From sustainable renovations to tips and tricks for organizing various rooms, the BC Home + Garden Show provides homeowners with ways to innovate a space.
As B.C. homebuyers navigate a difficult market, organizers at the event wanted to highlight ways that individuals could upgrade and organize their homes, according to Amber Beaton, assistant show manager of the event.
"The best you can do is make any space work and being organized or utilizing all your space to the best of its ability. That's a big thing. People aren't really wanting to move out into bigger houses right now with this market, so I think keeping your own home and keeping it organized is the way to go," Beaton said.
The BC Home + Garden Show, which runs March 16-19 at BC Place Stadium, emphasizes how homeowners can streamline, organize and upgrade their homes sustainably. The show features approximately 300 vendors ranging from construction companies to interior design, garden and home appliances, and sustainable goods.
Megan Golightly, a featured speaker at the event and founder of Simplified, a company dedicated to organization, said that organizing a space is about "rightsizing" and not downsizing.
"If you pick up any item, and you're trying to decide if you should get rid of it or not, you need to ask yourself three questions: 'Do I love this thing? Do I use this thing, and would I go buy this thing today?" Golightly said.
When it comes to streamlining a space, Golightly highlighted that it shouldn't be a punishment and comes down to living smartly.
"You need to realistically look at your space. It's like trying to drive a car with no gas; it's the same as trying to live in a space that just doesn't have room for you," she said.
For those who want to give their home more of an upgrade, Curtis Murray, owner of 180 Kitchens, believes that it doesn't have to result in large amounts of waste.
Murray's business is built on the idea that you can renovate a kitchen without gutting the room and ending up with a pile of materials that go to the landfill.
"It's keeping the existing cabinet boxes, replacing the front end panels, drawer fronts, everything you can see from the outside," he said. "What we've come up with is to replace what's been worn and torn, but keeping the existing box out of the landfill and then adding some functional items."
Murray said the key is to retain the existing base of the kitchen and build off of items, like sinks, that a homeowner may not need to replace.
Sustainable renovation can come in many forms. For Ken Gijssen, president of Meridian Pacific Construction, it's all about taking the existing bones of a house and making it energy efficient.
"One of the biggest changes in the industry is deep energy retrofits," he said. "Being able to go to an existing structure, let's say it's a home, and if it's got good bones, we can keep all of the frame and the foundation, or you can just build off of that. We take everything off the outside of the building and then put a high-performance membrane around the outside."
After British Columbians experienced adverse weather events like heat domes, wildfires and atmospheric rivers, Gijssen said an energy-efficient home can be a game changer.
More information on the BC Home + Garden Show and tickets can be found here.
