In a season where Minot residents are slowly beginning to rebuild their homes and, essentially, their lives the Minot Area Builders Home Show at the North Dakota State Fair Center this weekend proved to be an excellent venue to find those necessary pieces to make one's life whole again.
Early on Saturday morning, James Lowe, the manager of the floral division at Lowe's Garden Center, held a discussion on the trends in gardening and gardening art. Lowe said that a fair amount of questions he received were questions related to
how homeowners could repair work done to their yards after the flooding of the Souris River.
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James C. Falcon/MDN • Wanda Maixner, of Minot, admires some wind chimes at the Minot Area Builders Home Show on Saturday afternoon. Maixner said that she was attending the expo to look for some ideas to update her home.
Lowe noted that during his talk, three-fourths of the seats were full, which he admitted was pretty good for a Saturday morning. The turnout at the event, overall, has been pretty steady, Lowe said as visitors admired the wind chimes and the high heel shoe-shaped flowerpots available for sale at Lowe's Garden Center's booth.
"I think we're going to have a good show," he said.
The show was a world full of windows, aluminum siding, sliding doors, custom home designs, real estate, gutters, vacuum cleaners and shingles. The icing on the cake was the various dips into which pretzels were quickly submerged at Tastefully Simple. Pampered Chef was also on call to offer household wares.
As visitor traffic hustled by, squeezing within the thin rows that were bloated with visitors looking for the A-to-Zs of home and garden refurbishment, Vicky Flagstad sat back and watched the action unfold.
Flagstad, the executive officer for the Minot Association of Builders and the organizer of the event, estimated on Saturday that by the end of the day there would be about 4,000 visitors.
"I would suspect we would have that many today," she said, noting that at last year's event, there were a little over 4,700 visitors for both days.
There were 115 vendors registered for this weekend, an increase of 25 vendors compared to last year's event, Flagstad said.
"Obviously, the flood contributed a lot," she said in regards to the increase in vendors.
If there is something that can be done to your home, there is a vendor at the show to help, Flagstad guaranteed.
The number of land developers and home builders that are new to the area helping with the housing shortage were represented at the fair. One such business was Paramount Builders, out of Bismarck. What makes Paramount different is their use of CIP panels to construct homes. John Schran, a regional sales manager with Enercept, which does business with Paramount, said that within a month to 40 days, an enclosed structure is ready for habitation. To build using CIP panels is 10 to 20 percent more than to build a standard stick structure, but the labor is reduced by 30 percent in time.
There were some homes built with this technology here in Minot in the past, and Paramount and Enercept would like to introduce that to the housing market here again as oil and agriculture are starting to take off, Schran said.
The Home and Garden Show continues today. Admission is $4. Dorian Waller, a landscape designer with Lowe's Garden Center, will host a seminar at noon about the effects of the flood on trees, shrubs and lawns.