Kelowna, B.C.’s Plan B Contractors will complete a new warehouse and showroom under construction for National Concrete Accessories (NCA) by the end of August, in time for the local branch to move from its smaller quarters into the new facility by early September.
“Kelowna is a growing market and our previous facility did not allow us to maintain the depth and breadth of inventory required to service the needs of all our customers in the Kelowna area. We will be able to offer more products at higher quantities,” said NCA’s Western Canada vice-president Neil Hastie in an email to the Journal of Commerce.
The facility is the sixth branch for NCA which has been rapidly expanding into Western Canada with other B.C. outlets in Victoria, Prince George, Langley, Kamloops and Burnaby.
It also has branches in Alberta, Saskatchewan and Manitoba for a total of 15 outlets in Western Canada.
More outlets are located in Ontario and Quebec.
“We pride ourselves on our technical knowledge and focus on customer service. We are one of the largest suppliers of concrete accessories in Western Canada,” said Hastie.
“We are proud to sell our own made-in-Canada line of ‘Acrow Richmond’ forming accessories.”
Brendon Westgate, a Plan B partner and project manager, said the one-storey building consists of precast concrete panels supplied by Advance Precast Ltd. in Kelowna.
The 12-inch-thick panels featuring insulation measured 12 feet wide by 30 feet high. Advance Precast both manufactured the panels and handled installation onsite. The 15,000-square-foot structure sits on a concrete slab.
Westgate said the challenge that presented itself with the construction of the NCA facility was really the wet spring seen in the Okanagan.
The soil at the McCurdy Corner site didn’t respond to the wet conditions and Plan B had to replace it with truck loads of gravel brought to the site.
Plan B Contractors is a 15-year-old construction company that specializes in commercial and retail outlets and builds in wood, concrete and steel.
“We are a family-run company, a small company in the grand scheme of things, but we have taken on larger projects because of our existing reputation with clients,” said Westgate, working with Bryan Murray, managing partner and CEO.
Together the pair has 35 years of construction experience.
Westgate said the NCA building was not the largest facility the company, which builds in the Okanagan (ranging from Vernon to Penticton), has completed.
“The largest is the one we finished last year. It is a sound studio (for Eagle Creek) for the film industry,” he said, adding it was again a concrete construction project but with cast-in-place panels that were tilt-up. “These panels were 50 feet tall and were one of the taller tilt-ups in Canada.”
The panels were engineered with extra rebar but to reduce the weight, the width was slimmed.
“Cast-in-place panels are usually 24 feet wide and these were only 12 feet wide,” he said.
By the end of August, Westgate said, the drywall, mechanical and electrical will be completed at the new NCA branch.
In 2015, NCA announced the acquisition of its western Canadian rival Northland Construction Supplies. The Northland branches have now been rebranded as NCA/Northlands.
Nova acquired NCA as part of a portfolio buy-out in late 2011 of a number of Canadian industrial businesses including Wilkinson Steel and Metals (subsequently sold to Samuel Group) and Calgary-based Exchanger Industries.
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