634 Fleet Street, Kingston

In that leafy west-end pocket south of Bayridge Secondary and north of Lemoines Point, 634 Fleet St guards the bend in the road, protects its pie-shaped lot with a sky-scraping pine tree that connects like a camouflaged thread the land north of Lake Ontario to the towering cumulus above it. The house went up in 1970, and sprawls along the horizon - an attached garage at one end and the bedrooms a little higher at the other. There are three of those on the second level, and a fourth in the basement, next to the laundry room, the extra bath, and the panelled rec room with its lime green shag. On the main level, the living room and dining room wrap around the original kitchen with its door out to the deck and garden. The charms are obvious, but most will still choose to refresh the house top to bottom, is my guess. The coming spring feels the ideal time for that - throw open the doors and windows and gather your materials in the long driveway, or lay out your plans on the back deck. The house is priced to comfortably accommodate some pretty elaborate changes. Just don't take out that livid, ankle-grabbing carpet, I beg you.