Marilou's place is spacious, clean, and very well equipped. We didn't know the Cotes-des-Neiges neighborhood, but we enjoyed staying there... and it was a perfectly good base for exploring. Lots of interesting food options nearby and it's a short walk to a very lively neighborhood near the University of Montreal. The metro is close (and a pleasure to use) and the bus on Marilou's street is a straight shot to Mile End, where we enjoyed exploring, including two of Montreal's most celebrated bagel places. (The ones that were nearby were nothing special).
The apartment is on the bottom floor of a 3 unit building and there's not much natural light. It's brightly decorated and the lighting is good but you won't have sunshine streaming in.
There was a little communications mixup about the key, but Marilou's sister is right nearby. She was very kind, gracious, and welcoming and helped us figure it out, and also talked us through our initial parking challenges. Parking was the one annoying part of our stay. We needed to drive to Montreal and just needed a place to stash the car during our stay - we used public transit in town. Since we were driving to Montreal, we figured this would be an easier neighborhood to deal with parking than the more central locations, and it was. But because there are brief parking restrictions on Mondays-Thursdays, we did take advantage of 3 nights use of the parking space rental Marilou has arranged. The parking space is a driveway half a block away and is a bit of a narrow, awkward spot and we were briefly worried that we had scraped our rental car pulling in, but that was a false alarm. Pulling out of the spot was no fun - it involved backing out onto a busy street not far from an intersection where the traffic is often backed up - it was a 2-person job and a long wait to get out ... and another near-miss of an accident. And be aware that while there is free parking on the street in spots for part of the week, the block and the neighborhood has a mishmash of different parking rules for different spots. For our last 2 days of free parking we ended up parking our car a couple of blocks down because the free spots on the block were taken.