Housing

We conclude the series of posts about the built environment in Ottawa with some notes about houses, based mainly on those of Lower Town, more particularly the one we were staying in.

They do not seem to do our terrace houses, preferring detached, with some semis. Almost all of them just two stories, some with dormers above. Construction board, brick or stone. We did come across a small number of log cabins, some fresh out of a catalogue, some rather older and one old barn. Plenty of trees in the streets, pretty during our visit. Also plenty of small squares, maybe the result of Lower Town being a French flavoured part of town.

Most houses have a few steps up to the front door and an open porch, perhaps to help keep snow out of the front hall, perhaps because most houses have basements, if for no other reason than to house the furnace. This also means that most houses have a bit of decking across the front, providing somewhere for the numerous black squirrels to live in the winter. Hard to see how they would survive otherwise, with the nests in trees that we saw looking woefully inadequate. Many householders seemed to favour a sort of potted orange crysanthemum with which to adorn their steps (see reference 3).

The stone seems to keep quite well, with little that we saw showing any sign of weather damage. Unlike, for example, the red sandstone widely used in Edinburgh, blocks of which often lose their faces, leaving a rather unsightly scar.

We were surprised how many roofs were flat; perhaps the idea is that the snow provides insulation. Another view was that one needed to be careful as roofs were known to collapse under the weight of the stuff. Most of the pitched roofs were tiled with asphalt tiles, asphalt which looked rather like the stuff we use for shed roofs. It seemed to be a fact of life that the edges curled after a few years. Also that they needed to be replaced every 10-20 years, this being the same sort of major householder expense that re-tiling is with us. (The tops of church spires seemed to be faced with metal sheeting with a shiny white finish. Of rather Germanic appearance to my mind).

Moving inside (on which we were invited to remove our shoes), our house had underfloor heating, heating which I first learned about by being woken up by a huge roaring noise in the night. It took me some time, perhaps minutes, to work out that this was only the heating kicking in in the cool of the early morning.

Double glazed sash windows, which seem to come with detachable air conditioning units, a supply of which was to be found in a back room. Never managed to work out how one fitted the things in the summer. Some of them also had fly screens.

Entirely new bathroom taps to learn about, the important thing with the bath tap being to pull the handle, rather than turn the handle, to turn it on. Good strong shower, without all the fuss & flapdoodle that some hotels showers go in for.

Water good, much better for making tea than the stuff we get in Surrey, which went some way to compensating for the rather odd tea that they sell in Canada. Perhaps being the Laurentian Shield (proterozoic, otherwise very old compared with the stuff we get here in the UK), all their water is surface water from lakes, not pumped up from the chalky depths.

The house also had a rather large cooker and a rather large refrigerator. The cooker was similar to our own in that it had four rings on top, an oven in the middle and a drawer below. What it did not have was a simple dial with which to turn the oven on and to set its temperature. Rather, it had a very small screen and a number of function buttons, with the whole having been designed in the days when domestic appliances did not have big enough processors to support a decent user interface - with this one being rather like that of our own central heating control unit before last. No instructions to be found, even on the internet, usually good for that sort of thing, and a bit of a disaster as BH had made up a bread pudding before she found out that she could not drive the oven. Some panicking later she ended up micro-waving the thing. Not perfect, but it served.

Nothing wrong with the refrigerator, except that it took up rather a lot of space (or at least it would have in our own kitchen) and it made a lot of noise. In part, one supposes, because the compressor has to work that much harder to keep so much space cool.

Reference 1: http://www.psmv2.blogspot.co.uk/2014/10/intensification.html.

Reference 2: http://www.psmv2.blogspot.co.uk/2014/10/construction.html.

Reference 3: http://www.canadiangardening.com/plants/perennials/five-no-fail-mums-for-your-garden/a/1205.