Month: December 2024

2024: A Year of Growth & Achievement

Posted on by Stacey

As 2024 draws to a close, it’s a perfect time to reflect on an extraordinary year for Cornerstone Timberframes. This year has been nothing short of transformative, filled with remarkable projects, personal celebrations, and significant achievements that highlight our collective growth as a company and as individuals.

In our production and finishing shops, we successfully brought to life an impressive array of projects, each showcasing the craftsmanship and dedication of our team. Among them were the Borys Cottage, Shoal Lake A-Frames, Southeast Event Centre, Churchill Wild, Perimeter Air Terminal Expansion, and the Minnewasta Clubhouse. These projects, along with countless others, have not only expanded our portfolio but also challenged us to push the boundaries of what’s possible in timber frame construction.

Our office was a hub of learning and connection this year. We embarked on a journey of education through Sandler Training and hosted several Lunch & Learn events with top industry leaders. Our Wine & Wood Shop Tours opened our doors to the public, offering a glimpse into our world and the work that we do in the production shop. Even a rain-soaked slow pitch tournament turned into a memorable team-building day at the CSTF shop!

Trade shows and conferences were abundant, providing platforms to share our expertise and learn from others in the industry. Our team made its mark at notable events such as the Portland Mass Timber Conference and Denver Mass Timber Group Summit, where we showcased insights on podcasts, delivered keynotes, and held workshops. Key events in Toronto, including the Wood Works Summit and Mass Timber Conference, further underscored our leadership in timber joinery design.

Beyond the professional sphere, we celebrated deeply personal milestones, with Jake, Matheus, Ben, Kevin, and Bobbi welcoming new babies into their families. These joyful arrivals remind us of what truly matters and inspire us to hold steadfast to our company’s core values of family and community.

Reflecting on the year, a consistent theme emerges: growth through challenge. We have continuously pushed ourselves beyond comfort zones, tackling “hard things” that have fostered team and individual development. Our successes are a testament to the dedication and resilience of the Cornerstone team.

Tanya and Nevin are incredibly grateful for each team member’s commitment to excellence and adaptability in the face of change. It’s because of our team that Cornerstone Timberframes continues to thrive and achieve its ambitious goals.

As we look to the future, let us carry this momentum forward, with the confidence that together, we can build extraordinary structures and enduring legacies!

Cheers to a prosperous 2025! Happy New Year!

Waste Reduction- A Golden Opportunity

Posted on by Gary Snider

In nature, waste from one life form always becomes food or building material for another in a continuous, efficient loop. In our modern human experience, waste is too often on a single-use, linear trip to Mt. Landfill, where it is stored forever.  To fix our waste problem, we need to find ways to better emulate nature.  For those who do, it’s a golden opportunity to achieve goodness on multiple bottom lines.

At Cornerstone we’re looking for ways to significantly reduce our waste streams.  The reasons are simple and several:

  • Our wood waste is valuable, representing thousands of dollars of purchases
  • Paying for waste to be taken away is a double loss
  • Recovering value from waste puts money back into our pockets
  • Reducing waste makes us more competitive
  • Environmental stewardship: we want to be good ancestors.

It’s important to remember that waste encompasses far more than the physical materials that might show up at a local landfill.  It can be excessive amounts of energy used to heat a workplace or power a machine. It can be found in suboptimal use of worker time, a dozen minor inefficiencies in a work process, or a missed interval of equipment maintenance.  All of these are wasteful and worthy of our efforts at reduction.

There are real and perceived barriers to addressing waste:

  • It’s faster and more convenient to simply throw it in the dumpster 
  • Setting up systems to reduce waste takes effort: planning and work.
  • It requires people to communicate, coordinate, and follow through.
  • The right tools are often not provided.
  • A first response is often: “No one has time for this!”

To get underway with our waste reduction plan, our first step is to do a complete audit of where our company currently produces waste, both physical and organizational.  The results will be used to build a Work Plan that will include regular check-ins to ensure we’re on track and adjusting things to work better as we go.

A priority is to address the largest sources of physical waste: 

  • Wood fiber (sawdust, chips, cut-offs) In 2025 we will begin to turn all our wood waste into energy to heat our buildings.  
  • Polypropylene lumber wrap (#5 plastic) from incoming lumber shipments will be baled and sent to a specialist recycling center that produces deck boards and other poly products.  Lumber wrap currently makes up 50% of our dumpster volume.

Our waste reduction marathon is underway.  An outline of our company’s waste reduction plan is available for viewing, here.

How we stumbled into being a diverse, equitable, inclusive employer.

Posted on by Gary Snider

A few weeks ago, I was in a session where a business leader was given several minutes to talk about whatever was on his mind. He described his concern that there was a surge in companies adopting Diversity, Equity and Inclusion policies (DEI). He felt this trend was evidence of “groupthink” that 1960’s term coined by John F Kennedy to describe how decision makers promoting the Bay of Pigs / Cuba invasion lost sight of alternatives and plunged forward on a disastrous course of action. His message was that DEI adopters are foolishly chasing a popular trend and are headed into trouble with dark consequences for society.  He couldn’t bring himself to define DEI or specify what those bad outcomes might be. I sensed he was holding back.  Perhaps he knew that saying more would expose his unfounded fears.

While he spoke, I thought about the changes I’ve witnessed at my workplace over the past several years.  Cornerstone started as a 100% traditional, macho-man timber frame shop that Tim the Toolman Taylor or even Archie Bunker would have loved.  It ran like that for 25 years. Now, it’s a place where more than half our employee group, including our CEO and lead timber framer, are women.  We also have Metis and Indigenous co-workers. Our worker morale and productivity are up, creative thinking and solutions abound, and our diverse workforce has put us on track to double our sales in just two years.  How did this happen?  First, some folks with bad attitudes found the exit door. We then invited a woman to try her hand at cutting joinery. When she succeeded beyond all expectations, it pushed us to consider the possibility that ‘other’ good people wanted to join us… people we had previously excluded. As the evidence mounted, we changed our old stereotype of who can be a timber framer, and we haven’t looked back.

As you can see, our transformation didn’t happen because we set out to be a diverse, equitable or inclusive company.  We dealt honestly with what we saw, the performance data and the positive “can do” attitude shift.  Our experience is that there is nothing to fear, only multiple good outcomes for employers, employees and customers.  After all, what is DEI when you really think about it?  It’s working cordially with people who don’t look like you or who may see things a little differently.  It’s about treating people fairly and allowing them to be fully part of your enterprise, with all the benefits and responsibilities.  It is saying yes to a virtuous cycle of learning, growing and re-imagining better ways to be.  Where is the danger?  Do we love our chains more?

I can’t resist smiling as I reflect on our DEI journey until I think about the personal and corporate goodness we could have missed if we never took that first step.

So, if this is groupthink, please tell me where I can find more!

You can find Cornerstone’s Diversity, Equity and Inclusion policy here!