloyd Smith found out.

We pulled into the yard and found our friends working diligently about the place. He was busy raking the yard while his wife was grumpily digging out her root bulbs and placing them in boxes. Well, they both needed a break so we sat down for tea and surveyed the landscape. We decided to hold an open house there, especially trying to attract the boaters going by.

The open house was a total bust, including my fishing efforts. I never even got one bite. Fortunately, my financial friend had a family member who was willing to buy the place and I suggested he do that privately, which suited my friend, saving him a commission. I even helped him with the offer. I had been way out of my league in that transaction and was happy it was over.

That was the last I heard from my friend until the cottage assessment came up.