RESTORATION
MARCH 2006
It was a beautiful March day in 2006 when Mark and I finally cajoled the real estate agent to take us to the Cassiar Cannery. I saw the iconic houses, and none of the mess, in a tiny listing photo flipping through the local real estate paper. The agent wasn’t keen in taking us – too far – too messy – too everything but after a day and a half of depressing Rupert houses – we insisted on seeing it.
30 minutes out of town, driving along a sparkling body of water on a bumpy road with little traffic, I thought we were finally on our way to see something that was more us. We pulled up to the gate, jumped out of the car and in about 15 seconds we were hooked. I saw the mess. I saw right through the mess to what a marvelous place this was. Sure, there were people left behind here and a ton of everything – boats, scrap metal, piles of buildings, things in bushes.
Cassiar has a four-acre pier and it’s basically covered with debris. There was a huge pile of minivans and sedans. It looked like the prairies had taken over the property seeding alders in between derelict boats.
The state of Cassiar scared off professional property cleaner-uppers but Mark and I were ready to have some fun. We headed back home and organized for an ESA (environmental assessment) to be done and put in a backup offer to a couple from California. Long story short
but Cassiar passed the ESA, the couple from California dropped out and fate had it that Mark and I were the next stewards of the Cassiar Cannery.
AUGUST 2006
We packed up and headed out to arrive on August 2, 2006. Ready or not…. we were heading north to an epic site at the mouth of the Skeena with an epic history and a triply epic mess.
First thing was to choose a house to move into. One was rented back to the guy we bought it from so we had four to choose from – none of them “move-in” ready. We chose the one that had a bit more of an open layout between the kitchen and living room and broke out the Pinesol. These houses were grim, greasy, and smelly. The one we chose had no power or water and we almost set our tent up in the living room it was so gross. In the beginning, we slept in one house, showered in another, and cooked in another.
We started with cribbing something together in our house to get it liveable. After finding about a dozen fridges on site, we found one that worked and a genuine 1980s mustard yellow stove. We did a little nesting but quickly started to work on clearing off the 4-acre dock piled high with lumber, broken windows and wrapped in cables and nets.
The dock took almost a full year to clear. Every day we would head out with our tupperwares, chainsaws, brooms, shovels, and pry bars to deal with the remains of the primary buildings from a busy cannery town. We got pretty good at sorting stuff into keeper piles, recycling, dump, and metal piles. We burned so much wood with daily big bonfires for probably three plus years. Nothing went into the ocean, it was all lugged off the dock by hand in a little, thrashed, Ford Ranger.
We started our first PIM (project in motion) by tackling the little house for visiting family to
sleep who thought we were kind of nuts on a sliding scale but came to visit anyways.
The next house we tackled was one of the bigger ones. A couple contacted us about moving into one of the houses for a while. We had no plans to get in there so said yes and they choose the middle house – the chosen house of the previous owner. They lasted one night. The car was packed, and she was out the gate while he said the house nearly killed them. Obviously intrigued, we decided to get in there and take a look.
The first thing we noticed was the smell and the air was bad. There were carpet tiles – gross, old, dirty, grimy carpet tiles. Those were gone by noon and things started to look up in there. These are heritage houses built with excellent materials by men who knew what they were doing. They have good bones, and they clean up very well with some ingenuity and elbow grease. As we tackled what is now Sockeye House, we stripped wallpaper, replaced wall board
and wiring, we scrubbed and scrubbed and scrubbed everything with Pinesol and TSP repeatedly removing decades of grime and neglect. We replaced the flooring with yellow cedar planks which brightened everything up.
Outside, we moved from the dock to the property. Much of the “keeper” woodpile got moved again and restacked. We called a metal scrap company out of Terrace to come and start removing the scrap steel. First load, we removed about 120 tonnes of scrap steel. Over the next five years, we removed about 220 tonnes of scrap.
We needed lumber and not just a little bit of lumber. One of our good friends was the local sawyer in Port Edward. We started by collecting logs and splitting the lumber with him after he milled it. Then we bought a circular head saw rig with one of those 52” blades whizzing at 100km+. Mark’s mom turned white as a sheet when she saw her son standing beside one of those! Back in the day, men used to stand on the log while the blade was cutting! That mill took a ton of work, wasted a pile of wood, made a lot of waste, and never cut a straight board!
2014
In 2014, we purchased a used WoodMizer LT 40HD and that was a game changer. Efficient and easy to use, this became Mark’s favourite tool and favourite place to be. It is really satisfying to take a log and create lumber out of it, and we needed a lot of wood!
2015
Mark and I kept going. Every day we got up and did something inside or outside for at least 10 years. By 2015 we were onto the blue house and the general store. We needed to put power back into the store and the freezer building. In 2015, we took a booking for a house that needed a full restoration in July 2016, and we started to run Experience Cassiar Cannery – a series of experiential programs – that needed a base to operate out of. Great ideas take a lot of
work and we needed to fully restore the store as well prior to Spring 2016.
Restoration is ongoing at the Cassiar Cannery. The coastal weather is hard on these places and they must get painted every couple years. The Guest Houses get annual inside restoration and upkeep over the offseason.
BEFORE AND AFTERS
GALLERY
