I have been here so long, dealing with the condition this house is in, I find it impossible to get up in the morning sometimes. I've lost the ability to function around other people. Everything else in my life does not exist anymore. It's time to either get rid of it or fix it once and for all, or die.
I'm embarrassed by the condition of the house. I appreciate your attempts at humour but please don't push me too far. I didn't make the house look like this. I'm trying to do what I can to rectify the damage and clean it up. Unfortunately, I'm not a contractor and I have limited skills and knowledge in this area. "What did you buy it for," you ask? The answer is, I didn't know what I was getting into. I needed a place to live. I recognized the hidden beauty of this particular house. I bid on it. Nobody else did. I thought it would be an interesting, profitable, and fulfilling challenge which would have been completed by now. I thought if I applied myself to problems one by one, I would solve them. Now I realize that only happens in the movies. I now know trying to solve a problem only compounds that problem and others that are tangential to it even as it creates new problems.
Yes, I removed the madonna statue. I sold it to the guy who owns the house in your first photo.
To make this house resemble the houses in those photos of yours would require contractors and an obscene amount of cash. I still need a ton of cash to finish repairing the interior damage the previous owners, and myself, have inflicted. What's more important, renovating the semi-gutted interior, or making the exterior look like real estate pornography? I want both, but need to be realistic.
However, there are problems with contractors. Not money problems. Worse.
If I bring in contractors to finish the exterior, they won't be interested in restoring it, they would insist on using plastic, melamine and vinyl instead of wood, plaster, copper, and steel. They won't use the historical mix of mortar for the bricks. They'll just use the modern mix; what do they care when it deteriorates after 15 years and has to be redone? They'll be long gone. No matter that it's a 100-year old house and you're not supposed to need to replace things like that so often. The previous owners pulled that trick, now it's 15 years later and I'm stuck dealing with it. I know all this because I've been going through hell for years trying to get qualified advice and assistance on this project. Everywhere I turn I find hacks and poorly-trained 'professionals'. I get clowns coming in here and telling me they're going to remove all the 'ugly and old' copper pipes so they can replace them with PVC, "because it's easier to work with". I get losers trying to sell me vinyl siding along with the vinyl windows they're peddling. They tell me they want to paint everything white, replace the original windows with white vinyl ones, etc. I have to fight these people and their ideas off. Sometimes they manage to convince me they're right even though their solution is probably a crime in the style world. They're trying to turn it into a Walmart house. I went through 2 designers. I explained that it was a Victorian, I wanted it restored on the outside and modernized inside while retaining original features such as the moldings, the 10" real hardwood baseboards, the wooden floors, and the door hardware; I showed them hundreds of pictures of what I wanted; they didn't care. They gave me designs based on stuff they like instead. Stuff you might see in a cookie-cutter condo. They think it's a good idea to rip out the baseboards and the floors, because then I can just go to Home Depot and get a shiny new laminate floor that will go perfectly with the new pre-coated melamine baseboards. They wouldn't even answer my questions about what to do to the exterior, because they don't know. You set a pack of these people loose here, it'll be worse than a 'Portuguese Renovation'.
I wasted a year with these designers. Money down the f---ing drain.
So I could try to finish it myself, to make it look like those houses in your photos. Except I don't know how. I don't have the tools or the know-how. I don't even know what questions to ask until it's too late. Even IF I get the right answer to a question, that doesn't mean I can actually do it. I've been trying that for years and now I know better than to try something brand new to me and expect to have excellent results.
I'm not near College/Ossington, I'm further west. I doubt if even a beautiful, fully restored, fully functional Victorian with all Portuguese influence removed, would sell for $825,000 in this neighbourhood. It's a nice street and all the other houses are in better condition than mine, but still..
I could probably remove the angel stone myself. But what if there's a problem behind it? Maybe there's a reason why somebody put it there. Sure, he could have chosen something more pleasing to the eye. He could have hired a mason to repair the original brick and mortar if it was deteriorating or something. I mean, if he was hiring a mason anyways to create this visual insult that I see every time I walk up the steps. Or maybe he did it himself; maybe he was a mason, people actually paid him to do this to their homes, he fell in love with the concept, and decided to commit the same crime on his own home. But he must have installed the loathsome angel stone for a reason such as covering up a problem behind it. Otherwise, he should be located, taken out and shot.
Removing the entire balcony, then replacing it with something tasteful, that's a project for a contractor. Like, I can't just leave the balcony door there if there's no balcony. Finding someone who can/will do that, so it resembles one of the well-kept Victorians in the Annex or Cabbagetown, becomes the challenge. Or else I'm going to end up with a Walmart-y entrance and balcony. In which case, I may as well leave it in its present insulting state.
After much searching I found a crew to renovate the upper interior of the house. These guys were pretty good. Not perfect, but I would probably recommend them to anyone who asked. They incorporated many of my concerns into their work and let me work along with them. But they were expensive. I don't want to know how much they would cost to redo the whole exterior. And some of the sub-contractors they brought in, that's where most of the problems happened. I am really not looking forward to going through that again.
I was hoping there would be something I could quickly do to spruce up the front exterior - to make it look good - without involving contractors, permits, maybe another hack designer, and tens of thousands of dollars before turning my attention back inside. But I guess not.
About the bins..
I use the bins. One problem with them, I find, is that because of these new bins, the lazy, unionized garbagemen don't need to get out of their trucks anymore. They just push a button and this crane lifts them in the air and turns them not quite upside down. Anything not in bags blows all over the place. Some of the stuff stays in the bin, stuck to the inside. The garbagemen aren't actually making any effort at all to collect garbage, they're just playing a video game where they grab these bins and lift them and put them down. They no longer consider it their job to collect garbage. Their job is now the video game. So you can't just throw things into the bin. You need to bag things and bag the bags. Then you throw the bags in the bin. You can put a large empty garbage bag in a normal garbage can, throw a bunch of stuff in it, and when it's full, tie it and throw it in the bin. Then when our overpaid unionized friends push the button in the cab of their air-conditioned truck, there's no way anything will get left behind.
I'm renovating a house, remember? I need a lot of garbage cans. I can bring them inside to where I'm working. Then when I'm finished, I can put them outside so I don't have to look at them. I can't bring the bins inside because they won't fit in the door or up/down the stairs.
Or this. 
