Salvage Home

I visited the charming Ray Chan and Mandy at Woodanchor, a mile past the perimeter south on Waverley, next to the landfill. Woodanchor's reclaimed wood flooring and furniture is a little dear; but the flooring they mill out of local-salvaged elms is lovely, and they have some spruce beams that would be impressive in a house or porch.

Sometimes they have Salvage Yard offerings, but their website isn't always kept up to date on that.

I recommend putting on some sturdy shoes and visiting Ray and Mandy at Woodanchor. The story behind the business is cool. The owner is a local woodworker who went to the city landfill on a dare and told them he could recycle the city's Dutch Elm-disease-ridden and felled elms, and market the products as green. The city let him; he milled the elms into value-added, saleable flooring; and now he's got the contract with the city.

Such a great business model for this town. Perhaps because it exists simply to manage the flow of wheat and hydroelectricity out into other cities, but Winnipeg is behind every place in the world, in terms of innovative, local-resources, Imperial Downslope technology development.

If they had any big-picture business sense, the local and regional governments should be paying the universities to systematically replicate German cold-weather green products and technologies, and then dispersing the technologies to community economic development co-ops to produce and market here.

For example, why not use UM materials scientists (at the Home Ec school) to develop street and sidewalk paving that can better adjust to the expansions and contractions attendant extreme temperatures and/or floodplain substrate--instead of keeping the local concrete companies on the constant teat of public pavement patching? (Concrete production is an environmental nightmare.)

Ray Chan at Woodanchor is a photographer, designer and website developer for hire as well.

Other salvaged-home resources in Winnipeg include:

The Old House Revival Company, 324 Young St. N. Old lead-painted doors in various odd sizes, and antique furniture and household doo-dads. A bit dear.

The Salvage Supermarket at 1042 Oxford Street West.

Habitat for Humanity's ReStore at 60 Archibald Street. Big picture windows and a whole lotta slum-living junk.

and...at 305 McKay Ave., Northern Lights cedar hot tubs. Uh, they are also wood, they are also in Winnipeg, and I'd like a cedar hot tub. Because Winnipeg has some shitty, shitty weather. (But not the summer 2011 - winter 2012, when the weather was great, and the carnivorous bug biomass mysteriously and thankfully absent! ...Good weather, one out of every three years. Can humans recuperate on that?)