Community

Grand Opening of the Cortes Wood Makerspace

On Saturday, December 6, more than three dozen people gathered for the grand opening of the Cortes Wood Makerspace, in Mansons Landing. 

Shopmaster Hannu Huuskonen explained,    “A lot of people need to do stuff in a woodworking shop and not everyone needs to build themselves a shop, especially big enough to do certain things with it properly equipped. It’s a big outlay of money. So it makes total sense to have people be able to come to a common space.

View from the tablesaw

Cortes Currents: How many people have signed up so far? 

Hannu Huuskonen: “I think we have 11 or 12 signed up at the moment. There’s few who just haven’t gone through the process yet.”

Cortes Currents: Are there any projects underway? 

Hannu Huuskonen: “At the moment, the project has been to get everything ready for this.  We have worked for Rainbow Ridge since the summer. The Rainbow Ridge Project has used it for at least 50-60 hours already.”

Last February: Hannu showing the place where a covered porch was to be built.

Cortes Currents: Hannu remembers people talking about the need for a makerspace more than twenty years ago, but it started becoming a reality through a Cortes Community Forest Co-operative initiative.

David Shipway, President of the Community Forest Co-operative said,   “We started the whole value added discussion about three years ago, got some funding and hired those folks from Harrop Proctor up in the Kootenays to stickhandle the process. We came up with two options: actually doing something ourselves as a co-op or else funding entrepreneurial activity. We ended up choosing the latter, just to keep our lives from getting complicated on a volunteer board. This is the manifestation of it. Sadhu knows more about the history of buying this property. It seemed like a great opportunity so our co-op put some money into getting it all set up.” 

Sadhu Johnston, Executive Director of the Cortes Community Housing Society, added, “The Cortes Housing Society bought this property, which we call Orchard Village, and it has a big shop in it. So we were wondering what to do with the shop space. We put out a tender or a call for proposals on Tideline, had some inquiries and the most exciting interesting one was from Hannu. He said, ‘let’s create a community wood shop.’”

The covered porch where people can build kitchen cabinets or a tiny home.

“ I’m personally very excited about it and I think for the island it’s an important step forward. The Community Forest Co-op developed a value added strategy a couple years ago, and one of the recommendations was to create a maker space where people could work with wood. From the housing society perspective, we know that lots of people are trying to build tiny homes and are renovating or building their own homes.  This is a place that they can come and build kitchen cabinets or even park a tiny home and build it here. That’s what the awning on the side is for, so that someone could pull their trailer in there and build a tiny home right undercover with access to all the tools. We expect to welcome one or two or three tiny home builders a year.” 

Just prior to the meeting

Cortes Currents: This was actually similar to a project Sadhu was involved in while he was living in Vancouver from 2012 to 2020: 

Sadhu Johnston: “I didn’t have space for a wood shop and a lot of other people didn’t. So I set up a wood shop co-op there, and this is loosely modelled after that. It was a really successful place that I used to go after work and I would work until the wee hours. I built a couple canoes, ukuleles and other instruments, as well as furniture for my home.” 

“I just love being in community and working on wood projects. With the amount of wood we have here on Cortes and the number of crafts people that can’t afford to equip a big shop for themselves or have ready access to great tools, this will hopefully be a real resource for the community and entrepreneurs and home builders and DIYers for generations to come.” 

 “It’s taken us about a year to work out all the details, meanwhile Hannu has been scouring the island to get donated tools or purchasing some tools.” 

Mark Lombard was the General Contractor for the Makerspace.  

“When the housing society purchased the property, the previous owner had this shop that he used as a storage room and did some work on stuff inside, but the floor wasn’t level. It wasn’t insulated. There was no siding. It was just Tyvek. None of these covered porches were here. So I designed an outside finish for the building and organized to get the work done. We put a covered porch on both sides. On the other side, it’s big enough that you could start building a tiny home under it or some other bigger project that you could pay a nominal rental fee for. On this side, we built this really custom lumber rack so that there’s lots of space to store all mixes of lumber in a really good way.”

Cortes  Currents: Are there any special highlights? 

“The in-floor heating is one of the main highlights for sure. We levelled the floor so now our tables and everything are dead level. We put in four inches of insulation and a really simple hydro heating system. Now it’s a lovely warm temperature with no moving air.” 

“The other highlight to make a really functional woodworking shop is to have a nice lumber rack filled up with wood from the house that was deconstructed on Potlatch Road and donated to the housing society.

We built similar racks at the Rainbow Ridge property in each of the storage buildings. This is all lumber that’s for the use of the maker space, and a lot of it is off cuts that came from building over at Rainbow Ridge. Not quite short enough to throw out or to make into kindling, but still long enough to make a really nice woodworking process.”

Bench and miter saw
Planer and floor heat system
Drill press
Drill press and ban saw

In the podcast above, Hannu takes us on a tour of the tools available at the Makerspace.

Ken Hanuse leads the chant, beating on two boards from the Makerspace, while the first two local residents help carrying out the smudging ceremony

Ken Hanuse gave a traditional Klahoose First Nation welcome song at the Grand Opening of the Makerspace. There was a smudging ceremony, in which the building, tools and everyone at the opening was cleansed. Following which, everyone danced around the interior parameter of the building to a First Nations chant. After his segment was through, Ken returned the cedar boughs used during the smudging ceremony to the tree they were taken from.  

After the smudging ceremony, the cedar boughs were returned to the foot of their tree.

Hannu and Sadhu both gave welcoming speeches, after which Hannu, Mark Braaten and Zach Sukuweh all performed.  Refreshments were served.

Food and liquid refreshments were served

Links of Interest: 

All undesignated photos by Roy L Hales

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