Paul Meyers interviews Kimberly Lediett and Trevor Hurd from Coat of Arms Wood Care Professionals
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Paul Meyers (00:00):
Hey, Hey, Hey everybody. Here we are with Kimberly and Trevor Hurd from Coat of Arms Wood Care Professionals. Good morning. How are you guys?
Kimberly & Trevor (00:09):
Good morning, Paul. We’re great. Thanks. Good morning.
Paul Meyers (00:12):
Okay, thanks. Hey, listen. Thanks for hopping on. I know this is sometimes last minute and you know, you’re wondering, well, what are we going to do? What kind of questions? We’re just here to talk about your business. This is, this is going to be posted in support of local business in Northern Ontario. These are changing and challenging times. So anything we can do to kind of get your message out there and get your service out there. And that’s what we’re here for. So Coat of Arms Wood Care Professionals. Tell us a little bit about what this business is.
Kimberly & Trevor (00:45):
It’s more of a beautification business. Paul, we restore log homes, cedar homes, barns decks, fences, you name it. We make them look pretty again.
Paul Meyers (01:00):
Okay. That’s awesome.
Kimberly & Trevor (01:02):
Yeah. As opposed to being all gray and black in that
Paul Meyers (01:06):
Yeah, The sun, wears the wood. You guys come in behind it. And what does your process look like? How do you make it? How do you beautify that home?
Kimberly & Trevor (01:14):
We would either use pressure washers or a, we do a corn cob blasting, which is, which is like sandblasting, except we use a corn.
Paul Meyers (01:27):
Why?
Kimberly & Trevor (01:28):
It’s got a cutting edge on it that doesn’t harm the wood.
Paul Meyers (01:56):
And it’s also more environmentally friendly as well, right?
Kimberly & Trevor (02:01):
Yeah, absolutely. The product that we use, we lay down a whole bunch of tarps, so you’re not left with all this material leftover and we do a full cleanup of the job site when we’re done. But anything that ends up on your plants or in your grass or on your driveway, it’s fully biodegradable and it’s not harmful to animals or anything. So it’s great. And it’s almost like instead of using the oscillating hand sanders, a lot of people do that. It’s like pushing it through a pressure washer, but with air it’s not water it’s, all grit and everything.
Paul Meyers (02:47):
Yeah. Okay. I pressure washed my deck several times and it does a much better job pressure washing it than it does with most other methods. So, okay. So it’s not just for homes or is it cabins? Is it like what types of, products are you guys doing this process?
Kimberly & Trevor (03:09):
So for the cob blasting, it’s generally on log homes or wood sided homes. We have done furniture with it, like old when you see the old handmade rockers or, you know, the porch chairs that are hanging from the chains we can, we can use the same process. You can cob blast it. Like if we’re already there doing it, we generally try and pick a little side project to do as well. So one of the places that we cob blasted was we work with a lot of generational homes. So with grandma and grandpa who originally purchased it, and it’s been passed down to mom and dad. And then so sometimes throughout that process, the maintenance hasn’t been maintained on it. So you get 20, 30 years’ worth of weathering and animal feces and bats and raccoons and stuff like that.
Kimberly & Trevor (04:14):
So you want to clean up that stuff off of, and it’s amazing some of the stuff that we’ve been able to just transform it’s like night and day, it’s just taking a facelift off the top end and turning it brand new. You get fresh woods. So you get the, you get the full life of the stain when you get to bring it down to the bare wood. So you’re not just layering it on a decade of product. Then, then you’re not going to get the adhesion that you want. And then your product, you know you’re redoing it every two years and you shouldn’t have to, you should be able to, you know, take on a big project that for 20 or 30 years and be able to get a good five, seven, almost 10 years out of the project before you have to recoat.
Paul Meyers (05:05):
So it’s about bringing the wood back to the natural state and then you guys spray the stain back on, is that how it’s done, or is it hand painted?
Kimberly & Trevor (05:16):
Some people have used stain like sprayers and it’s, you can use it as long as your back brush, but we found you get the most out of the product when you put it on with a brush. Old school, you know, it’s labor-intensive but it does what it’s supposed to and you get your value out of it versus because when you, when you spray it on, it doesn’t necessarily penetrate the wood the way it’s supposed to, to get your full life out of the product. And that’s, that’s at the end of the day if you’re going to hire us to come in and all this money on labor, you’re going to want that product to have its full life value. Right.
Paul Meyers (06:05):
You’re a seasonal business clearly.
Kimberly & Trevor (06:09):
No, actually we run full year. So on the exteriors, we are seasonal. Obviously, we can’t put a stain on in January. It just doesn’t work. It’s like trying to put tar on without any heat. It just doesn’t work. But we do interiors as well. So log homes that have sat there for a while, either if they don’t have the right moisture content, then you can get big checks in the logs and if you have that, then you’re, you’re losing your heat value. Log homes always have a super great, heating, cooling system in themselves because their logs, they breathe, right. If they’re not maintained properly, then you lose that, our value on, on the log home.
Paul Meyers (06:59):
So what areas are you servicing? Is it Northern Ontario? It’s like, how far will you guys go from your location?
Kimberly & Trevor (07:07):
We’re pretty portable. We go where the work goes. So traditionally we’ve been Northern Ontario. We’ve had a lot of success in the West. So Blind River, Sioux St. Marie Echo Bay area. I’ve got family down that way. So it’s helped a lot of cottagers a lot of U.S. Citizens who have log homes up here who just didn’t know who to turn to. We were on a few of the referral sites for products. So the Permachink lifeline brand that we use frequently we’re on their site and with the Canadian log home supply out of Eganville where we get most of our product from we’re with them as well. So anybody who’s looking to the source or think that they want to do DIY and then find out how much and then go, Oh, we’re in over our heads kind of thing.
Paul Meyers (08:13):
So would you do more cob blasting than sandblasting? Is it about even split? And then why would you do cob versus sand?
Kimberly & Trevor (08:22):
So we don’t do sand at all. The sand is too abrasive and actually cuts into the word a lot, it just doesn’t work well. It’s a lot more aggressive Paul. #1 Cobb is a lot softer. It has a cutting edge on it, but it doesn’t actually tear the wood like sand would.
Paul Meyers (08:46):
Gotcha. Yeah, that makes sense. Okay. That makes sense. So you’re, and, and yeah, you’re not tearing the wood and you’re not breaking the wood down, you’re just cleaning the wood a lot gentler level.
Kimberly & Trevor (09:00):
Have you asked me just the surface? I mean, air pressure has a lot to do with that too. If, if your air pressure is really high, it’s going to cut a lot, a lot more aggressively. Typically we would start out at low, low numbers and work our way up until it actually does the job that we needed to do.
Paul Meyers (09:21):
Yeah. I can see a lot of cottagers using this process. Right. I mean, they want to enjoy their cottage. The last thing they want to do is is that. Trevor tell me, it’s not just you, that does this. You have a team that when you hit a property, there’s a bunch of you.
Kimberly & Trevor (09:35):
Yeah. On average and we’ve got two to three guys. I mean, the bigger the job, the more people we have.
Paul Meyers (09:45):
Typically if I’m looking at your Facebook page and I see an after picture, which looks gorgeous, how long would that have taken to do?
Kimberly & Trevor (09:55):
Depending on the size of the home and that, but it could be anywhere from a week to three weeks to a month.
Paul Meyers (10:02):
Wow. That’s awesome. I love it. I love it. I don’t know if you guys know the Facebook page I’m talking about, but it looks beautiful. It’s got the wrap-around balcony.
Kimberly & Trevor (10:13):
That was one of the clients that were out of the States. Who’s a generational again, his grandparents or his parents rather had the original cabin and he took the original cabin and put it on top of a garage and then built that log home for himself. That’s what happens. Same with a lot of things, we don’t maintain it. Right. It just sits because it looks good and we don’t really have to do anything. So it’s a lot of people don’t know vocally about us. Getting to seeing somebody or an after they’ve hired somebody else from out of town and then realize, Oh, you guys are here. I need, you know, an update on what’s going on, on my logs and stuff like that. And then find out, Oh, we could have saved ourselves thousands because we could have hired locally instead of other towns.
Paul Meyers (11:23):
That’s awesome. And COVID, we’re in, COVID, we’re locked down. How is that affecting you guys at this point? You’re probably not an essential service.
Kimberly & Trevor (11:35):
We’re on the borderline of the essential, because if you’re not maintaining your property or then if you get water damage, then there’s insurance and whatever. So we kind of fall in the construction. What we found a lot of people are very.
Paul Meyers (11:54):
They don’t want you in their house.
Kimberly & Trevor (11:55):
No, they don’t want you in their house. They don’t want you in their town. So traditionally we would go on a little trip, a family trip, and then we’d, you know, plunk in a cabin or a hotel or something. And then do our little drive around and pop flyers in mailboxes. And that’s just not acceptable right now. You know, you just don’t want to go into somebody else’s community physically. So we’re trying to do the flip. We’re trying to get it all digital. And we’re a little bit the old school.
Kimberly & Trevor (12:29):
Face-to-face the coffee dates, the Hey Joe from the hardware store recommended you and stuff. We’ve done a lot of word of mouth. So to get on to the digital age, to be able to have virtual conversations like this, or say, Hey, we’re in this area right now. We’re dealing with that with a lot of our U.S. Clients because they’re stuck. They can’t come up to their properties. So traditionally where they would have come up for Christmas or come up for their Thanksgiving to have a big family at the cottage in Canada, they can’t. So they rely on us to be able to go up to the cottage and see, Hey, no, everything’s good. And well, we’ll check in next year or check in the spring or so we’re available to do that. We’re trying to push our seasonal maintenance so that you’re on a list and you get a call every spring and say, Hey, you’re looking at this for this year. So yearly maintenance is a big thing with your log homes, you get bugs and whatnot. And if you’re not maintaining that, then it can in the long-term, it can cost you a lot of money, but in the short-term, if you, you know, just like your car.
Paul Meyers (13:45):
Yeah. That’s great, it’s a great idea. So really anybody that has a wood frame, a wood home getting it on a maintenance program seasonally can save them dollars down the road.
Kimberly & Trevor (14:09):
It’s night and day, it’s the difference of, you know, maintaining your oil in your car and you get the long long-term effects of it. It’s the same thing with your logs or your Cedar siding or your fence, or your deck, or your dock or your boathouse, you know, like all of those things, if you’re doing, and we find that a lot of people don’t do the planning for it. They kind of come up, they kind of wait until the sunny days and like, Oh, we should really do this. Or we should hire somebody. It’s like, well, in the summertime you have optimal days and then you have rain days. And that takes so half of your summer. And a lot of people don’t factor that in, or don’t consider that until they’re in it. So it happens that you say you have four months of weather to be able to actually yeah.
Paul Meyers (14:57):
Yeah. For sure. For sure. So how long have you guys been in business for?
Kimberly & Trevor (15:04):
That’ll be our eighth season.
Kimberly & Trevor (15:09):
Was a couple of years on his own before we met, and then I got holes into everything. So it’s been five years that I’ve been involved in. He was doing it on his own before that.
Paul Meyers (15:23):
Awesome. Well, listen, guys, thank you so much for hopping on again. We’re going to push this out to a bunch of different places and hopefully just get more awareness on, you know, what’s available for people with these types of products that you guys are there to service it and, um, make it last for many, many generations to come. So, um, thank you so much for popping on. I really appreciate it. And we’ll talk to you again.
Speaker 1 (15:51):
No problem. Thanks. Nice meeting you Trevor. Take care. Thank you. Thank you. Bye-bye.
Here is the audio version.