This is a real creamy place!

This is a beautifully updated 3 bedroom, 3 bathroom home in a much sought after Kitchener neighborhood. It boasts hardwood and ceramics on the main floor. It also has new “California Ceilings”. And, the open concept main floor has a ginormous kitchen.

The sliding doors from the dining room lead out to the hardscaped patio and fully fenced yard, with new retaining walls, succulent landscaping and a humongous shed – ample storage space for all your lawn equipment and sporting gear. The upper floor features a large master bedroom, the lower floor a fully finished basement.

$314,900

Living in Kitchener Waterloo just can’t get any better than this, can it?

Filed under: open house by Keith Marshall
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Harmony Lunch has been the Uptown iconic diner since Waterloo was just a wide spot in the road. It’s the kind of place that the old timers all have stories about. Until last Friday, I’d never been to the Harmony Lunch and wanted to see for myself why this fifties style diner is so popular.

So I called up Mike Stark, the onetime restaurant critic and general foodie.

We both had hamburgers and cokes and soaked in the naugahyde ambience of past days, long gone and best forgotten.

If you like nostalgia and diner food, you have to try this place. For me, traveling through time made me feel queasy. (Or maybe it was the food.)

Filed under: Around Kitchener Waterloo by Keith Marshall
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Three words about home staging. Don’t overdo it.

A good magician never reveals how he does his tricks. A great chef never discloses her secret recipe. And staging a home was once the domain of the homeowners and their Realtor, but not anymore. The genie is out of the bottle, the ante has been upped, and we are all better for the knowledge.

Many people enter a great house but cannot see past the 80’s wallpaper and ancient fixtures. Maybe the house is chockablock with family photos, books and a collection of beer mugs. The goal is to get your home in its most attractive and saleable condition. Good home staging helps houses sell themselves.

Of course to help us with home staging, we have professional home stagers, home and lifestyle magazines and a variety of TV shows. The problem I sometimes see is that we overdo it and send the wrong messages to the potential buyers.

“This house was obviously staged”.

That’s not a good message. People don’t want a fake house. They want houses that are real and alive. The link below is a comical look at catalog pictures and the messages they send.

http://catalogliving.net/

Filed under: advice, Buying Real Estate, just for fun by Keith Marshall
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In a generation, I predict, instead of having the two cities of Kitchener and Waterloo separated by a kilometer and a half up King Street with a low-density urban sprawl of medical buildings, hair salons and nondescript low rise office towers, the cities will be amalgamated if not by government but by real estate. We are growing together. The line on the map is fading. The retro looking sign on King Street, hidden behind an electricity pole announcing “Waterloo”, will be dwarfed by our shared, gleaming and modern urban landscape.

Another old one-time boot factory is being converted into office space. This time it’s north of Victoria Street (between the Beer Store and McDonalds), the former Collins and Aikman plant at Breithaupt and King. It’s being called “the evolution of the workplace” and the “Breithaupt Block” and when completed will provide a creative work environment for young technology companies.

This project is another positive step in revitalizing and re-urbanizing our city core. Zoning has been changed and plans are in place to continue north, up the strip.

http://www.570news.com/radio/570news/article/82532–new-life-for-old-factory

Filed under: Around Kitchener Waterloo, editorial, real estate by Keith Marshall
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My youngest daughter plays rep soccer. Over the past few years, I’ve become familiar with the roads of London, Woodstock, Oakville, Mississauga and many other smaller towns in southwestern Ontario. Yesterday, we went to London.

London is a similar size to Kitchener Waterloo Cambridge, but I don’t think I’ve seen a traffic roundabout there. In fact I don’t remember seeing a roundabout in any other Ontario town or city.

The traffic in London is bad; this summer it seems worse than ever.

Leaving Kitchener at 6pm, down Ira Needles, we quickly found the 401 after traveling through five (or was it six?) roundabouts.

On the other end of our journey, leaving the 401 in London, it was stop and go traffic (in a boring grid pattern) until we reached the field.

There was a story (link below) in the Waterloo Region Record a few days ago postulating that we might be wrong to be rushing headlong into building roundabouts – in some Canadian cities (Edmonton) they are taking them out. I haven’t been to Edmonton recently but I’ve been through a lot of Ontario towns and cities. I love driving in Waterloo region. The roundabouts are working just fine here.

http://news.therecord.com/News/Local/article/765219

Filed under: Around Kitchener Waterloo by Keith Marshall
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