Making memories — one build at a time

Feel the cold. Watch the breath hang in the air after each exhale. Throw another log on the fire and wait for the cabin to get to room temperature.

Many people picture summer when they think about going to the lake, but Glen Veenstra has winter in mind when he remembers the time he spent as a child at his grandparents’ cabin on White Lake in the Whiteshell Provincial Park.

When Veenstra was a boy, he and younger brother Josh would visit the cabin with their grandfather in the middle of winter. It was winterized, but there was no heat source when no one was there, so after the three arrived at 8 or 9 in the morning, they spent the day getting the space to a reasonable temperature.

“You literally had to wear your snow pants and winter boots in the cottage until at least one o’clock in the afternoon just to be able to get the fire going enough to take the edge off,” says Veenstra, 44.

Fishing in the spring, waterskiing in the summer, hunting in the fall — all are activities Veenstra enjoyed at the cabin when he was growing up.

But on a Friday morning in October, as he sits in his office at Pine Creek Homes — the homebuilding company he and Josh co-own — he’s remembering those days he shared in the dead of winter with family.

For more than 40 years, Pine Creek has built custom homes and cabins in Winnipeg and surrounding areas.

Whenever the business is building a cabin, Veenstra thinks about how special being at the lake was when he was a child. Everyone builds cabins for different reasons, he says, but at the end of the day, if you have children or grandchildren, that property is going to help create priceless memories.

“For kids to be able to grow up having those experiences out in the woods, on the water, on the dock, making friends out there, maybe having some different freedoms out there than you could give a kid in the city … it’s really impactful,” Veenstra says.

“So when we build cottages for people … I just know that those kids are going to very likely get the same type of experience that I had as a kid.”

Craftsmanship, attention to detail and excellence are core values at the company, which Glen and Josh’s father, Jasper, founded in 1978 as Veenstra Homes.

The brothers grew up on the job site, mucking out basements and extracting nails from forming. Eventually, after high school graduation, they moved on to framing houses, operating equipment and serving as lead carpenters.

In the 1990s, Jasper’s brother, John, a talented cabinetmaker, travelled to South Carolina to take a course in timber framing.

He returned to Winnipeg and became Jasper’s partner. They changed the company’s name to Pine Creek and began crafting distinctive homes characterized by heavy timber elements.

Glen and Josh were drawn to the craft, dedicating many hours after school to carefully carving timbers in the Pine Creek workshop.

The brothers took over ownership of the company in 2012. Today, Pine Creek Homes employs 17 people and is headquartered in a 4,000-square-foot building on Winnipeg’s eastern boundary in the Rural Municipality of Springfield (904 Redonda St.).

The homes range in price from $700,000 to $5 million and the company takes on 10 projects annually. That cap ensures a good workflow so employees and subcontractors don’t get backed up, and helps the company deliver homes on time and on budget, Pine Creek says.

The design process typically takes nine months. Once the shovels are in the ground, a build usually takes nine months to a year-and-a-half. This gives Glen and Josh, who are involved with every project, time to create strong relationships with their clients.

The brothers know there’s a lot of trust involved when someone hires Pine Creek to build their dream home. There are hundreds of decisions that need to be made and the company has an in-house design team to help people along the way.

Hank and Susan Sprong appreciated the guidance they received when they hired Pine Creek in 2018 to build their cabin near Kenora, Ont., on Dogtooth Lake.

The self-described outdoorsy Selkirk couple had long planned to spend their retirement years at the lake, and were impressed with what they saw when they encountered Pine Creek at a trade show.

They hired the company to build their first and only cabin — a 1,200-square-foot hybrid timber frame with two bedrooms and two bathrooms.

“They never made us feel like we were taking up too much of their time,” Susan says.

“We’ve seen their book that they put out, with all the different builds they’ve done,” Hank adds. “Ours is certainly not the biggest cabin (they’ve built), but I believe that they treat everybody with that same respect no matter how much money you’re spending with them.”

More than four years after they got the keys, the Sprongs say they couldn’t be happier.

“It was our goal, it was our dream, that’s what we wanted to do — retire out at the lake — and they brought our dream to fruition for us,” Hank says.

According to Glen, another core value at Pine Creek Homes is to make every day better than yesterday.

If a client hires the company a second time, the customer experience and end product should be better than it was the first time around, Veenstra says. If they aren’t, then Pine Creek Homes hasn’t done its job.

“That’s what defines success for me: we always want to be making it better and improving,” he says.

Investing in employees and helping them succeed is what Veenstra most enjoys about his work. To that end, he’s excited the company is planning to add six employees to the team next year.

“I just like seeing other people thrive,” he says. “A company is only ever as good as the people in it.”

aaron.epp@freepress.mb.ca