Budget Breakdown: They Turned a B.C. Corner Store Into a Home—and Just Had to Keep the Pepsi Sign

They used to be places where you might grab a Coke or a quart of milk. But in some residential pockets of North America, corner stores that have sat vacant are turning out to be prime real estate not for proprietors but for homeowners disillusioned by prohibitively expensive housing markets. This story and two others—one in Phoenix, and another in the San Francisco Bay Area—share how clever owners applied pluck and perseverance to turn disused mom-and-pops into dream homes that, dollar for dollar, beat out anything they could have found doomscrolling on Zillow.

When Aki Kaltenbach called her partner, René Gauthier, in 2017 to announce she’d found their next home—and that it was a corner store—René had the kind of reaction anyone would upon learning they might soon live where candy bars and lotto tickets reigned: skepticism tinged with confusion. But within days, they had taken over a shuttered storefront on an otherwise residential street in Victoria, British Columbia, plus a worn-out house tucked behind it. What followed wasn’t only an opportunity to live somewhere with a quirky backstory—it was also a tactical maneuver to buy a home in a housing market that had priced the couple out of almost every reasonable option.

"I’m from Vancouver originally, and you see these transitions of corner stores and family businesses into homes," Aki says. "Conceptually and visually, they’re beautiful, and they’re often in great locations in a neighborhood."

The Victoria property had that going for it. That both buildings were in poor condition made it relatively affordable as well—the store had somehow been operating without a foundation, and outer wall studs were cobbled together with two-by-fours and were in no way up to current code. The couple snagged the address for just over $400,000 USD, an absolute steal in Victoria’s competitive real estate market.