Orillia woodworking,room by room.

Orillia is home. The shop sits in town, which means a kitchen or wall unit for a house in the West Ward, the North Ward or out along Bayshore gets measured, built, finished and installed without a highway in between. If a reveal needs adjusting on install day, it goes back to the bench and comes back the same afternoon.

A lot of Orillia's housing stock is older brick and frame — homes near the downtown core and the lake that were built before drywall was flat and floors were level. That is where scribing matters most. Built-ins are sized to the room they are going into, not to a catalogue, so the crown meets the ceiling cleanly and the end panels sit tight to plaster that has moved for eighty years.

Newer homes on the north and west edges of town and the waterfront rebuilds along Couchiching and Simcoe are a different job: bigger open plans, taller ceilings, more glass. There the work is about proportion — making a library wall or a bar read as part of the architecture rather than furniture pushed against it.