After years of crushing mortgage payments and escalating maintenance costs, one homeowner sold her house and signed a lease on a place a few blocks away. Life has never been sweeter By Rachel Giese | Illustrations by Daniel Stolle

Our last house was a little gem. Few homes in Leslieville are stately or architecturally impressive—it’s a neighbourhood of unremarkable brick semis with the rare Victorian or Tudor flourish—and the one my partner and I owned for two years was no exception. But inside, stripped down to its simple bones, with Benjamin Moore cloud white walls and dark wood floors, a cute IKEA kitchen and mid-century decor from local vintage shops, the place had charm. We bought it for $450,000 in 2007, a deal, if not a steal, for a home on a coveted street less than a five-minute walk from all the amenities required by the middle-class hordes: good coffee, a busy playground, decent restaurants. Soon, however, our house began to make exhausting demands: the furnace needed to be replaced, then the roof; the basement felt damp in the summer humidity, and in the winter our barely insulated bedroom, with its ancient windows, was so cold we had to run a space heater through the night.

There was no money to fix any of it. Our line of credit and credit cards were maxed out. We had two comfortable incomes, but after mortgage payments, utilities, property taxes, car payments, insurance, daycare and groceries, there was little left over. We added up the sums, living expenses against income, on increasingly complicated spreadsheets—it would be years before we would be in the black. Meanwhile, the company I worked for faltered during the recession. First the frills were cut: fewer couriers, no fancy Christmas parties, no taxi chits. Then jobs; I lost mine in early 2009.

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