Just around the corner from the café Cool Hand of a Girl, Nancy is spending the weekend on her garden. The small plot outside her typical Junction row house now sports a tiny lilac tree, with one small bloom. She stares at it hopefully.

"There were tons of hostas, but they were getting burnt by the sun." The green hostas now sit in pots, waiting for relocation to the backyard. This is Nancy's first spring in Toronto. "I have to do the yard but everything else was done. I painted a little." Inside, I see she's actually painted a lot: the walls pop with colour - especially upstairs, where her children each chose bright paint chips for their bedrooms.

As soon as I walk into Sarindar's home, I feel surrounded by bright colours and books. The best homes I've visited are "all of a piece" with our lives, our personalities; this is the feeling I get immediately in Sarindar's live-work space. Everything has purpose in this working art studio - even the chaotic melange of photos and keepsakes pinned to the walls. "Most of my work is made on a visceral and emotional level, not the cerebral level," explains Sarindar, "It's a bit like collecting bits of a life."

The studio is built the site of a former Goodyear Tire plant. "I used to say, 'I live in Etobicoke,' and people would look at me as if I'd said I lived on Mars. But if I said, 'I live in Mimico,' they said, 'Oh, that's lovely, by the Lake.' Really, I live in New Toronto."

I wanted to visit the Foundry Lofts because a friend came back from a theatre rehearsal there and said, "You won't believe the shared central atrium. It's huge and industrial and you're gonna love it." The former warehouse is part of the old 60-acre Canada Foundry Company, not far from Corso Italia, at Davenport and Lansdowne. I jumped at the chance to visit Elisabeth in her new space.

It's perfect weather for hiding inside--so Friday night, I hit the Images Festival (on until April 11th). I went to see Lebanese director/playwright Rabih Mroue's Make Me Stop Smoking. I've never been to the Images Fest before, so I was expecting film (experimental, straight-up, video, virtual, whatever) - but Make Me Stop Smoking was much closer to Powerpoint presentation as theatre. And it was riveting.

"Catherine Runchey, rooming house operator extraordinaire," says Trish fondly, looking at the plaque on her house. "We don't know much about her, except that she lived here." Along with other of the Robert Brown row houses near the revamped AGO, the house is on its way to being listed as a Heritage building.

The house dates from the transitional period between the Grange's aristocratic heyday in the mid-1800s and its population shift in the 1890s, when the area became home to new Canadians making the transition to a new life in Toronto. Mrs. Runchey's house reminds me of English author Jerome K. Jerome, who once wrote: "I want a house that has got over all its troubles. I don't want to spend the rest of my life bringing up a young and inexperienced house."

When the economy flatlines and businesses enter the dead zone, once-grand streets like Palmerston Boulevard can show off their ability to learn and adjust. Boom or bust, the Boulevard with its snazzy globe streetlamps and wide lots has seen it all before.

The first houses were built in 1903, aimed at wealthy WASP types -- former mayors Horatio Hocken and Samuel McBride moved here, and the most impressive house belonged to George Weston, whose bread factory wasn't far away. By the 1920s, the community had shifted, and the residents of the grand brick family homes were mostly Jewish; some houses still have traces of a mezuzah in the doorway. In the early sixties, despite the wide street and luxurious trees, the street was on a downward slide; to attract tenants, landlords converted the grand homes to boarding houses.

Today, many of the houses are apartments, with quirky illogical layouts and over-the-top woodwork. "Everything is idiosyncratic in a house like this," says Ann of her ground floor Palmerston apartment. "Which makes it fun. And strange."