Three generations on Lulu Island.

My grandfather came over in 1948 and worked the gillnetters out of Steveston for the next thirty-five years. He used to say a boat tells you what it needs if you listen — the way it sat in the water, the way the engine sounded when it warmed up, where the salt had eaten through the paint that week. The Fraser estuary was honest with him. It rusted what it rusted, fast.

My father moved off the boats in the seventies and got into roofing. Same island, same houses my granddad's friends lived in by then — bungalows in Steveston, ranchers in Broadmoor, the bigger places going up in Seafair. He learned the same lesson from a different angle: everything you put on a Richmond house has to survive the air, or it doesn't survive. Galvanized nails rusted out in fifteen years. Asphalt shingles dried and curled faster than they should have. Cedar shakes split.

I got into doors in 2006. These days I cover Richmond, Delta, and the South Surrey side, but Lulu Island is still home, and it's where I learned the trade. Same houses, third generation.

What eighty years of Richmond houses will tell you

Much of central Richmond went up between the late 1960s and the mid-1980s — split-levels, ranchers, the occasional Vancouver Special. A lot of those original garage doors came with builder-grade springs and plain galvanized cables. Cheap to install, never meant to last forty years on a river delta that meets the sea.

Almost all of them have failed at least once now. The springs that didn't fail outright were swapped during a re-roof or a renovation, often by a tech who didn't know the difference between oil-tempered and galvanized. So we've got Richmond houses on their third or fourth set of springs, and the homeowner has no memory of any of it except that "the door keeps breaking."

It keeps breaking because the spec was wrong from the start, and every replacement has been wrong since.

What the river air actually does

It's not water that kills steel. It's chloride — the salt left behind when sea mist dries on a surface. Chloride breaks down the steel's protective surface layer and speeds up the rust underneath. Pitting starts long before you see surface rust, and every pit thins the wire a little. Thinner wire means shorter fatigue life, and shorter fatigue life means the spring snaps at 7,000 cycles instead of 10,000.

In the drier Interior, standard oil-tempered springs last ten to twelve years. In Richmond, galvanized springs last five to seven. Oil-tempered springs hold up far better here — the oil finish does its job. And stainless cables roughly double cable life on the most exposed homes.

What that means for your spring job

If we come out to a Richmond address and the previous installer used galvanized, we'll swap to oil-tempered as a matter of course. Cost is similar; lifespan isn't.

For waterfront homes — Steveston along the river, Terra Nova by the dyke, Seafair backing onto the West Dyke — we recommend stainless cables as a parts upcharge. About $40 more. It's the difference between three years of cables and seven. Worth it.

For the inland Richmond pocket (East Cambie, central Broadmoor, Hamilton) — standard oil-tempered with the free galvanized cable swap is fine. The salt's there but it's diluted enough.

Why we work with Steveston Garage Doors

If you grew up on the island you already know them. Steveston Garage Doors is a sister shop — same family feel, same standards. We handle springs everywhere, Steveston included; when a Steveston job needs more than a spring (a new door, a new opener), we hand it to their crew. When they get a spring call anywhere in the 16 cities we cover, they hand it to us. One phone call either way.

It's not a franchise. It's just two small shops who know each other and don't see the point in competing on the same island.

What hasn't changed in eighty years

The boats are mostly gone. The salmon canneries are museums. The cedar bungalows my grandfather's friends owned have been torn down and rebuilt into 4,500-square-foot monster homes with three-car garages and copper-clad carriage doors.

The salt's still there. The fog's still there. The springs still break.