Interview with Doug Kehler

Tell us a little about your early years.  Did you grow up in this area?

Our family ran a small beef farm a few miles south of Steinbach, near a place called Friedensfeld.  In high school I enjoyed the shop program and especially enjoyed carpentry and construction.  My Dad encouraged me by purchasing lumber and letting me build sheds and shelters and other stuff on the farm.

Coming out of high school, I worked at the ice rink in Mitchell for a couple years. The rink is the social center for Mitchell. I made strong connections with people there and got to know the Peters family well.  They were big into hockey.  My youngest sister was good friends with Tanya (Peters) Bachmeier, having gotten to know each other through ringette.  Nevin Bachmeier was always around the rink too, with his brothers playing a lot of hockey.

You’ve got a close connection to Haiti, and it has a big place in your life. Why is that?

In 2017 a friend of our family went down to Haiti to start a foster home, because there were lots of kids on the streets without parents or anyone to care for them.  A bunch of us went down to help them get set up.  I spent a couple weeks building furniture and doing repairs.  Seeing the situation there, first-hand, was eye-opening.  We adopted a boy and a girl, and it took a while for them to get here.  She’s 14 years old and doing great.  Like a typical girl her age, her friends mean everything to her.  Our boy is 17 and he impresses us, more mature and wiser than his age, and making good choices.

What are some of the challenges you face in your work?

People: finishing work is demanding and you’re doing a lot of the same thing, but you need to keep on top of it, maintaining a high standard.  Not everyone is up for that.

The other challenge is the size of the jobs we’re doing, the overall project size as well as the individual pieces, both keep getting bigger.  When our finishing shop was built in 2018, it seemed large, but we now need more space.  Case in point – we currently have a job with pieces so big and heavy they can’t be handled in the finishing shop. We’re working on them in the Production Shop, which is kind of bunging up their workflow. Instead of handheld sanders, we’re using floor sanders!  The pieces are wider and longer than a lane in a bowling alley!

What surprises you most about what you do now, and what you’ve learned in your job?

When I think about what I did before, construction and concrete forming, and what I do now, working with colours, that’s kind of amazing.  Like a lot of guys, my wife would let me know that sometimes my clothing choices were hard on the eyes, “So, you’re wearing those two together!?”  And now, customers come in with a colour they want matched, and I’m telling them, so that’s a warm brown colour and to get that on douglas fir, which has a red undertone, we’ll need to pull in some green…”  For an old construction hand, that’s probably been my biggest learning curve. Go figure how that ever happened!