The cerebral, and lucrative, world of heritage carpentry in Charlottetown

It took four years of labour and the skills and care of many craftspeople. You'd probably never notice, but that's the point.

The three sets of black wooden doors at the front of St. Dunstan's Cathedral are the same ones which were installed when the church was built over a hundred years ago.

Holland College students were enlisted to repair the doors a few years back. Recently, they put the finishing touches on the final set.

"We kind of slowly started taking the door apart piece by piece ... It wasn't just putting pieces apart and throwing them out. Even if we weren't going to use them again, we still labeled them to make sure we knew where they came from," said Heather Harris, who worked on the last door.

"We measured everything so that the new pieces we put in are going to match up with, say, the width or the thickness of the door. And then basically the pieces that we were going to be replacing, we kind of started from scratch with rough sawn oak, and mill that and cut it and worked on the joints."

Harris is training to become a heritage retrofit carpenter, specializing in the traditional and modern skills necessary to restore and repair old structures, some of which could be hundreds of years old.

"What we try to do is replace in kind," said Josh Silver, Harris's instructor and the lead learning manager of the college's heritage carpentry retrofit program. The program is one of only three in the country dedicated to that specialized trade.

"[That] means if something is irrepairable, we would have to make every effort to replace it exactly the way it was with a host of techniques and skills. Or ideally, we can conserve it."

The students are trained on things such as using old-fashioned tools such as the end product looks as similar as the original as possible. 

They have helped do restoration work all across Charlottetown, which Silver said has the highest number of heritage buildings per capita in Canada. 

Most notably, some former and current students were brought in for the restoration of Province House, a project which Silver said involved lots of research before any of the real work began.

"It's no longer the traditional carpentry where how much can you lift and, and how tough you are, and all that," he said. "It's a lot of brainpower, they are using their brains more than their back and making sure we do the right thing."

Paul Coles has been working in heritage buildings since he bought one such home in Charlottetown three decades ago. His work has earned him eight heritage awards from the city.

Coles often takes some Holland College students through some of the projects he's working on. He said the work usually starts outside the home set to be restored.