CHEO’s Generic Dream Home

Have you been to see the CHEO Dream Home? I’ve never gone to tour any of them before, but that’s because – to the best of my knowledge – none of them have had a saltwater aquarium until now.

I have wanted a saltwater aquarium for several years. I want mushrooms and brain corals and live rock and intensely coloured fish and a cleaner shrimp. (A cleaner shrimp is like a drive-through carwash for fish and other marine critters. They pull up to the cleaner shrimp, and he cleans them up and polishes them and sends them on their way. I want one.)

The CHEO Dream Home tour was pretty interesting. If you’re looking for something to do, go check it out. You take off your shoes and carry them around in a bag, and you’re free to explore the house. There were probably a hundred or so other people exploring it at the same time I was.

It’s interesting because the whole concept of Dream Home implies – to me anyway – something unique and special and personal. Yet the CHEO Dream Home, because it’s being raffled off, has to be a generic dream home. It has to be everybody’s dream home.

So apparently everybody wants a marine aquarium, a built-in wall-sized wine rack, a workshop, a sauna, 10 televisions, a home theatre, a popcorn machine, three payphones, four bedrooms, six bathrooms, a solarium, an exercise room, a games room, a three-car garage, an office, a dining room, a living room, a family room, a kitchen, a mud room, a deck, a hot tub, and a laundry room.

And everybody wants a weird blue wall sculpture.

The prize includes the house, everything in the house, $100,000 (presumably so you can pay the taxes and utilities), a year’s free housecleaning (because I’ll be damned if I’m going to keep six bathrooms clean), and a year’s groceries (because I expect I’ll have more visitors). It also includes a car, because this house is in The Middle of Nowhere. And it’s not the good Middle of Nowhere either, it’s the one out near Barrhaven.

I think they maybe messed up a bit on the location, because I don’t think anybody would build their dream house there. My dream house would be either in Centretown (generously defined as including Chinatown, Little Italy, Mechanicsville, Hintonburg, Westboro, Glebe, Ottawa South, Sandy Hill and Centretown proper) or in a clearing in the forest on the edge of a river. But it would most certainly not be on the outskirts of Barrhaven. And while I rarely attempt to speak for everybody, I find it hard to imagine that the outskirts of Barrhaven would be anybody’s ideal dream home location.

But the location I suppose is a trivial detail, because I probably won’t go out much once I move to Winding Way. For one thing, there’s nothing there except other big houses. For another thing, I’ll be so busy drinking wine in my sauna and building swap boxes in my workshop and watching my mushrooms and brain corals and cleaner shrimp that I won’t have time to go out.

You’ll all be invited to the housewarming party, just like last time I moved.

In the meantime, feel free to take the virtual tour and let me know what you think.