The Power To Move You - March 2022

GREAT ESCAPES FOR MARCH BREAK KELLER WILLIAMS REAL ESTATE ASSOCIATES, BROKERAGE

INDEPENDENTLY OWNED AND OPERATED

REALTY GROUP

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he Toronto Star shared this week that “while house hunters today may be known for tapping the bank of Mom and Dad to get into Toronto’s overheated housing market, many Gen Zers plan to take a different approach for their first home purchase: co-owning with their family and friends. With affordability being an issue, and the cost of living being as high as it is, people are getting more creative.”

There is definitely a widening gap between home prices and buyer’s incomes, however many from Generation Z really want to become homeowners and still plan to buy within the next five years.

How will they be able to achieve these goals? One way is to co-own a property with family or friends.

People are being forced to be a bit more creative. Buying a property with 2-3 separate suites could be the perfect solution to help get into today’s market. Some Gen Zers, however, still plan to seek financial help from their family rather than sharing a title with them.

A recent Toronto Regional Real Estate Board report said that as of Fall 2021, 17% of first-time buyers, irrespective of age, expected to rely on gifts from friends and family for their down payment. That’s compared to 11% of buyers overall.

If you know of a Gen Z who is looking to get into the real estate market and is seeking some advice, please share our name and number. We would be glad to help them explore their options.

On the opposite side of the spectrum, we have the Baby Boomers who are looking for options as well.

Do they sell and go into a retirement home, downsize to a townhome or condo apartment, move out of the area to take advantage of their home’s equity, rent out a space in their existing home or choose another option that we commonly refer to as ‘Sell and Stay’? ‘Sell and Stay’ allows a homeowner to sell their current home, releasing the equity they have generated, and lease it back for the time frame that they would like to continue living in it. We have lots of information available to help guide you into making the best decision for you and your loved ones.

So far for 2022, the real estate market has begun in a frenzied state, with many sellers receiving multiple offers and well over-asking prices. Our prediction going forward is that we will begin to see the market start to stabilize to a more normal, balanced market as inventory begins to increase later this month.

If you, or anyone you know, is considering buying or selling this year, reach out to one of our team members today. We would be happy to provide a complimentary home evaluation and give our recommendation on how you can best navigate this ever-changing real estate market.

Best regards, Theresa Baird - Broker The Realty Group 647-298-0997

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HIGHER INTEREST RATES ARE COMING...

Are you ready?

SOLD 80 Port Street, Suite 415 in Port Credit, Mississauga

HOW OPEN CONCEPT IS DRIVING US UP THE TORN-DOWN WALL Open-plan design - Can the pandemic help

FOR SALE 19 - 1060 Walden Circle in Clarkson, Mississauga

FOR SALE 80 Port Street, Suite 510 in Port Credit, Mississauga

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SNEAK PEEK

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1 Hurontario Street in Port Credit, Mississauga

SNEAK PEEK 3563 Lake Shore Blvd West in Toronto

LIVING IN THE SUNNY SOUTH Homes available in Florida

FAMILY TRAVEL FOR MARCH BREAK Great locations to get away from it all

THE IRISH MAID The perfect St. Patrick’s Day cocktail

THERESA RECOMMENDS The many faces of Quiche

HIGHER INTEREST RATES ARE COMING...

ARE YOU READY?

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Written by Sophia Harris on March 1st, 2022 and seen on www.cbc.ca

he Bank of Canada is expected to raise its key interest rate on Wednesday.

Everything seems to be getting more expensive. Food, gas and housing prices are on the rise while paycheques are slow to keep pace. The CBC News series Priced Out explains why you’re paying more at the register and how Canadians are coping with the high cost of everything.

Over the past several months, mortgage agent Rasha Ingratta has fielded a flood of queries from clients worried about how rising interest rates will impact their mortgage payments. “People are in a panic,” said Ingratta, who works with Mortgage Intelligence in Windsor, Ontario.

“They’re thinking, ‘Oh my God,

what is the interest rate going to go up to?”

For the past two years, Canadians have enjoyed access to extremely cheap credit thanks to rock-bottom interest rates.

However, to help curb soaring inflation, many economists predict the Bank of Canada

will begin hiking its benchmark interest rate - starting with a hike of 0.25 percentage points on Wednesday. The bank’s rate influences the rate creditors charge for consumer loans and mortgages. The question now is, how high will interest rates go, and will indebted Canadians be able to handle it?

Ingratta advises her clients not to panic, because she believes any increase in mortgage rates will be slow and incremental. To help allay her clients’ fears, she set up a private Facebook page where she offers advice.

But Toronto-based bankruptcy specialist Doug Hoyes says he’s concerned about Canadians already struggling with their finances.

“I’m absolutely worried about everybody living paycheque to paycheque.” Hoyes notes that prices have climbed recently for household staples such as food and gas. So for some people, he said, a rise in rates - and therefore a hike in loan payments could tip the scales.

“How are you going to be able to increase what you have to pay on your debt when you also have to pay more for food and transportation and everything else?” said Hoyes, who works with the firm, Hoyes, Michalos & Associates.

Canadians piling on debt Canada’s inflation rate hit 5.1 per cent in January, its highest level since 1991. At the same time, Canadian household have been racking up more loans, adding $51.6 billion of debt in the third quarter of 2021, a near-record high.

Mortgages make up the lion’s share of that debt.

On top of that, the debt-todisposable income ratio is now at 177.2 per cent. That means Canadian households owed an average of $1.77 for every dollar of disposable income. Many Canadians are feeling the pinch. Of the 5,000 Canadians Angus Reid surveyed online in January, one quarter said an increase in interest rates would have a major negative impact on their household finances.

Roy Graham of Shrewsbury, Ontario, said he’s worried about the impact of rising rates on his $150,000 variable-rate home equity line of credit.

People with variable-rate mortgages or other types of debt, such as lines of credit, will likely be impacted first if the Bank of Canada raises its benchmark rate. Those with fixed-rate loans won’t experience any changes until the term of their loan expires.

Graham, a 66-year-old retired emergency response worker who lives on a fixed income, is concerned how higher debt payments will affect his already stretched budget. “Your hydro is going up, your water bills are going up, your taxation is going up, so it just compounds everything,” he said. “It’s like the straw that broke the camel’s back.”

Graham said his biggest stressor now is not knowing how high interest rates will rise. “You watch the news, you read the newspapers, you watch it online, and you just don’t know where this is going to bottom out.”

Back at Mortgage Intelligence in Windsor, Ingratta offers what may be a comforting calculation. She provides as an example a $400,000 mortgage with a 25year amortization and a variable rate of 1.45 per cent. With a 0.25 per cent rate increase, monthly payments would rise to $1,636 an increase of just $47, she said.

“When I start punching these numbers into my computer and telling [my clients], you’re paying this much, and if it should go up to this much, this is what you’re going to be paying, they’ll say something like, ‘Oh, okay, that’s not so bad.’”

But bankruptcy specialist Hoyes said he’s concerned about

potential consecutive rate hikes.

“If it is the start of a series of increases, that’s where it becomes a problem,” said Hoyes.

“You could be in for a big shock to your monthly budget.” The Bank of Canada signalled last month that interest rates will need to increase to control inflation, but it’s unknown at this point how fast rates will rise and how high they will go.

CIBC Capital Markets chief economist Avery Shenfeld predicts the Bank of Canada will hike its benchmark rate by about two percentage points over the next couple of years. But he points out that interest rates plummeted during the pandemic, so a two per cent hike shouldn’t be too much of a shock for Canadians.

“The good news is that rates aren’t really going to be any higher at the end of the day, or materially higher than they were before the pandemic,” said Shenfeld. “We’ve had a taste of very, very low interest rates and I think the economy just doesn’t need so much of that now.”

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415 - 80 Port Street, Mississauga STUNNING PORT CREDIT CONDO Rarely available corner unit on 4th floor with views of Lake Ontario. With 1,209 square feet, 2 bedrooms, 2 bathrooms, 2 balconies, 2 underground parking spots and 9ft ceilings, this open concept floor plan has it all! Upgraded kitchen offers stainless steel appliances and separate pantry for extra storage. Hardwood flooring throughout main living areas. Large primary bedroom boasts stunning floor to ceiling windows with California shutters, hardwood floors, walk-in closet with organizers and 4 piece ensuite. Don’t miss this exciting opportunity to call this wonderful port credit neighbourhood your new home!

HOW OPEN CONCEPT IS DRIVING US UP THE TORN-DOWN WALL

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Written by Mireille Silcoff on February 26th, 2022 and seen on www.thestar.com

t work and at home, open-plan design is driving up the torn-down wall.

Can the pandemic help?

It has long been said that good fences make good neighbours and, sitting in the middle of this pandemic, I am convinced that a nice solid wall might make me a better person, or at least one who loses her temper with her children less often. Over the last

two-plus years - with me working from home, and my daughters often schooling from home, and everything happening in this home - have on occasion fantasized about kicking in a wall. If only I had a wall to kick in. Instead, I have one of those

homes you can see a good way through. It came this way when I moved here, the openness listed as a feature, not a plane for a constantly rolling tumbleweed of kitchen, dining-area and hallway mess, a mess sans frontières.

For quite some time now, it has been taken as a done deal that what we all want in our built spaces is open-plan everything. But I don’t know a single person who has not in some way suffered from open architecture during the last couple of years.

There are the condo dwellers who’ve covered glass curtain walls with cardboard to stop the oppressive sun that didn’t bother them when they were out of the house most the day; the quarantining families all wearing headphones inside; the people who rent in open offices who now could not go there. It takes only one day of remote work from the closet to realize that the design of your home is not as “multipurpose” as you thought.

It probably takes less to acknowledge, if you are a whitecollar worker, that your focus might be better in the closet than in the noisy, wall-less office you once commuted to daily.

The high era of the open interior, it seems safe to say, is drawing to a close. There is considerable data showing that open offices make workers sick more often.

Add in our looming reality of getting on with life, COVID notwithstanding, and it’s easy to imagine that the workplace will be the first place to change. In 2017, one survey estimated that 68 per cent of American offices had low or no separation between workers. The increasingly common practice of “hot desking” employees - creating a musical-chairs office where nobody has their own personal

real estate - erodes the boundaries further. It goes beyond health concerns. Long before the pandemic hit, millions of office workers were in a kind of space-induced existential crisis, living with a humming, ragetinged frustration brought on by severely unprivate workplaces that literally gave them nowhere to hang their hat.

And so, to our era of the Great Resignation. After two years of remote work, the numbers of employees who say they won’t go back to their offices are absolutely mind-blowing. An Ipsos poll published last year had more than a third of office workers saying they would quit if they were forced to return full time. Another had 49 per cent of adults born after 1980 responding that they’d consider quitting. Still another survey, from Harvard Business School, found that an astounding 81 per cent of people who have been working from home through the

pandemic want either a hybrid schedule or not to return at all.

Given all the problems of the contemporary office - perpetual cutbacks, ever intensifying work, soul-destroying commutes, toxic bosses - it feels wrong to lay this mass aversion at the feet of bad office design. But to blame design is also not without reason, because the plan of a space holds so many of its hopes and dreams, and also so many of its silent prejudices and imposed norms. Illness is one of the best BS detectors, and in a pandemic era, the incongruences seem more exposed than ever.

The problematic open office of today was largely forged in the 1990s.

Certainly, there were earlier forms of openconcept work spaces: the midcentury German Burolandschaft (“office landscape”), or American furniture firm Herman Miller, with its 1960s idea of the ergonomic “Action Office.”

But it was in the last decade of the 20th century, on the sprawling campuses of Silicon Valley, and in new media companies in cities like Manhattan and Toronto that “open plan” was taken up with a kind of countercultural religious zeal.

Here, the chancy, the casual, turned aspirational, and “spontaneous collaboration” and “serendipitous encounters” became creed - as if unfettered communication was the primary thing knowledge workers needed to be healthy and productive.

The “way to increase communication,” wrote Malcolm Gladwell in an enthusiastic article on “the new office” published in “The

New Yorker” in 2000, “is to have as few private offices as possible.

The idea is to exchange private space for public space.”

From the start, though, openplan offices were disliked by the people who had to work in them. A famous example is the hubristic experiment undertaken by the ad agency Chiat/Day in the 1990s. Jay Chiat, whose agency made some of modern advertising’s most memorable moments, from the Energizer Bunny ads to Apple’s “1984” commercial, apparently had an epiphany while skiing in Telluride. The office of the future would not only be paperless, but also deskless and with very few walls. Two bureaus were designed, one by architect Gaetano Pesce in Manhattan, and another in a Frank Gehry building shaped like a giant set of black binoculars on Venice Beach, the building that now houses Google’s L.A. office.

In Pesce’s extremely whimsical Manhattan office, meeting zones had employees sitting in repurposed Tilt-A-Whirl cars with clients. Employees spoke of roaming around looking for their collaborators for hours, or of hiding in toilets to take private calls. A tribal territorialism for the few enclosed meeting rooms emerged, with teams arriving at the office at 6 a.m. to set up camp. Chiat would do walkabouts to break up these “nests,” convinced that keeping people unanchored would lead to peak creativity. Often, staff ended up just working from home. Many used their car trunks as filing cabinets. In 2019, the writer and former Chiat/ Day director Shalom Auslander told NPR’s “Planet Money” that working in the Manhattan office was “like sitting inside of a migraine.”

During the early aughts, when researching her influential book “Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can’t Stop Talking,” Susan Cain travelled to Silicon Valley, a haven for both the introverted types she was studying and the new hyper open-concept offices laying waste to the sectioned floor plan.

“And literally the first thing that happened is everyone started whispering to me about how much they hated their open offices, how corrosive they were to productivity,” Cain recalls.

“Back then, everyone putting in open offices had this idea that they would have the same creative energy as a café,” she says.

“But an open office plan is nothing like a café, where you have the social freedom to interact or not, to leave if it’s too noisy, to not be evaluated by someone

monitoring what you are doing.”

Yet open offices were an orthodoxy that you could not speak out against. Executives who wished to hang onto enclosed offices were seen, Cain says, as unenlightened. “As if wanting to have privacy was an act of unseemly privilege rather than a basic need of all humans.”

It’s easy to understand why open offices spread so widely. They are cheaper to build, and can expand or contract with a company’s changing situation. But the productivity piece - why so many North American companies believed open offices to be more efficient - is harder to get one’s head around. It doesn’t take a specialized genius to scan a pen of office workers wearing noise-cancelling headphones, or pretending their AirPod ear buds are on, to figure that maybe the

open office’s engineered sociability has nurtured a less social workplace. Indeed, when firms switched to open offices, faceto-face interactions were found to decrease by 70 per cent, according to a 2018 paper

by Harvard Business School p rofessors Ethan Bernstein and Stephen Turban. With the physical walls gone, workers needed to erect boundaries in other ways, such as employing selective deafness or non-verbal cues, like looking at your computer screen in a very steely way with the hood of your sweatshirt up. It’s counterintuitive, but in the open office people had to become more actively introverted just so they could work.

In the esthetics of how we like to live, there are eras defined by openness and others by contraction - and, as with two sides of a coin, one always backs the other.

That our present iteration of the open-plan interior came together in the 1990s, a decade of great expansion and flow, is no coincidence. The ’90s were the era of NAFTA, of the EU and the euro, of the rise of the boundless World Wide Web. People had laptops and cellphones and there were cheaper-than-ever plane tickets, and suddenly it seemed everything was portable, including coffee, which now came in ingeniously jacketed and lidded cups designed, like never before, for easiest transport. Gay marriage was set to take off, and Nelson Mandela was the president of South Africa. Breaking barriers was, in many ways, the spirit of the age, and its architectural expression was an almost preening openness.

There seems no great leap between the dismantling of the Iron Curtain and the mainstream rise of the glass curtain, between Ronald Reagan’s “Mr.

Gorbachev, tear down this wall!” and, two decades later, HGTV’s Property Brothers tearing down every dividing wall. Today, you’d be hard pressed to find a new or newly renovated house or condo that is not open concept. Newbuild houses in the 21st century are much bigger than they used to be, but they are also designed with fewer types of rooms. This has largely been the doing of the “great room” - the kitchen enlarged and blown out into both dining room and living room, so that it eats most of the home, save the areas kept for sleeping and toilet. After the year 2000, these big, often echoing spaces, often punctuated by a granite- or marble-topped kitchen island, became ubiquitous. Contemporary condo interiors would literally be impossible without this floor plan, which like the open office, is sold as a light-filled, free and creative way to live - the unbuttoned polo to the separated house’s stuffed shirt.

The question is whether an open-plan home was ever really freeing - especially for women, its target market from its earliest days. In the early 20th century, before European architects like Mies van der Rohe made high-concept, low-comfort glass boxes synonymous with modernism, the American architect Frank Lloyd Wright presented open-home plans in Ladies’ Home Journal. That Wright (whose “Prairie Style” homes were templates for the later American suburban styles of the ranch house and the split level) and dozens of other American architects chose to publish architectural floor plans in a women’s magazine is no mistake.

Women have always been decision makers when it comes to the home. And by midcentury, as middle-class houses gave up butler’s pantries and domestic

help for automatic dishwashers and electric ranges, the practical branding of the open plan coalesced into one familiar line: that these homes were good for mothers, who, even when toiling in the kitchen could have unimpeded views of their children.

It’s amazing that more than a century later, this is still the common refrain when showing open-plan homes, be it 800 square feet of low-income housing or the most ginormous new McMansion. As if monitoring children’s homework and wrestling matches while scrubbing pan grease is every parent’s version of Having It All. I get it. I’m a working solo mom.

Like millions of Canadians, I have no choice but to multi-task most of my hours. But the fact that so many of us have come to see this architecture where labour is front and centre as luxury says something about our age. For all its claims of clean-lined harmonious living, the open-plan home melds work and play in one unending grind.

Think about it. The other line often given about open home layouts is that they are “great for entertaining.” But just who is entertaining so much? And great for whom? The guests, who are expected to eat and drink while watching their host cook and clean? Or the host, who works in full display of people having fun?

The key word here is display, a practice that in recent years has become situated into our daily living in some unprecedented ways. For centuries, a durable home trut in Western architecture was that money bought privacy. The rich had hedges and private baths and corner offices with heavy oak doors. It was those several class

rungs below who were forced to do much of their daily living in constant view of others. But the open-plan era, where we all live our private lives in an increasingly public manner, has caused a flip-flop. And now the problems of the poor have not only been accepted by the wealthy, they’ve been deemed fashionable.

The most incredible example I’ve found of this is in a circa 2016 trend in high-end Toronto residences, where renovators were converting master bedrooms to include visible ensuite toilets, effectively killing the last taboo in what people might decently do in front of others. Could this fashion for the reveal go any further than rich people pooping in the open in the name of enlightened style?

There is such thing as a built overshare. I will never forget taking my four-year-old to see her father’s new office in Toronto’s Liberty Village circa 2015, where my ex-husband was hired to run a division of an achingly hip media company. Seeing her father’s office, a broiling all-glass cube stuck in the middle of an unenclosed room, she asked, “Does Dada work in an aquarium? Or is it a stage?”

The answer was kind of both.

Our decisions over what parts of our lives to live full-frontal have been revised so much in the past few years, it’s hard to recall that there was a time not very long ago that taking a phone call in a restaurant felt like a rude leak between our interior and exterior lives. Exhibitionism and non-privacy are so much the norm nowadays that many of us, however reluctantly, suffer from the feeling that an experience is only fully realized once publicly consumed, like a freshly baked sourdough loaf on Instagram.

Given that our century thus far has been so willingly exposed, so fixated on transparency, is it any wonder so much of its resulting architecture has been erected in sheer glass? Twenty years ago, I wrote about an architect in Houston, Texas, who had designed a low-income housing project that was practically all window. “Why should an invisible group of people choose to live behind walls rather than reveal their lives?” he asked, obnoxiously. Whatever one’s response, these days, given size constraints, there is “no choice” but to go with open plan, and so privileged concepts like “flow” trickle into places where the dignity of basic privacy might be better placed.

Things can only get so open until something like the opposite becomes desirable. And now, COVID may have helped tip the balance.

After two years of lockdowns, it’s no exaggeration to write that we are living in an increasingly hunkered era. Just as populist political trends like Brexit and America First have large segments seeking comfort in isolationist, border-tightening ideas, most new home trends contain some kind of studied snugness, from obsessively cosy Millennial fads like hygge to the cluttered, Aladdin’s cave maximalism evident in this year’s trendiest shelter magazines. The style vernacular is moving away from unfettered one-world airiness. “Transparency” feels like yesterday’s buzzword. In an age where even the air can infect us, we talk more about setting healthy boundaries.

Even pre-pandemic we were starting to hear about “broken plan”

offices with more divisions and about plug-and-play “walkin furniture,” such as felted phone booths and “meeting dens.” Since her book’s publication a decade ago, Cain has consulted with companies like Steelcase, the largest manufacturer of office systems in America, to create built solutions for offices that have become, in her words, “too extroverted” in their design. These are small signs of transition for workplace architecture, but they point to an increased understanding that workplaces need not just provide an architecture of inspiration, but also one of plain old shelter.

Residential design is seeing a similar shift. For the past two years running, the American Institute of Architects’ annual survey found double-digit declines in interest in open layouts. Lately, some designers - maybe even the same ones who were doing those insane bathrooms - have begun playing with enclosure, like great room kitchens containing a walled off “messy” or “work” zone, essentially, the return of the pantry.

As for my modest home, I have a single kitchen wall going up in the spring. I got the number of a builder from my neighbour, who spent all of 2019 pulling down every wall on his ground floor so that the light could get all the way through, and then weathered the pandemic with the blinds closed tight, because his family was home all the time, and everyone could see into his house.

When the builder came to my place she stood in her big boots and said my rooms would feel small with dividing walls, and didn’t I love being able to see my kids when I was making dinner? I answered that I love my children very much. But that given the shape of my life, I’ll be able to love them better in a small room - with a wall.

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19 - 1060 Walden Circle, Mississauga SOUTH MISSISSAUGA BEAUTY! This 1,945 square foot, 3 bedroom, 3 bathroom townhouse at Walden Circle in Clarkson Village is truly the one you’ve been waiting for. As you walk through the spacious rooms and well laid-out floor plan, you can’t help but want it. Within walking distance to Clarkson GO, restaurants, banking, stores and so much more in the village. You will rarely have to leave South Mississauga to access everything you need. As a resident you have a membership at the Walden Club.

According to the founder of Butler Mortgage, it’s about time and he believes it’s going to happen.

Monumental home equity gains have persuaded buyers in the market not to sell the homes they live in and instead finance their new purchases using existing home equity.

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“They’re going to do something to prevent people from acquiring or retaining rental properties,” Ron Butler surmised. “It used

510 - 80 Port Street, Mississauga ONE OF A KIND CONDO IN PORT CREDIT This truly custom, south-facing 2 plus 1 bedroom suite features lots of upgrades including custom drapery, granite countertops, hardwood flooring, stainless steel appliances and closet organizers.

Featuring spectacular, unobstructed lake views from all living areas and 2 separate balconies. Includes 2 premium parking spaces and a locker. Located in the trendy village of Port Credit and close to all amenites and transit. Call us now to book a private showing.

SNEAK PEEK

1 Hurontario Street, Mississauga GORGEOUS CUSTOM DESIGNED CONDO Beautiful, 1 bedroom lake view suite at Northshore in Port Credit. Spacious corner suite layout with 2 bathrooms, floor to ceiling windows, captivating city/lake/sunset views. $15,000 in quality upgrades. Exceptional value with 904 square feet, 9ft ceilings, hardwood floors, granite and marble countertops, pocket door, walk-in closet and 2 walkouts to large balcony.

If you’d like more information before we go live on MLS don’t hesitate to call our team at 647-298-0997.

SNEAK PEEK

3563 Lake Shore Blvd West in Toronto LOOK NO FURTHER THAN THIS FOR THE PERFECT HOME This gorgeous south facing suite is located in the seven storey, award-winning Watermark building.

Conveniece at its best with Starbucks, TD Bank, TTC, Shoppers Drug Mart, grocery stores, pubs, The Beer Store, the Long Branch GO station and so much more at your doorstep. A short distance to the airport and downtown. Stunning city and lake views from the rooftop patio.

If you’d like more information before we go live on MLS don’t hesitate to call our team at 647-298-0997.

Living in the Sunny South Thinking of moving to Florida? Here are several homes that the Realty Group have available.

Property Listings Courtesy of John R Wood Properties

17th Street Southwest in Naples - Estate living at it’s best! Come enjoy your own private oasis with a preserve setting in this golden gates estates home. This fabulous 3 bedroom with 2 full bathroom home with 2 car attached garage sits on 2.27 acres. The long driveway with side pull around offers privacy and the fenced in yard is perfect for kids or your pets. New roof in 2018, new tankless hot water heater 2021, newer A/C unit 2019, and accordion shutters. Features include kitchen island, breakfast bar, oversized owner’s suite with sitting area, and fantastic spacious split bedroom. Floorplan is open and inviting and offers a formal living room and separate family room.

The screened in lanai with covered seating overlooks the preserve and is perfect for entertaining or enjoying your morning cup of coffee. This sought after location is perfect for the owner who wants a tranquil setting, space to garden or create your own peaceful sanctuary. The owner has left many trees in the backyard and on the acreage feels like you are so close but yet so far away.

So many possibilities at this home for the buyer who has the vision.

Falling Leaf Drive in Estero - Enjoy this great room Heron floor plan with 2 bedrooms, den, 2 full bathrooms, and two car garage. Nestled on a quiet Street with tranquil lake and preserve views.

Features include tile on diagonal in all living areas, decorative tile accents, plantation shutters, tray ceilings with crown molding, natural gas cooking, new electric and accordion shutters. Stainless steel appliances, granite countertop and tumbled stone backsplash in kitchen and so much more.

New roof 2019, newly refinished resort style saltwater pool and spa 2021. New brick paver lanai 2021, new interior paint 2020. AC 2015, pool heater 2017, pool pump 2018, and natural gas stove and gas water heater. Home has neutral colors throughout and easy to make your own. Come live the lifestyle in Shadow Wood with three optional championship golf courses, fitness center, tennis, Commons Club fitness, beach club, Rookery restaurant, cultural meeting room and pickleball.

Minutes away from Southwest Florida International Airport and 9.4 miles to beach.

FAMILY TRAVEL FOR MARCH BREAK

By 8 Great Escapes Article and photos seen on https://www.frommers.com/slideshows/831434-family-travel-ideas-for-canadians-for-march-break

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he kids are out of school for one precious week, and you want to take advantage of every day of it to show them a bit of the world. Where to begin? Whether you want to head somewhere warm or explore what our vast country has to offer, we have suggestions to help you choose a memorable family vacation.

Check in to a Québec ice hotel What does an “ice hotel” look like? Picture 15,000 tonnes (more than 33 million pounds) of snow and 500 tonnes (approximately 1.1 million pounds) of ice, showcasing a new architectural design each year. Quebec City and now Montreal are the only two places in North America where you and the kids can explore (or spend the night) at one of these magical creations until they melt, of course.

The original ice hotel in Québec City is just ten minutes away from downtown. Entrance allows you to tour the property from 10am to 8pm; if you arrive after that the price is only C$13 as the sleeping quarters are off limits.

And, yes, people really spend the night. There are 21 basic rooms and 15 individually designed

suites that offer a themed decor, all with a queen-sized mattress on a block of ice. Guests get a Nordic sleeping bag to keep them warm, up to -40 degrees Celsius - plenty cozy when the interior room temperature averages a balmy -5 degrees Celsius.

Things everybody can enjoy are the exquisite Ice Chandelier, the Ice Chapel (there are 20 weddings in an average year), Ice Slide (for kids of all ages), the Ice Café, and the Ice Bar, where the signature cocktail (ice cider and vodka) is served in a flute chiselled from ice. Should there be a naysayer travelling with you who just can’t take the cold, there’s a heated pavilion, including a restaurant, just next door.

Montreal’s Snow Village on IleSte-Helene (Parc Jean Drapeau metro) has a slightly smaller hotel with 15 standard rooms

and 10 suites. While it lacks a few of the features of its counterpart in Québec City, it also offers the chance to sleep in an Inuit -style igloo, and gaze at an ice replica of Montreal.

Take on the surf in Tofino A late winter storm rages at its peak. Amidst tempestuous winds, ocean waves as high as six metres (20 feet) smash the beach, white spray lashing against jagged headlands and huge logs careening into the sand. It’s awe-inspiring, a total contrast to the image of serene natural beauty that draws visitors to Tofino the rest of the year. Here, in this laid-back town of 1,600 on the west coast of Vancouver Island, facing the open Pacific Ocean, stormwatching has become a major attraction. In March you can catch the last of the big winter

Interior of Québec City’s Hotel de Glace

by Xavier Dachez

storms, donning a yellow slicker to get outdoors and see some amazingly fierce weather.

The lavish Wickaninnish Inn started the trend in the late 1990s, and boasts some of the best views. Two more wellregarded resorts await in nearby Cox Bay, only a tad less luxurious.

Long Beach Lodge Resort (with its cottages equipped with fireplaces and hot tubs) and Pacific Sands Beach Resort (with its luxury beachfront villas) both offer panoramic ocean views.

Want to get a real close-up look? Outside magazine hailed Tofino as “the best surf town in North America” in 2010. It gets amazingly consistent big waves, lots of great beaches for beginners, and water temperatures hold steady year-round at 10°C (50°F) along Tofino’s 35 km (22 miles) of coastline.

Before you can carve waves on spacious Long Beach, or under

rated Cox Beach, you’ll want some cold-water gear. A number of businesses have sprung up to address the needs of surfers, including Pacific Surf School, which offers lessons and camps for beginners, plus rentals and gear sales (private lessons are also available). Live to Surf (www. livetosurf.com) is Tofino’s oldest surf shop and has the largest selection of new and used boards, and offers lessons and advice on local beaches. Surf Sister caters exclusively to female surfers.

Spend a week exploring Hogtown Toronto definitely offers plenty of fun for kids of all ages, from the amazing delights of the Science Centre to the imposing dinosaurs at the Royal Ontario Museum.

Even getting around town can be a treat - a ride at the front of a subway or streetcar can keep little ones amused for a surprisingly long time. And you’ll want to check out all of it - many attractions have special March Break programming for kids. The Ontario

Science Centre has been delighting young and old with its interactive exhibits - more than 800 of them, spread throughout 10 halls - of technology, biology, and physics since 1969. You could literally spend the whole day here (and your kids, who will be having a blast, might insist on it). KidsPark is a learning center and playground where junior Einsteins eight and under can build a roller coaster, cook a meal, or explore the mysteries of water. Older kids can test their skills in the Sport Hall; wander through a real, live rain forest; or go on a virtual airplane flight.

Imaginative kids get a lot out of this, Toronto’s only castle, Casa Loma. Adults can soak up the palatial design and furnishings while adventurous little ones investigate the stables, secret passages, and 244m (800-ft.) tunnel.

At the Royal Ontario Museum, kids can’t enough of the cav-

ernous place - especially the dinosaurs. There are 50 dino specimens, including 25 fully mounted skeletons, representing 120 different types of dinosaurs.

Gordo, the museum’s 27m (90ft.) Barosaurus skeleton, is the largest dinosaur on permanent display in Canada. Videos and other interactive displays provide helpful and fun background.

Kids and families get the deluxe treatment at Harbourfront Centre, with programming and events geared specifically to them year-round. HarbourKIDS is an ongoing program of indoor and outdoor fun, including free movies, skating (both ice and, inside, on skateboards), arts and crafts, and sports activities. The Natrel ice rink, right next to the lake, is Toronto’s largest outdoor rink and there’s good hot chocolate in the adjoining Lakeside Eats café.

Everglades National Park in Florida by frommers.com community

Explore the Everglades river of grass Only 65km from the Miami airport, The Everglades is a strange ecosystem: a drawling grassy river that’s rarely more than kneedeep, but spreads some 65km wide, harboring an exotic population of manatees, hawksbill turtles, water moccasins, coral snakes, panthers, armadillos, muskrats, opossums, river otters, herons and egrets. It’s the only place in the world where alligators and crocodiles live side by side. There’s nothing like it anywhere else - and it might not be here much longer, given the encroaching development in southern Florida. Bring the kids here now, particularly during the March dry season, to dip a paddle into this River of Grass while it still flows. While you can stick to dry land - driving or biking on the paved park roads, or walking \short nature trails through jungle-like patches of forest the whole point of this place is

that it isn’t dry land. What you really want is to feel the sway and lap of the park’s waters, the lazy grace of its fluid meander through mangroves and cypresses and sawgrass prairies.

Rent canoes at the Gulf Coast Visitor Center, on FL 29 in Everglades City, or the Flamingo Lodge by the Flamingo Visitor Center, at the end of S.R. 9336 at the southern tip of the park.

In a canoe you’ll be incredibly close to the water level, casually coexisting with gators and birds as if you’re part of their natural environment.

Take a walk through Great Smoky Mountains National Park You and your family can actually find peace and solitude in America’s most-visited park, Frommer’s choice for best family destination for 2012. With some 520,000 acres, the Great Smoky Mountains National Park, which straddles western North Carolina

and eastern Tennessee, is one big, welcoming tent. You and your family can cocoon yourselves in true wilderness, hike a trail in utter silence, and camp out in the hush of a hardwood forest - all in spite of the fact that the Great Smoky National Park is visited by eight to 10 million people a year.

Yes, if you visit in the summer high season you will at times feel like a salmon on a spawning run, with Grand Caravans clogging the roads and Dolly Parton theme parks dialing up the cornpone, but in early spring daytime temperatures can crack 20 degrees Celsius at lower elevations and visitor levels are half the summertime peak. Head to the park’s highest peak, Clingman’s Dome, soaring to 6,600 feet above sea level. Angle for fish in trout-rich streams, lakes, and rivers. Reach out and touch the stars on a blueblack night in one of the park’s 10 developed campgrounds.

Akumal is home to sea turtles from may through July

True beauty is all around, from the sweeping curves of the Blue Ridge Highway to the sparkle of the sun on a burbling mountain stream. Climb the spiraling roads by car or put your two feet on the ground and hit the leaf-strewn Appalachian Trail. Carolina pines scent the air, and scarlet rhododendrons dot the hills.

Listen to the concert of leaves fluttering in the breeze. You will be doing what untold folks have done before you - from Cherokee warriors to coonskin-clad pioneers - and it will feel fresh and new. And when the swirling silver mist crowns the mossy peaks, you’ll understand why these smoky heights continue to fascinate, as they have for untold centuries.

Take your pick of some of the Caribbean’s best beaches in Antigua Once, the British Colony of Antigua was known for its sugar plantations; today it’s an inde-

pendent nation known for a different kind of sugar - the fine white sand of its myriad beaches.

Locals boast that Antigua has a different beach for every day of the year. Of course that’s an exaggeration, but Antigua’s indented coastline is fringed like a sea anemone with little bays and outlying coral reefs, and nearly every one of them protects a sandy beach.

This is the sort of idyllic vacation spot you expect the Caribbean to offer, and it’s worth experiencing it at least once. Antigua is an expensive island, with small, exclusive inns rather than high-rise package-tour resort complexes, but just about any hotel you choose will have doors opening right onto the ocean and sand.

Usually vacationers plunk themselves down at the beach by their hotel and never move; there aren’t many sightseeing attractions on Antigua

Shoreline along Antigua

by Anne Ackermann

to lure you from your hotel - not unless your children are Master and Commander fanatics who are keen to tour the restored Napoleonic-era dockyards 18km (11 miles) southeast of the capital, St. John’s.

However, with such a wealth of beaches so close together, it’s fun to sample each one’s distinct character. Dickenson Bay, in the northwest - the side of the island with higher winds, breaking waves, and dramatic scenery - is favored by families with young children for its wide strip of powder-fine sand and calm turquoise waters. The swimming is quite safe, and all the amenities you need are close at hand - you can rent watersports equipment at the Halcyon Cove Hotel and slip inside for drinks and snacks at casual restaurants nearby.

If you’ve got snorkelers in your group, just north of Dickenson Bay is Paradise Reef, a 1.6kmlong (1-mile) coral garden. On the more exclusive southern

coast, it’s worth a drive to gaze upon the strikingly blue waters of Carlisle Bay: Against a backdrop of coconut groves, two long beaches extend from a bluff, and you can actually tell where the calm Caribbean waters meet the more turbulent Atlantic. East of here, at Half Moon Bay, you can see that Atlantic surf kicking up, and watch windsurfers skim the waters out past its reef; the reef itself protects the waters nearer shore, making it good for a family swim.

Follow the trail of Tin Tin in Belgium Steven Spielberg’s film The Adventures of Tintin introduced North American audiences to Belgium’s third most-loved export - beer and chocolate bein numbers one and two.

In Spielberg’s film (a blend of several original Tintin stories) author/artist Hergé’s globe-trotting hero Tintin and his canine sidekick Snowy tumble through

a series of adventures that are part Indiana Jones, part Pirates of the Caribbean. In the books, Tintin and Snowy visit the Congo, Tibet, China, Australia, the United States, the Soviet Union (Russia), South America, the Arabian Desert and outer space. But the journey for real fans begins in Brussels, which is a family - and budget-friendly introduction to Tintin’s far-flung adventures.

The Belgian Comic Strip Centre, a five-minute walk from the Grand-Place, is a great way to begin to explore the birth of Tintin and the back story of his Belgian born artist/author creator, Hergé. The Centre, housed in a grand old art nouveau building, shows revolving exhibitions of Belgian comic strip history but always has something to delight Tintin fans such as the original paint pans and pencils Hergé used to bring his heroes to life and a life-sized Tintin astronaut statue. The Musée Hergé located in the Brussels suburb of Louvain-

la-Neuve is a must for die-hard Tintinites. Although it’s a trek to get here, fans of the original series and older children and teens won’t want to miss the most comprehensive collection of Tintin-related art and artifacts in the world. The exhibits, including original art and scale models of ships, rockets and local flora and fauna that the artist used to imagine Tintin’s world travels, range over multiple floors.

The Hotel Amigo located steps behind the Grand-Place is one of Brussels’ most loved five-star hotels with staff and service that rival the Four Seasons. It’s also a Tintin lover’s dream with three new Tintin-themed deluxe rooms (one complete with its own rocket to the moon) and one deluxe Tintin suite that even has an electronic version of Marlinspike Hall’s butler answering the room phone

Tintin mural celebrating the opening of “The Adventures of Tintin” movie in Brussels, Belgium

(rooms start at ¬319, the suite is tagged at €1,150 per night).

The family package (¬293 per night in a classic room) offers kids’ rooms free, a 50% discount on food for children under twelve, admission to the Hergé Museum for the whole family, a Snowy plush doll, a Tintin walking map and interactive Tintin games and movies on PSP and Wii for each family room.

The

Irish Maid The Perfect St. Patrick’s Day Cocktail

By D. Durand Worthey. Article and photos seen on www.awortheyread.com updated March 4th, 2021

This festive drink known as the Irish Maid is the perfect St. Paddy’s Day cocktail. It is light, refreshing, bright, and twinkles like the Emerald Isle itself. This St. Patrick’s Day, ditch the green beer for this sophisticated grown-up drink. Cheers!

This St. Patrick’s Day cocktail requires just five ingredients to make. Give it a try, and sip away on a refreshing and delicious boozy cocktail. This drink is also fantastic for making for parties if you are planning a party!

INGREDIENTS 2 ounces Jameson Whiskey Casemates or Black 3 slices of cucumber 0.5 ounce Elderflower Liqueur 0.75 ounce Fresh Lemon Juice 0.75-ounce Simple Syrup with a drop of honey (the honey is optional) Ice Cubes Type of Glass: A standard whiskey or rocks glass METHOD 1) Into a shaking tin drop in two (2) slices of cucumber, using a muddler mash cucumbers.

2) Add whiskey, Elderflower liqueur, lemon juice, simple syrup, and lots of ice.

3) Shake vigorously for 30 seconds.

4) Strain into a rocks glass filled with ice.

5) Garnish with a wheel of fresh cucumber.

6) Serve.

Drink responsibly, and never drink and drive.

The Many Faces of Quiche

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As seen on www.cookingclassy.com on March 23rd, 2021

y favourite Quiche recipe! It’s made with a buttery, crispy and flaky pie crust along with a rich egg filling and some delicious mix-ins including ham, cheese and herbs! It’s perfect for weekends and holidays.

What is Quiche? It is a French tart made with a simple pastry crust (with flour, butter and water) that is filled with a savory egg custard. If often includes veggies, meats, seafood, cheese or herbs mixed in as well. It’s a classic timeless recipe and it always makes for an impressive brunch (or lunch). You’ll love leftovers too!

This ham and cheese version is one of my favourites but the mix-in options are endless. You can just replace the ham with 2 cups of other fillings of your choice. Just stick with the base custard recipe: 5 eggs to 1 1/4 cups heavy cream. You can also use half and half in place of cream but it’s not quite as rich and the crust doesn’t seem to stay as crisp.

Frittata vs. Quiche A frittata is an egg based dish similar to an omelette and has no crust. Generally frittatas are filled with pre-cooked vegetables and they’re started cooking on the stovetop until eggs are set on the bottom then finished in the oven.

A quiche has a crust and is usually richer and less eggy than a frittata (though the quiches I make still tend to err on the side of eggy, I prefer the flavor and texture this way). It is completely oven baked.

Variations There are so many ways to make it. Here are a few of the most popular options. Omit the ham then stir in one of these options into the egg mixture instead.

Quiche Lorraine: Cook 8 oz bacon until crisp, drain then chop. Also add 1/8 tsp nutmeg to recipe.

Spinach Quiche: Defrost 1 (10 oz) bag spinach. Ring dry to remove excess liquid.

Broccoli or Asparagus Quiche: Use 2 cups small chopped steamed broccoli or asparagus.

Mushroom Quiche: Saute 8 oz sliced mushrooms in butter or olive oil until shrunken and golden brown.

Make it Crustless To make a crustless quiche simply omit the crust from the recipe. Spray the pie dish with non-stick cooking spray. Bake 350 for about 35 minutes or until center is just set.

Use a Store-Bought Crust For an easy quiche recipe you can use a store-bought, frozen deep-dish pie crust. If doing so thaw 10 minutes. Pierce bottom and sides all over with a fork. Bake in preheated 400 degree oven for 10 minutes until dry (seal up an cracks with a mixture of 1 Tbsp water 1 Tbsp flour, bake a minute longer).

Reduce custard mixture to 1 cup heavy cream and 4 large eggs. Bake with filling at 350 degrees.

Reduce bake time by about 5 minutes or so.

Quiche Recipe Ingredients All-purpose flour: I prefer unbleached all-purpose flour as it has a better flavor than bleached.

Granulated sugar: This helps tenderize and brown the crust. Only a hint is needed.

Salt: The crust has a decent amount but you can definitely reduce slightly as desired.

Unsalted butter: We use plenty of this for a rich and buttery pie crust.

Ice water: Making sure the water is super cold is a must. It helps keep the butter cold, in turn it doesn’t melt and you end with a flakier pie crust.

Eggs: Pasture raised eggs are best (and it’s a better quality of life for the chickens who lay them as well).

Heavy cream: Whipping cream works great as well.

Ham: You can use leftover ham from a ham roast, ham steak, thickcut deli ham, or pre-cut cubed ham.

Shredded cheese: Cheddar, swiss, or gruyere are great choices here.

Green onions: If you want a milder flavor only use the greens for slightly bolder flavor also include the whites (which is what I do).

Parsley: This just adds a hint of extra flavor. You can omit if you don’t have any on hand.

Salt and pepper: Season to taste.

How to Make Quiche Crust Whisk dry ingredients: In a medium mixing bowl whisk together flour, sugar and salt. Cut in butter: Add butter and using a pastry cutter cut butter into flour until it resembles coarse meal with some slightly larger clumps of butter throughout.

Toss in water: Drizzle in water 1 Tbsp at a time, tossing and mixing after each addition, and adding just enough water until mixture is just moistened enough (when pressed together with your hand it should hold together).

Shape dough into disk, chill: Dump mixture onto a clean work surface then press together well and shape into a 6-inch disk, cover and chill 1 hour in fridge.

Roll out dough, transfer to pie dish: Roll chilled dough out onto a floured surface to about a 13-inch round. Roll and wrap dough around a rolling pin then transfer to a 9 to 9 1/2-inch deep dish pie pan.

Shape into pan: Unroll dough into pan then shape into pan. Trim uneven edges while leaving about 1-inch overhang, fold overhang underneath. Decorate edges as desired.

Chill: Freeze dough for 20 minutes or refrigerate for 1 hour. Meanwhile move oven rack one level below center preheat oven to 350 degrees.

Cover crust, fill with weights: Cover crust with aluminum foil, pressing directly against bottom and side surfaces and leaving foil overhang to drape over top of crust to prevent over-browning. Fill with dry beans, sugar or pie weights.

Bake, covered: Set crust on a baking sheet, then bake in preheated oven 25 minutes.

Remove cover, continue to bake: Remove foil and beans, pierce bottom and sides all over with a fork and continue to bake until crust appears dried, about 10 minutes longer.

How to Make Quiche Filling Blend eggs together: In a mixing bowl, whisk eggs with a fork until blended.

Mix in remaining ingredients.

Add heavy cream, ham, cheese, green onions, parsley and season with salt and pepper to taste.

Stir mixture until blended. Pour mixture into pie crust.

Bake in preheated 350 degree oven (one level below center) until center of quiche is just barely set, about 45 – 55 minutes.

If needed tent crust edges with a pie shield or a foil ring to prevent excessive browning during the last 15 minutes.

Slice and serve. Let rest for a few minutes before slicing. Serve warm.

Can you make ahead or freeze quiche?

Yes prepared quiche refrigerates well for 3 days or freezes well for 3 months.

Cool before freezing. If freezing wrap in foil then store in an airtight container. If refrigerating simply wrap top with foil.

Thaw frozen quiche for 1 day when ready to serve. Reheat cold quiche in a 325 degree oven until heated through.

Quiche Mix-ins Ideas I’ve listed lots of ideas already, but let’s bring them all together along with the others, for a quick list to refer to when needed.

COOKED MEATS: Ham, bacon, chicken, turkey, breakfast sausage, Italian sausage, chorizo, salami, pastrami, smoked salmon, or crab meat.

VEGETABLES: Mushrooms, grape tomatoes (or sun-dried), bell peppers, broccoli, cauliflower, asparagus, olives, kale, spinach, radicchio, arugula, peas, potatoes, zucchini onion or shallot. Note that the vegetables should be cooked beforehand by sautéing, steaming or roasting.

CHEESES: Cheddar, Swiss, gruyere, Monterrey jack or pepper jack, mozzarella, Romano, parmesan, goat cheese, feta, provolone, gouda, fontina, or ricotta.

HERBS and SEASONINGS: Basil, parsley, chives, tarragon, dill, thyme, marjoram, chervil, oregano, red pepper flakes, paprika, or nutmeg.

Helpful Tips Blind bake crust before filling for a non-soggy crust. Use a glass or metal pie pan not ceramic for a crispier crust. Bake quiche just until center is set. A toothpick inserted should be free of wet batter, though quiche may just barely wiggle slightly.

Remember there will be a little carryover cooking upon removal from oven so careful not to over-bake so it’s not rubbery.

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MEET THE TEAM Theresa Baird - Broker Theresa is an award winning professional real estate agent. She has been in the industry for over 20 years, and prides herself on being able to communicate with her clients. Theresa’s aim is to make every client feel like they are the only client – even though she is typically working with 10 or more at a time. Theresa loves meeting new people and getting to know them, which makes her job perfect for her!

Theresa enjoys the diversity of her business. She is able to provide clients with excellent service due to her extensive knowledge and experience in the Real Estate market.

Theresa is committed to delivering what her clients need. She is a Master Certified Negotiation Expert and works hard to put the most amount of money in her client’s pockets. Theresa will work with you from beginning to end, ensuring that your closing is as stress-free as possible.

Lindsay Meadwell Real Estate Agent Since receiving her license, Lindsay has utilized her knowledge of the industry, along with her hard-working attitude and passion for providing excellent customer service to help several families meet their real estate goals. Lindsay believes in the importance of developing strong client relationships that will last a lifetime.

Samantha McGrath Real Estate Agent Samantha has worked in the Real Estate world for the past 6 years. She began at our Keller Williams Brokerage on-boarding new agents and teaching them our systems and technology.

She has acquired her Real Estate license and is now working with the TB Realty Group. She enjoys working with both sellers and buyers.

Carolina Mauti Administrative Assistant After years of working as a successful real estate agent, Carolina is the TB Realty Groups administrative assistant.

Julia Baird-Oryschak Real Estate Agent Julia has worked and trained across the globe and brings her go-to-market strategies, campaigns and domestic expansion skills to the TB Realty Group. After completing her BSc and BBA she has joined the TB Realty Group where she brings her great customer skills and resourcefulness into play.

Dereck Addie Graphics/Photography Dereck has been working in the graphic design field for over 20 years and enjoys the challenges of working with the TB Realty Group.