When we first started shopping for places to live, Alysha commented on how desolate a lot of the neighborhoods looked. Vacant of large trees and fences, she pointed to how the homes “kind of look like prefabricated ginger bread houses that are just plopped everywhere.”
And like a weird reoccurring dream, where all the patterns repeat themselves, the walk down our street brings you by the same house again and again, except with different siding each time.
We have friends who take pride in the fact that their house is a popular wartime model. “These houses can be found all over Canada.” claims Land (that’s his name, but that’s a whole other blog entry in itself). Its cookie-cutter floor plan is fairly basic, matching functional design with ample living space, making them great and dependable houses. Their neighbors have the same one but flipped. Together they share a driveway. On the other side lives Land’s brother River (ibid.)lives in the same model, but also flipped. They actually know a lot of people with the same plan and even share ideas on modifying them. “We know one guy who turned the closet upstairs into a bathroom,” Land explains. They are considering some major renovations pretty soon.
Another popular plan is the duplex. Out of the 38 houses in our neighborhood, one is a townhouse, 18 are regular houses, and 19 are duplexes.
This one (pictured above) sits across the street from us. Our neighbor-friend Ann, who works auxiliary at Alysha’s clinic, lives there with her husband Ante. They met on the Stewart-Cassiar Highway while he was on his 3 year bike tour for Peace in Croatia and she was biking from Whitehorse to Vancouver. They use half of the duplex to live in and the other half to run their B&B. Fittingly, they call it La Bicicletta. You can read more of their story here.
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