Build it and they will come.

After building Giggle Ridge Adventure Golf and relocating back to the Fraser Valley (after eighteen years on Vancouver Island) we found ourselves at a crossroads. For a time we seriously considered becoming a design studio only, leaving the construction of our projects to others. After much thought, I decided I couldn’t give up working with my hands as I enjoyed it so much. But if I was to continue building our complex projects I needed to do it much more efficiently. It was time to build the shop I had been dreaming of for the last twenty years. We purchased a small acreage in the tiny village of Yarrow with the intent of building a new house and shop.

I drew up plans for the shop and excitedly showed them to Janis. She studied them carefully and then shook her head no. I was devastated. After so many years of dreaming, I thought it was at last the right time. What she said next shocked me. Janis told me to rip up these plans and go back to my drawing board. She instructed me to instead plan the ultimate studio with a much bigger shop space attached. We would live in the tiny old farmhouse for now. The dream shop would come first and the new house would follow when the time was right which turned out to be ten years later.

The shop instantly changed the way we did business. Instead of fabricating everything on our customer’s worksites, out in the weather and far from home, we instead worked in the comfort of our own studio. No time was wasted setting up each morning and then tucking all the tools into the tool trailer each evening. Best of all I got to work in our own backyard and still do all that I loved. It was the best of all worlds. When we finished our work we would ship the completed pieces to our customers.

We were exactly where we wanted to be and we were confident the world would soon beat a path to our door.

Then came Giggle Ridge

After almost five years of working almost exclusively for West Edmonton Mall, it was time to do a project we had been dreaming of and planning for over a dozen years. The opportunity to locate in Cultus Lake, British Columbia first appeared on December 15, 1999. We made a deal to purchase an ancient mini golf, there since the 1940s. The half-acre parcel of land is ideally located in a busy recreational area. The golf was outdated and underused but had immense potential. The possession date for the property was noon on March 15, 2000. By five o'clock, that same day, the old golf was demolished and hauled away. Then the real work began. Our extremely ambitious goal was to build Giggle Ridge Adventure Golf in only one hundred days. Thankfully, we had twenty members of our skilled and experienced team to help us which made things a little easier.

During construction, the team cut, fit and welded over fourteen miles of steel. We tied thousands of sheets of galvanized lath into place. Thousands of cubic yards of soil and gravel were moved, shaped and then tamped into place. We carefully poured and troweled more than four hundred cubic yards of concrete and seven thousand concrete blocks. Two hundred and thirty litres of paint were hand-brushed and blended. We welded fourteen hundred square nuts onto the fence pickets - just for decoration. Many hundreds of feet of electrical conduits and underground piping were buried. More than three thousand-six hundred square feet of carpet was cut, fit and glued into place. Landscape design was done by world-famous gardener, Brian Minter. There were fifteen thousand annuals planted, plus all of the perennials, shrubs and trees.

Despite the spring of 2000 being unusually cold and wet, Giggle Ridge Adventure Golf officially opened on July 13, 2000 - one hundred and twenty days after we started.

And on to the next!

West Edmonton Mall is a massive enterprise, with a diverse array of attractions. As work on Galaxyland progressed, the mall management asked us to do other attractions as well. One of these was the indoor mini-golf which was at the other end of the mall from the theme park - a mile distant. We dreamed up a new story and theme and Professor WEM’s Adventure Golf came to be. Working in this location was like working in a giant fish bowl as there was no temporary holding to hide us from the public. Passersby simply leaned on the glass railing and watched us create the magic in front of them. It was a very fun project that lasted many months before we moved on to the next adventure in the mall.