Canadian history lives in a floor

Let’s say it’s the early 1800s and you’re standing in a dense forest of tall pines along the Ottawa River.

Maybe you have a crystal ball and you can see the years unfolding before you. You watch as, more than 150 years from now, thousands of those trees are recovered from the bottom of the river. You see the dawn of a company called Logs End. And you watch those logs become some of the most beautiful floors in the world.

Next you see those floors as part of magnificent projects by first-class designers and builders such as Lagois Design∙Build∙Renovate. (“Renovate?” you probably ask yourself. “Most of the houses in Ontario and Quebec haven’t even been built yet.”)

Logs End supplied the beautiful floors in the recent renovation of the Lagois offices.

Lumberjacks, horses and ice

It's rich Canadian history. The trees were cut in winter with axes, crosscut by teams of tough lumberjacks and pulled by horses or oxen, trucks and railway, to the edge of the Ottawa River.

As soon as the ice went out, fearless log drivers released the logs into the fast-moving waters. The drivers had to hop in a kind of dance from log to log on the river, despite storms, mosquitoes and terrible danger. Many lost their lives in the river’s swirling, dark depths. It’s no wonder they inspired Canadian stories, folklore and songs.

Like the drivers, every year many logs would slip under the water and disappear. From the 1830s until the end of river-logging, between 500 and 700 million logs are estimated to have gone to the bottom of the Ottawa River and its tributaries from Quebec.

Diving for heritage

Logs End is a Canadian owned-and-operated hardwood flooring company started in 1997 by a young and enthusiastic amateur diver called Gord Black. He would dive to the bottom of the river for the logs that were doomed in history not to finish their intended journey. His efforts resulted in the beginning of a unique company, now Canada’s leading supplier of historic old-growth flooring.

Since 1997, the history of these magnificent logs has changed again to keep up with the times.

“When we first started pulling the logs out of the river,” says Logs End Business Development Manager Steve McCord, “We were doing solid flooring. Now we do engineered wood.”

Strong layers

He explains the floors are cut into engineered lamellas, or layers. The top layer is created with heritage logs from the river.

The company is still doing recovery operations, but they have slowed down over the years and have become a full-service flooring store. The products now include white oak from Europe as well as, for example, Canadian hickory, maple, and birch. Much of the recovered wood now also goes into stunning fireplace mantels and pine paneling.

Most of the logs are pine. “But over the years we’ve pulled up white oak timbers, yellow birch, and different species like basswood,” Steve says.

A lasting legacy

The logs often create a kind of personal history for homeowners, especially for those who live in areas along the Ottawa River: Their floor has a story that now becomes part of their own heritage and legacy.

When Logs End brings in European white oak, it is finished in the company’s mill in Bristol. The mill has transformed over the years from a log-to-floor operation to a finishing plant where stain, finish, and colours are applied. The recovered logs are now sawn by a local company, and the wood arrives at Logs End as raw planks ready to be finished with Logs End’s own custom colours.

“So that way when our customers order,” explains Steve, “they pick their colours and their species and we mill up the order for them.” Then everything is pre-finished and ready to be delivered and installed.

The Lagois design team is familiar with Logs End products, so at a certain point in the Lagois design process Steve is part of the conversation. He goes to the site, measures it and discusses some options with the design team.

Homeowners want to know

“We love working with Lagois,” he says. “They’re a great family business, too, and we have a lot of commonalities with them in the way we both got started. We’ve grown together, you might say.”

He finds homeowners are more interested than ever in what will hold up the best in their home in the years to come. They want to know if a product will stand the test of time. He’ll ask questions about their lifestyle. Do they have children? Dogs? How will the space be used? What is the household traffic?

Steve knows the business from all sides. He began with Logs End when he was a university student pulling up the logs as a summer job. He transitioned into sales and worked in the store. He left to do project management and estimating in the electrical field, then returned to Logs End in a sales role again.

Logs End does “hundreds and hundreds” of floors a year all across Canada and some in the United States: “anywhere we can send them on a truck”, Steve says.

From start to finish

Installation is done by crews who work directly with Logs End. This means the company is there from beginning to end, from sourcing the product to colours, finishes and installation. Steve oversees it all.

At the end of a project, he does a “walkthrough” with homeowners to make sure not even the smallest detail was missed. Sometimes at that point, he says, customers fall in love with their flooring so much that they decide to do another room or rooms in the house.

Not only the customers fall in love with the finished result. Steve says neighbours and friends visit, fall in love with them too and immediately want to know how to get them for themselves.

“It’s really how our business works,” he says. “It’s through word of mouth. And trust.”