Eric Goodwill has spent more than three decades crawling under Vancouver decks, and he can usually tell you what’s wrong before he picks up a tool.
“Rot almost never starts where you can see it,” he says. “It starts where water sits and nobody looks. By the time a board feels soft under your foot, the problem is usually five years old.”
Goodwill founded Renaissance Solutions Painting & Carpentry in Vancouver in 1992. What began as a painting company grew into something less common: a crew that handles both the carpentry and the finishing – the structure and the surface – on the same job. In a trade economy that keeps pushing specialists into narrower lanes, Renaissance went the other way.
That decision came from watching homeowners get stuck between contractors. A carpenter rebuilds the deck, then leaves. A painter shows up weeks later, finds the wood too wet to stain, and the finger-pointing starts. “The gap between trades is where jobs go wrong,” Goodwill says. “So we closed the gap.”
The discipline of doing it right
Vancouver is a hard city on wood. The coastal rain works on cedar siding, deck boards, and porch posts for eight months of the year. Goodwill’s crew has completed more than 185 deck repair and restoration projects across the city, and the ones that last share the same trait: somebody respected the conditions.
Ask him about staining a deck and you get specifics, not slogans. Wood moisture under 20 percent. Application on a cloudy day when it won’t flash-dry. Prep that takes longer than the finish coat. “Nobody drives by and compliments your moisture reading,” he says. “But that’s the part that decides whether the stain lasts two years or seven.”
It’s an unglamorous philosophy – that the invisible work is the real work – and it extends to how he runs the company. The crew that shows up is the crew he trained. Longtime team members lead their own projects. Clients deal with people whose names they know.
What holds up
Thirty-plus years in, Goodwill measures the business less by growth than by callbacks – the good kind. Repeat clients whose houses he has painted twice, a decade apart. Referrals from a deck rebuilt in one neighbourhood leading to a porch three doors down.
“A deck is a simple thing to judge,” he says. “Either it’s solid in ten years or it isn’t. You can’t talk your way around that. I think that’s why I’ve stayed with this work – it keeps you honest.”
Renaissance Solutions Painting & Carpentry provides residential painting, custom carpentry, deck and porch construction, and finishing services across Vancouver, Burnaby, Richmond, North Vancouver, West Vancouver, and New Westminster.
Renaissance Solutions Painting & Carpentry 1892 West Broadway, Suite 200, Vancouver, BC V6J 1Y9. Website is renaissancepainting.ca
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