Wednesday, September 12, 2007 - Found our Future Home in Saskatoon
By a chance encounter, I ran into Chris Fossenier and his property at 401 - 27th Street West as I was seeking a new home in Saskatoon. Carrie and I had sold our condo in the Fairbanks Warehouse and were looking for a property that gave us the space and location that worked for our lifestyle: Carrie is a singer and songwriter constantly in need of rehearsal space and a home office, while I work out of home doing real estate development and am a hobbyist woodworker, thus requiring a workshop. In addition to that, we throw house concerts when friends of ours are touring through town, so it's a regular occurrence for us to have 40-60 extremely loud people over (read: family) for a concert.
I viewed the property and for the first time in our 6 month search for a new home I actually saw the potential to create a loft/home/office/studio/venue that worked for our lifestyle: it is only a few blocks from downtown (maybe 6 from the beautiful Meewasin Valley riverbank), it is quite large at 1800 sq ft and it had an empty parking lot next door where I could build another house to sell. On top of that, it was built in 1935 by Safeway as a grocery store. My initial reaction was "Well I've seen lots of old churches converted to houses before, but never a Kwiki-Mart!"
So Carrie and I negotiated a deal to take possession and start working on the building immediately. That set us on the path to building what we believe will be our Saskatoon home for a very long time...
