When Annie Biddle first moved into her house, she was only a year old.
Now, after a century of living in the same east London bungalow, the 102-year-old woman is ready to sell the only place she’s called home, her property hitting the market for the first time since her family bought it in 1923.
At that time, the property Biddle shared with her parents and two younger sisters at 66 Boullee St. sat just outside the city limits.
Biddle said the street, still unpaved when she was growing up, was mainly filled with men who, like her father, worked at the Canadian National Railway car shops and their families.
“This was all dirt roads, no sidewalks,” Biddle recalls. “We had to wear boots way into the summer when it rained. It was awful muddy.”
Back then, the property – which was often ground zero for family events, including celebrating Biddle’s parents’ 50th wedding anniversary – was considered a starter home, with two bedrooms, small dining and living rooms, and a kitchen.
Today, at $400,000, the bungalow is hitting the market in the same category.
Biddle said she made the decision to sell due to her advanced age; she has moved to live with a niece.
But while she understands it was a necessary move, that didn’t make it any easier.
“This house is my whole life,” she said.
“I’ve been here since I was 13 months. It’s kind of hard to just pull up and go, you know, but I managed it better than I thought I would. I was afraid I might go to pieces after living here so long.”
Jason Cheese, the real estate agent at the Price Real Estate Team who’s managing the listing, said it’s exceedingly rare to see a property stay within the same family for so long.
“The average time a family stays in the same place is about five to seven years,” he said.
“So, for someone to be in a house for 100 years is almost unheard of.
“The only time we see something like that is with a large family estate, where it gets handed down from generation to generation. But I don’t think I’ve ever come across a property where the kids end up living in the family home and staying there their entire life.”
An open house to see the property is scheduled for the weekend.
All Biddle hopes is the new owners will love the place as much as she did her entire life.
“We had some very good times here with my family,” she said. “Of course, we had our differences once in a while, but Mom always straightened us out.
“I hope they enjoy it as much as we did.”