Photos of your home

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House prices are crazy here and most people have small homes to avoid the land taxes.



$800,000 OVER the asking price. ^ I don't know the asking price.



$990,000 ^



$1M This is a townhouse so you get one side of it.
It's in a prime location for commuting (backs onto noisy train station).




$600,000K ^

Closest I could find.Mine has a gable addition off side and more porches.You can never have enough porches and a screened in one to keep bugs out.
Also more open around it.

That's beautiful. Even if it's not exactly the same. Did you build yours?

Home:

My bedroom (where the magic happens):

My throne room:

Mostly finish work and additions..We added two bedrooms , three porches, plumbed it , wired it, got electricity to it , drilled a well,( there is a spring and hand dug well that we used, but they don’t put out the volume for a washing machine and modern water usage), put in a a septic tank, metal roof , wood floors.
It’s been an old home place since late eighteen hundreds.The original house is gone.Supposedly Frank James used my spring but everybody claims that.

^^

That's exactly what I pictured when you mentioned looking for a landscaper.

Did you ever find anyone willing to cut the grass at those angles?

I have one of the neighbor kids do it. I give him $10 a week and a glass of lemonade.

We have a lot of land And very fat people need to fit inside.

It's normal here. I haven't travelled overseas anywhere, but I've seen plenty of photos and movies and know that homes are much smaller in most of the world - especially in places where homes stand for hundreds of years. With recent wealth and a style of housing that usually gets torn down and replaced after ~60-100 years-ish, designs get bigger and better.

There are smaller homes here - but for houses they're old (for here, almost all new houses are bigger than ever) or they're apartments or mobile homes etc. More common to see older smaller homes in small towns, especially places that aren't desirable to move to for retirement or anything like that. Just tiny little towns that never grew, or once were mining towns or something and then stagnated or fizzled with no new investment. No one's going to spend $$$$$ to build a dream home in the middle of nowhere with no hospital or other services nearby.

As for them looking like "Millionaire homes," well, in major cities they're all "Millionaire," homes. This one I'm in right now was a killer deal 16 years ago @ $450k. (It was the last one in the development and they just wanted it sold so it was $50k off and no tax - another $30k savings. It's right beside a main road so we hear more traffic noise than neighbours farther up the block.) Fast forward 16 years and it's valued at ~$1.8M. So, anyone who's able to buy a home now has to be a Millionaire - or have access to that much money. Almost every single house in the region is at least $1M, and many condos. Heck, there are condo buildings downtown where the ground floor cheapest place starts at $2M. It's all nuts.

Anyways, I guess there's nothing really identifiable and there's no real harm in showing what the kitchen and living room look like. I'll snap a couple pics and share.

Last edited by goldfish21 on 01 Jun 2023, 2:48 pm, edited 2 times in total.

I hope it's a gas mower instead of electric.
It's so annoying to get the cord tangled around your feet!

It looks like some of that might be mossy rocks too, instead of grass.
I bet you love reading out there.

It's simply wonderful.

It has a nice dungeon, too. That's always very important when it comes to real estate.

Where I am (province) there are lots of tiny wartime homes which were meant to be temporary. They're close together and made quite poorly, but still go for around a million because they tend to be near the lake or by the train routes. In the downtown urban centre it's mostly rowhouses, duplexes, semis, or high density apartments also in the millions because of location location location, like London. Most people don't want land and there isn't space for new developments to build big.

People build massive cottages a couple hours north of the city in the Canadian Shield (rock / big lakes), and those are worth up to $10 or $15 million. Lots of movie stars and millionaire athletes live up there for six months a year.

We don't really have "council housing" like you do so most young people keep living at home with their parent(s) as long as possible. Rent for a 1 bedroom flat can be $2000/ month or more so it's impossible for most people to get their first place.

They build bigger where Goldfish is because you get a cross between rich Asians and rich Hollywood socialites moving to the mountains for a view. They can afford to buy the land and frankly, it's worth buying as opposed to the flat and boring land here, which costs nearly the same as my mortgage every month.

I guess there’s nothing identifiable and no real harm so here are a few pics:

Here’s a pic of the kitchen from standing by the end of the dining table:



And here’s a pic of the dining area/living room from standing over in the kitchen:



The teak furniture came from the British Consulate in Vancouver because whoever works there are morons lol back in the 1990’s a painter my dad knew had a contract to paint the walls there and they were “upgrading,” to IKEA furniture and gave the painter this set as partial payment for his work. He didn’t have space for it so sold it to my dad for $1000cdn. The tag underneath the table says it was insured for £10,000.00 when it came over on a ship from England. It’s served us well for about 30 years now and counting.

Quick photo out the back. My mom had the cement patio extended and glass awning installed a couple years ago. I dug 6” off the top of the grass a few weeks ago and hired a crew to bring in gravel/crusher dust and artificial turf - no more mowing the little lawn. Looks the most real of any fake grass I’ve ever seen.



My bedroom isn’t particularly special but it’s not exactly small - cluttered mess I know; whatever:



There’s a guest room across the hall, master bed (nice) with ensuite, and a bathroom upstairs. Den/office & washroom on the main floor, full basement games room/bar/exercise room/bathroom etc downstairs, 2 car garage stuffed with stuff. ~NONE of which I can afford - it’s my mom’s. I’m short a couple Million dollars of owning my own home lol

This is one of the houses I lived in as a student.
It was rented with four other people.
Even thirty years ago it was $500/ month each. ($2500 total)

Now it goes for $2000 / student. ($10,000 total month)

In some parts of Vancouver city proper there are mansions, but mostly even newer houses are 3-4k sf and the larges ones are in suburb cities where land is cheaper. Mostly - but there are still plenty of large houses in Vancouver, and ones with suites.. it's just way more common in the suburbs where the same or lower cost of building builds a larger house with multiple rental suites instead of a nicer house with higher end e v e r y t h i n g for finishing materials.

I suppose we have land space to a degree.. however, part of the reason everything is stupid expensive here is because there's only so much land between the ocean and the mountains to build on - and a bunch of it is, and should remain, ALR (agricultural land reserve) for local food supply. There are ever more homes being built in the mountains, but not a major sprawling city like Vancouver and it's suburbs - there isn't another large flat piece of land like that maybe anywhere in BC.

Things get built big because there are a lot of wealthy people that have moved here that like to show off their wealth with very large homes/estates. It's become a "thing," in Chinese business culture to show off your "Vancouver house," to your clients. Some local people who have made $$$$ in a generation or two like to show it off with their massive farmhouse mansions - seriously - one could take a driving/motorcycle tour of farmhouse mansions across 5 or 6 suburb cities and be absolutely gobsmacked at these places.. some of them almost don't even look real they're so "straight out of the movies," - especially when they're lit up at night. I read an article that some Chinese Billionaire's sprawling farm estate out in the valley has security drones flying around the perimeter keeping an eye on things.

As for "regular," big houses.. they're built for multi-generational Indian families and/or to have mortgage helper suites because it's almost mathematically impossible for one or two incomes to make a mortgage payment anymore. So, while we still haven't managed to get rich people on board with building more condos/apartments, there are at least multi-family houses being built that do tend to house more than just an immediate family. Some places are large enough to have 4 separate suites in the basement, then 2 floors of a family home above.

Never mind how tuition has skyrocketed, THIS is why fewer people will seek higher educations.. how the hell do students pay that kind of money while not working full time all year? Crazy. Basically have to have huge financial/housing supports from family in order to be a student these days. Either that or you graduate with more than six figures in debt. Irritating.

^
That's about the size of most houses in the UK, even new houses. In fact a lot of houses are built like that by default but people move into them, buy them and add extensions on to them to make them bigger.

I think this is an example of a larger 'rich people' house in the UK:-