Tools / Equipment Archives | Sweat Equity – The Grimsby Homebuilding Co-operative 1953

Silent video – Blake Footage – Shingling on Stewart Street

In this short clip, someone took John’s camera and filmed Wilf Worley (in white cap) and John Blake (end of clip) shingling houses . With the Niagara Escarpment […]

Co-op builders shingling the houses along Lakeside Drive in the early part of the build.

Although the co-operators did a lot of the grunt work, they learned and became very good at certain tasks. John Rowan with John Colleary (in white cap) who […]

Co-op sons collaborated as their fathers had done six decades earlier

The exhibit was designed to create the sense of being on a worksite in an unfinished house. Some of the wood was donated, and the framework sections were […]

Ingenuity and co-operation applied

With volunteer design and construction skills completed, others added their labour to build the exhibit. This echoed the tasks undertaken by their parents 60 years earlier. The magnitude […]

Shingling in the Lakedale Co-op

Some jobs were simply backbreaking and others required skill. Sometimes work could be dangerous. Supervisors and inspectors were on hand, but men who had never done construction found […]

Teamwork was key

Working 30 hours on the co-op site per week, over and above their regular jobs, the builders focused first on grunt work. Eventually, they took on some of […]

Sweat equity begins with land clearing

The men were so anxious to begin the building phase, they cleared the land themselves. Later, they would mix their own concrete, haul and lay bricks for basements […]

Father O’Brien and Father Sherlock

O’Brien and Sherlock had been introduced to co-operative methods a few years earlier, as students at St. Augustine’s Seminary, when Father Marrocco had come to lecture. After the […]