Just north of Trapper Bob\u2019s Farm, I find my way to the residence and home office of Steve Steinberg, owner of The (Original) Fence & Deck Centre. Although it is a chilly March afternoon and there\u2019s snow still in the bush, there is a hustle and bustle of activity around his parking court. Apparently, a small crew is busy developing a vendor stage set for the Backyard Living Expo in Toronto.<\/p>\n
Steve is a \u201cworking senior\u201d, which is an inadvertent, recurrent theme in this month\u2019s OTR. I\u2019m sure he has slowed down a bit since the beginnings of the company – because someone teased him about a nap – but I get the impression that he still puts in long days consulting, designing and estimating. It is a lot of work for a closing ratio return of 25-40%. They\u2019ve also started \u2018pushing snow\u2019 again in the winter to glide more easily through the off-season.<\/p>\n
In March 1979, a young man by the name of Geoff, fresh out of Ryerson, got started in a little summer venture he called The Fence Centre. His older brother Steve, while working full time elsewhere and caring for his firstborn (a baby boy named Adam), helped out on a very limited part time basis (he probably watched more than anything). That first year, knowing virtually nothing about building fences, and working out of their parents\u2019 driveway – to the everlasting dismay of their neighbours – the fledgling business still managed to turn a fair dollar, enough to pay for Geoff\u2019s car and a few other luxuries.<\/p>\n
Emboldened by modest success, the following spring the brothers went into it full time,
\nand off they flew. Working out of a rented 12\u2019 x 12\u2019 storage shed in a tiny lumber yard in Richmond Hill, they quadrupled their business. They stuck with building fences, because honestly, that\u2019s all they knew how to do, until July of 1980, when a customer who had just purchased a wood fence from Steve asked if he could build them a deck. Reluctantly, Steve took the job, and Geoff hunted for someone who knew how to do it. Eventually, he found a friend of a friend whose cousin\u2019s uncle was a carpenter from \u201cthe old country\u201d. He took on the job, showed the boys what materials were needed and how to build it, and suddenly they were in the deck business. From there, the brothers made it their business to learn how to build decks.<\/p>\n
Today\u2019s company can proudly look back on 40 seasons of design and innovation and more than 12,000 installations (you read that correctly). It was the very first deck company in Toronto and is still one of the most respected. Its designs pioneered Toronto\u2019s style, and virtually everybody in the GTA has felt this influence. In fact, more than a dozen current companies, large and small, are owned by installers originally trained at The Fence & Deck Centre.<\/p>\n
Eventually, the deck side of the business became so important that the company was renamed \u201cThe Fence & Deck Centre\u201d. That\u2019s been their name ever since. The office was located on Langstaff in Thornhill until they moved about 10 years ago to Warden Avenue near Pine Orchard. With Canada Post\u2019s past practices, they and their neighbours were labelled as residents of Newmarket, but now they are rightfully recognized as residents of Whitchurch-Stouffville.<\/p>\n
Steve said that managing labour with a seasonal business like this is tough \u2013 hiring and laying off people on an annual basis is unnecessarily difficult. Instead, they subcontract jobs to crews, which some people might be uncomfortable with. \u201cIt is not like that\u201d, says Steve, \u201csubcontracted doesn\u2019t mean inexperienced. Some of these crews have been with us for 15 years. I pay enough to have high expectations \u2013 if they do a poor job, I\u2019ll pull them off in middle of a project and get it right.\u201d Permanently with the company are Steve\u2019s sons Adam, 40, who works in sales, and Noah, 32, who coordinates crews and materials. When a job begins, the Fence & Deck folks have all the materials delivered to the site. They manage as many as 7-8 crews a summer, building about 100 decks or more. Steve says he\u2019s on the road a lot in season doing estimates: \u201cIt is an 80-hour work week, no way around it.\u201d Each design takes time, as he may need to design a couple of budgeting options, and then each may need to be priced as wood or composite, with different types of railing details, etc. It goes on and on.<\/p>\n
Steve says that there are respectable deck builders out there and less so respectable deck builders. Quality is important: \u201cI\u2019ll build a deck with 12\u201d footings and 16\u201d joists, while others may slide by with a 6\u201d footer and 24\u201d joists. The deck has to be connected into the frame of the house, not just to the veneer,\u201d he said. He buys 10\u201d lag bolts by special order just for attaching decks to houses \u2013 these aren\u2019t typically available in box stores.<\/p>\n
Steve speaks proudly about an 1,800 square foot deck he built. \u201cIt is gorgeous \u2013 built out of cedar with an outdoor bar with a stone top. I went overboard with detailing, making the client very happy.\u201d However, he didn\u2019t get fully paid for that job, which he says, unfortunately happens.<\/p>\n
After a couple hours into the interview, Steve relaxes and talks about being born and raised in Toronto. His father was German, and mother was English. Before 1936, his father had been on the German Olympic Swim Team, but things were to change. His father was put in a camp at Buchenwald. Luckily, a relative was able to \u201cbuy him out\u201d before the Nazis started killing people in that camp; however, his savior later repaid this act with her life. He escaped to England, where he and other Jews were housed in \u2018refugee camps\u2019. They were later loaded onto boats to be shipped to Canada or Australia \u2013 as prisoners.<\/p>\n
As reported in the Montreal Gazette (30 JE 18), \u201cIn a little-known Canadian footnote to the Holocaust\u2026 2,300 Jewish boys and men sent to internment camps in Canada, including six in Quebec, sometimes housed with the very perpetrators of the crimes against them… Fights immediately broke out between the two groups, but the men were quickly separated by the camp guards, mostly Canadian army veterans of the First World War.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cThe only explanation for this about-face on the part of Britain was the sense of panic that had taken hold of London as German troops invaded Belgium, France and Holland. It was feared there might be people acting as spies or people willing to assist Britain\u2019s enemies in the event of an invasion,\u201d continued the article. Jews were interned in Canada for about 3 years until \u201cEngland stopped sending detainees to Canada and Australia in July 1940, after the Arandora Star, an ocean liner transporting German and Italian internees and POWs was torpedoed by a German U-boat on its way to Newfoundland.\u201d<\/p>\n
Steve\u2019s father was later sent back to England. The Allies in England had then decided he was a resource for translating German. He met Steve\u2019s mother in England. \u201cMy father was an Engineer, they came to Canada for good in 1949.\u201d The very country that had interned him. Steve concluded the interview with \u2013 \u201cMy father didn\u2019t talk about those days very much.\u201d With Spring in the air, let the conversation turn back to decks.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"featured_media":835,"template":"","acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/stouffville.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/spotlight\/834"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/stouffville.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/spotlight"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/stouffville.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/spotlight"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stouffville.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/835"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/stouffville.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=834"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}