Kalesnikoff Lumber Highlights Move to Mass Timber Manufacturing

In a recent interview with the Vancouver Sun (8-19-24), Chris Kalesnikoff, Chief Operating Officer of Kalesnikoff Lumber, speaks about the journey of the Kalesnikoff family from a BC forestry company to a sawmill operator to a key player in the mass timber and prefabricated mass timber building industry.

Kalesnikoff Lumber has invested in a large parcel of bare land beside the Castlegar airport. While there’s not much to see now, by the end of the year, this site—about four city blocks in size—will be transformed into a bustling 80,000-square-foot assembly plant for prefabricated mass timber buildings, thanks in part to C$6.7 million from the BC provincial government.

If this Castlegar site represents the future of the company, its sprawling 130,000-square-foot mass-timber production facility 20 minutes away in South Slocan represents how far it has come.

Kalesnikoff took the Sun reporter on a guided tour of the South Slocan facility, including the elevated walkway from one end of the pristine, machine-filled building—roughly the size of eight Olympic ice hockey rinks—to the other, showing off how lumber is transformed into glue-laminated beams (“glulam”) and cross-laminated timber (CLT) panels strong enough to serve as floors, walls, ceilings, and structural support beams.

During the tour Kalesnikoff pointed to several glulam beams that will be used in The Hive, a 10-story wood-construction office building going up in Vancouver’s False Creek flats.

It has been a remarkable past five years for Kalesnikoff Lumber. The company that started as a traditional sawmill evolved into a manufacturing plant that produced musical soundboards, then into a mass timber production facility during the pandemic, and soon into a first-of-a-kind mass-timber module-assembly plant in Castlegar.

Kalesnikoff says he is especially proud that the South Slocan facility is about to go 24/7, creating even more jobs for people living in West Kootenays. He is grateful that the provincial government is making a concerted effort to promote and encourage the mass-timber sector.