Greener Homes off to greener pastures
The Canada Greener Homes Grant, the grant no one needed in our industry at the time, is gone. Now we do need it and don’t have it. This has been a common theme throughout our membership: the bad timing of programs like these. As everyone looks back, the grant questions abound – good, bad, indifferent. But it was there and just not what our members wanted at the time.
So where do we go?
Enter the Canada Greener Homes Loan program. “The Canada Greener Homes Loan offers interest-free financing to help Canadians make their homes more energy efficient and comfortable. The loan can help you finance eligible retrofits that are recommended by an energy advisor and that have not yet been started.”
The gist of it is a maximum $40,000 loan with a minimum of $5,000 interest-free for 10 years. Sounds great for the consumer but here’s the crux for SAWDAC members working with this program and their clients: you don’t get paid right away once the job is complete and can be left waiting for funding for two to six months! So our business partners are left holding a large chunk of costs for that time. To make matters worse, some of our members found out about this after they did the work and ordered the materials and paid their employees. We notified our members of this at the time, but the message hasn’t always gotten through. Again, we go back to the original question, where do we go or what do we do? SAWDAC has worked with our members through our RenoPlan program to secure bridge loads for that time frame so that cash flow doesn’t become a problem. We see this as a needed step to help our members through tough times. We have help, you just need to email us to get it: jason@sawdac.com.
Coming events
The SAWDAC golf tournament will be Sept. 11 this year at Turtle Creek in Milton, Ont., once again. Email us to make sure you have a spot as we sold out last year and the weather promises to cooperate again as we’re looking for another sellout.
We have partnered up with Conestoga College to work with them on training carpentry students proper window and door installation using the Window Wise installation process. So we are looking forward to hopefully having these graduates join the window and door installation family in the near future.
SAWDAC is relaunching our vinyl siding training so make sure to look for the coming announcements. If you want to get ahead of the curve, please email us to get on the list.
Chris George
Freddie Hamilton
Jennifer Beingessner-Dietrich
Robbin Lindsay
Board update
Two thousand twenty-four is here and we have a new president and two new board members. We are happy to announce that Chris George from the Douglas Window and Door Group has stepped into this role. We look forward to having Chris guide the ship with his 20-plus years in the industry, from learning to install right up to owning the company and everything that goes with that over the years. With that said we would like to say thank you to Jennifer Beingessner-Dietrich from Beingessner Home Exteriors for her service as president over the last term. We have added two new board members: Robbin Lindsay from R. Lindsay Sales Solutions and Freddie Hamilton (not Fred Hamilton) from Lincoln Exteriors in Calgary. Robbin represents top-quality building products manufacturers, providing technical, design and sales solutions to architects, designers, distributors, retailers, general contractors and trades. Lincoln Exteriors specializes in windows, doors, siding, soffit, fascia, gutters and residential roofing.
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