About 'us'
Picture: Del and Junior working
In the spring of 2020, I was commissioned by Vancouver’s cat cafe, Catfe, to do some renovations to the store. Junior just happened to be one of the adoptable cats there at the time, and we hit it off, as we both shared a common interest in fixing things. Junior has an insatiable curiosity for all things paper, plastic, wood... dangly things, moving things, and especially my ladder, which I had to save him from multiple times when he tried to climb to the top! Working with Junior made the job much more fun.
What we didn't expect was the impending pandemic that would forever change both our lives. Junior fell sick during this time, and my partner Michelle and I fostered the poor guy throughout his illness. At the same time, I was navigating work life during the pandemic when another opportunity arose out of nowhere -- Michelle, who had founded Catfe, hired me to build North America's very first bunny cafe!
*Read more about building The Bunny Cafe here.
I started work on The Bunny Cafe and thankfully, Junior's health rebounded, and he returned to Catfe as an eager cat up for adoption. However, life had other plans... Junior had multiple pending adoptions that fell through. Not everyone was as impressed as we were by his take-charge attitude, and he was a little too rambunctious for the new adopters. Junior seemed so happy at Catfe, I suggested to Michelle that we adopt him as the resident cat. He had invariably become a wonderful addition to the team there, as he was super friendly with all the new cats when they arrived, and seemed to take pride in helping them feel comfortable and settle in. Turned out that Junior, like myself, was finding his own job alongside all the other animals.
Picture: Building North America's very first bunny cafe
Through trial and error and more errors, The Bunny Cafe got built as a temple of love for adoptable rescue rabbits, much like what Catfe is to the adoptable rescue cats in their care. The silver lining to this story is that through all the dark and difficult days of managing a construction project in the midst of a pandemic, Junior remained a constant companion, and I got to see him a lot during construction, often returning to Catfe to visit with him and exchange notes about the good work we were doing. In the end, I didn't just build The Bunny Cafe, but all the furniture, fencing and toys for the bunnies as well. As time went on, the rabbits let us know what worked for them and where our products could improve. That's how we started to develop our product line for bunnies. In the summer of 2021, when construction was complete, I had to keep myself busy somehow, so Junior and I put our little heads together and came up with Junior's Jobs!
Picture: Our first little workshop in East Vancouver
Picture: Our 1000 square foot workshop in Chilliwack
