Throughout the spring of 2007, Aaron spent a lot of time and energy looking for a house in Regina. The process was complicated by the fact that the Regina housing market had lit up around February or March, so it was definitely not a buyer’s market. On several occasions, Aaron bid significantly above the asking price, only to be outbid by someone else. Buyers were even foregoing house inspections or any other conditions to increase their chances of getting a house.

But, finally, in early June, he managed to be the successful bidder on a smaller three-bedroom house. Although it’s not walking distance to work, Aaron can drive downtown in five minutes. The house doesn’t have a basement – not necessarily a detriment in Regina’s shifting clay – but it makes up for it by having a HUGE heated garage, accessible from the back alley. The house sits on a well-treed lot, with huge, mature elms in the front yard and several ash trees and a maple in the back yard. The trees shade the house almost entirely, so it stays quite cool, even when the weather is beastly hot.

Aaron took possession on June 29th, so the day after school was done, we headed up to Regina to help him settle in. The original plan was to shingle the garage right away, but, as a result of the delivery of the shingles being delayed, we ended up starting to paint the interior of the house instead. We convinced Aaron that it was much easier to get that job done before he moved in.

One thing led to another and before we knew it, Cal had spent the entire month of July in Regina, and Irene had spent one week of holidays and every weekend in July there as well. We started by painting out all the trim in the house, as it was showing signs of age. That really helped to make the house look less dated. Then we painted the entire interior, with the exception of the utility room.

After that, we moved on to the exterior. I had to re-build both the front and back steps, although, thankfully, they had sturdy steel frames, so it was just a matter of replacing the wood on the surface. After some eavestrough repair, we painted all the trim, soffit, fascia eavestroughs, and shutters on the outside of the house. Fortunately the house and the garage both have stucco exteriors, so that limited the amount of painting we had to do.

Then I moved on to the garage. The soffit and fascia on the garage had deteriorated quite a bit, so I replaced most of the soffit and all of the fascia and added some missing trim around the doors. After that I painted the garage trim.

The last job we managed to squeeze in was to do some rewiring in Aaron’s kitchen. His fridge was on a circuit with a ton of other stuff and kept blowing the breaker, and his main counter didn’t have a plug-in at all.

That pretty much used up the month of July, so we finally left Aaron to enjoy his house. I’m sure he was glad to get rid of us and finally start to live in his house. He had already arranged for one room mate who was going to move in on the first of August and his friend Jeff announced that he was moving back from Alberta and that he could use a place to live as well. So Aaron had about two days of having the house to himself before more people moved in