Before we lived in the bizarre and rather smelly Guelph apartment, we lived in a basement apartment in Kitchener. I moved into this place the September before we were married. We found it in our local Pennysaver which we picked up in the lobby of an apartment building where we toured a tiny one-bedroom place that was going for $750. The bedroom there had enough space for a queen size bed and a piece of paper and that was about it. The basement was somewhat less than that that per month.
It was located about 10 minutes’ walk from my school (which was handy). It was about 5 minutes’ drive to the nearest grocery store and closer to 15 to the nearest grocery store that was worth the name. The south end of Kitchener is absolutely terribly laid out for anybody who doesn’t have a car.
Our landpeople (for such we called them) were a very pleasant family of four with at least one dog. The kids were both pre-school aged (around 3 and toddler). They would often have playgroup at their house which meant Amy was trying to study with between 5 and 80 3-year-olds running laps above her head. Sometime in the winter that we lived there, the toddler broke her leg and had a tiny cast on it so she would motor around with a sort of skid-THUMP skid-THUMP kind of rhythm.
For the first couple months that I lived there, I was still working a couple days a week at my co-op job and so I had Amy’s car about half time. This was fine because the driveway was big enough for about 6 cars. Our landpeople parked in their garage, my roommate parked at the bottom of the drive and I parked just ahead of him. One Thursday I left work slightly later than I had intended and was rushing back to make an afternoon class. When I went to pull into our driveway I was without options. My roommate had parked in his normal space but the landwoman’s parents had parked their van in such a way that there was nowhere for me to park. They managed to totally block out the entirety of the driveway with their Dodge Caravan. I was in a rush so I just parked at the end of our street and got an $18 parking ticket for my troubles.