Laura Burton-Bloom
When home renovators and fiancées Heather Lidberg and Alika Autran packed up their silver trailer with the tools from their construction business to leave Vancouver two years ago, they were hoping to reconnect with a sense of community they could no longer find in the big city.
“Community is very important to us,” says Autran, who grew up in the West Island. “We were paying $1600 for a 300-square-foot apartment in Vancouver.”
“That kind of cost of living kills communities,” Lidberg explains. “Coming back to a rural community was really important for us. It offered financial independence and the chance to reconnect to the earth and look back to our ancestors.”
Autran, an actor as well as a carpenter, and Lidberg, a Canadian Forces veteran and the daughter of a Saskatchewan cattle farmer, took their trailer across Canada performing custom, eco-friendly home renovations before purchasing property in Elgin in July 2020, where they fell in love with the area immediately.
“[The Chateauguay Valley] is such a great place. We drove through Ormstown when we first arrived in Quebec and could immediately see ourselves there. The architecture is beautiful. Time has stopped here a little bit,” says Autran.
Before crossing the Quebec border, the entrepreneurs spent time in Ontario developing their progressive home renovation enterprise, NOVA Women Builders, an inclusive platform that promotes sustainable home construction and advancing women in the trades.
“Carpentry and construction is the last industry for women to break into. Right now it’s only 4 per cent of women in the trades. We can bring it to 40 per cent,” says Autran.
“Nova is a platform for many things, not just building,” Lidberg adds. “It’s for like-minded allies to come together to create renovations that are more environmentally sound while preserving the community ideas we believe in: equality, promoting women in the industry and creating a space for that to thrive.
“When people renovate with us, it’s a whole community experience.”
As co-owners, Autran and Lidberg bring a unique mix of business acumen, technical expertise and creativity to Nova. The professional carpenters have a combined 21 years of experience in home renovations and film industry construction, while Lidberg is also a seasoned educator who recently started teaching carpentry at the Chateauguay Valley Career Education Centre in Ormstown.
“Moving here and finding the carpentry school has been like winning the lottery in a way,” says Lidberg. “The teachers there are very passionate, very diverse in the industry and very committed to creating really rad carpenters!
“It’s the only anglophone carpentry program in Quebec, so people come from all over. The teaching staff really reflects that.”
With Nova so far only operational in Ontario, Lidberg and Autran are anxious for their Quebec licensing to clear so they can start meeting the huge provincial demand for skilled tradespeople and accessible, affordable home construction. “It’s been an amazing feat to get through the system to open up to the Quebec market,” says Lidberg.
Navigating Quebec bureaucracy isn’t the only challenge they’ve faced; the women were recently victims of a crime that dealt them a shocking blow. The same trailer that carried their lives across Canada was stolen from their home in Elgin, complete with their business’s entire inventory of tools and equipment worth over $40,000.
The regional police are investigating the crime. The trailer was found abandoned and burned in Godmanchester but the thief is still at large and none of the stolen items have been recovered.
“It was our whole lives in there. It’s everything we have.” says Autran. “To have someone literally drive away with it in minutes is devastating.”
However, they each acknowledge an unexpected silver lining. The community they were hoping to find immediately surrounded them with support.
“We might have gotten robbed but, my gosh, the people in the area stood up and came to our door,” says Lidberg. “They didn’t know us from anyone but they brought us food and helped us set up a security system to make sure nothing like this will ever happen again,” Autran explains.
While the couple are hopeful that insurance will help them recoup some of the cost of their tools, they accept there are some things that can’t easily be replaced.
“In the trades, it’s hard enough to get your size 7.5 foot in the door without someone driving off with your boots, extra small gloves and custom-sized toolbelt,” Autran says.
Lidberg adds, “But what’s not going to kill us is making us stronger; I’m not going to stop fighting. This is not the end. This will only fuel our fire to get women in trades. It will not kill our spirit.”