I live in Toronto. Not the GTA, but Toronto proper. My area code is 416. I love my little 3-bedroom house and I love my neighbourhood.
I work with lots of people who live outside the city, in Mississauga, Brampton, Milton, Oakville, Georgetown or Burlington. When it comes to square footage, I can't compete. These folks are tossing out crazy figures, like 3000 square feet and the like, and my awesome Toronto home simply doesn't measure up. I suppose it's a choice every parent has to make: suburban home with lots of space or awesome Toronto neighbourhood home with little space. We happily chose the latter.
Without the space, we have to be extra creative when it comes to furniture, storage and general organization. Less is more, and this past week we decided our living room / dining room (it's really the same room in my home) bookshelf from Ikea had to go. If you want a brown Ikea BILLY bookcase system, let me know.
Moving the BILLY bookcase out of the house reminded me of our first bookcase. My wife and I moved into our first apartment in 1996, a bachelor apartment at Yonge and Charles Street. We didn't have a pot to piss in, so I built our first bookcase using cinder blocks and slabs of wood I managed to collect in my travels.
I always loved my cinder block bookcase, and my wife allowed it to remain our primary bookcase until we bought our first home five years later. That's when we bought the $99 BILLY bookcase from Ikea.
Here's a blurry picture of my old cinder block bookcase. I miss it.
