Cleaning of a beautiful historic church building

A few minutes from our Warehouse, which is on Schoolhouse Street in Coquitlam, is Our Lady of Lourdes Church, on Laval Square.  It’s a heritage site that occupies the entire center of an oval street.  It’s truly a beautiful spot, made more beautiful by the lofty buildings. In 1909 volunteer workers were able to celebrate the first Christmas Mass in the church they had erected there.

Heritage buildings are a joy.  Our company gives good value to them by using gentle non-damaging systems, and brilliant cleaning that lasts a long time.  This is particularly valuable and important with heritage buildings.  They need TLC.  To clean the 3-building group, we used gentle products that do lasting cleaning. That’s through science instead of brute force!  When there is long lasting cleaning, there will be less cleaning, which gives both economy and less wear and tear to the building.  In a place with lots of visitors through the week, it’s less disturbance as well.

Aged buildings are special because they have stood the test of time. Most buildings become unmanageable mostly because of rot.  But rot can be kept at bay with the proper use of science and some attention to detail.  Mold, moss, algae, fungus, and lichen need an acid environment to thrive.  Changing the environment’s PH balance to alkali does miracles to keep destructive biotic community well under control. That’s what we do.

Is it ok to charge a non-profit religious society and make a profit from it?  The answer to that is up to the individual.  We do philanthropy jobs for good causes, but this one just received a “Ministry Discount” because the job size was significant, and we need to maintain a positive cash flow.

Profit is often seen as some kind of selfishness, but the very definition of good business is to make a healthy profit and grow.  By so doing, a business does a lot of good for the community.  Paying fair wages to employees so they can live happy and healthy lives.  Purchasing equipment and supplies helps other companies be strong.  Giving honest value to customers and healthy economic benefits genuinely helps the entire community be successful.

By doing what we do – “We serve others to make their lives better” – we also protect our customers from unskilled, uneducated, and sometimes unscrupulous people, who could bring various kinds of harm.

It was a privilege to serve Our Lady of Lourdes Church, and we feel truly honoured.  We also have two Buddhist places of worship in our customer base, and churches of many kinds.  Differing world views should not, we feel, make us anxious, but are an opportunity, rather, to build a strong community, and share our strengths.  There are shared values upon which democracy was built.  Like we treasure the value in the building products we clean, we treasure the foundations of our free country.