A promise made to a dying friend saw a house at the corner of Thurlow and Pacific revived.
Dark red and trimmed with petunias, the 102-year-old house has seen its once dilapidated exterior restored and its interior transformed from six small housekeeping suites with shared bathrooms to a strata-titled duplex.
Inara Jaunozola was a Martha Stewartlike TV show host in Latvia while her husband Juris Austrins worked as a computer engineer when Jaunozola's aunt, who'd fled Soviet rule decades earlier, begged her in 1990 to come to Vancouver so she wouldn't die alone.
Jaunozola's bosses agreed to hold her job for a year. The couple bought return tickets.
But Jaunozola's aunt adored their young son and rallied. Instead of living mere months, she lived four years.
"My aunt, she said, 'I will never forgive you if you leave me here alone, dying. I have family now for the first time in my life,'" Jaunozola said.
So they stayed. Her aunt left her decaying home at West Sixth Avenue and Larch Street to the family and they turned it into a bed and breakfast.
"Because we are old, our English is not good, all we can do, just work for ourselves," Jaunozola said.
Austrins renovated the home and won a heritage award for the restoration.
Their Latvian friend Bruno Ozolins, who'd fled Soviet rule in the 1960s and bought the home at Thurlow and Pacific, was unwell. He asked Austrins to buy and bring life to his home in 2006.
The couple bought the home in a private sale. The houses on either side were on the market and the corner was ripe for development, but they turned down offers. Austrins couldn't betray his friend who died three months later.
They initially planned to renovate so each suite would have its own bathroom, but with more than four suites, the city treated the house like an apartment building and the requirements overwhelmed them.
Austrins was diagnosed with cancer in 2009, so the couple sold their bed and breakfast and moved to an apartment around the corner from Thurlow on Beach Avenue. Austrins acted as contractor and they did much of the work themselves.
"On top of the weight of the project, my husband was battling a terminal diagnosis of cancer and I am convinced that keeping his promise to Bruno has kept him going to finish this renovation," Jaunozola told the Courier.
They completed renovations and moved in last month. They hope to rent out the other half. Austrins is bedridden now with terminal cancer.
So was the renovation worth the time and effort? "You know, when we were doing this, it felt no," Jaunozola said. "There were months and months when I thought oh my God, what have we gotten ourselves into. But now, when it's done, it gives us, especially for my husband, because he knows if something happens to him, that there is security."
