Maritimer of the Week tomorrow night

At the SPCA AGM in April they showed these amazing photos of what the former cat room now looks like at the Dartmouth shelter - to highlight the fabulous renovations that have gone on recently there - and most of it is due to the hard work of staff - and several key volunteers who have really put their time and money where their mouth is.
Tomorrow night on Live at Five they are going to honour Harold Porteous and his son Chris for all the hard work they've done at the shelter with their "Maritimer of the week" award for all the great things they've been doing at the Dartmouth SPCA.

Harold has a renovations and repair company and he and his son generously donated their labour as well as obtained for them a lot of donated supplies and they did a large portion of the recent renovations at the SPCA Metro Shelter in Dartmouth.

Harold built two new cat isolation rooms which enabled them for the first time to have a “real” cat isolation room as well as a cat “transition” room in order to give on-the-mend cats a transition home before entering the adoption floor.
What this has accomplished is it has enabled the shelter to drastically improve their disease control in the building. This change also enabled them to move the cats from the original cat adoption room to a room on the other side away from the dogs, creating a more peaceful environment for the adoption cats; in turn, this move enabled them to free up the old cat adoption room to become an Adoption and Education Centre. For those of you who have not been to the shelter in recent months, I think you would be pleasantly surprised with the changes.

This is a photo I took a couple years ago of the reception area at the front of the shelter - talk about being entirely un-user friendly and non-ergonomic, eh? Yuck!Sometimes people would be lined up out the door, trying to see animals, drop off animals, adopt animals - whatever. The animals would be stressed, the humans would get angry - it was awful.

But now the new reception area is opened up - the crowded little useless foyer is gone - the visitation room flows off the reception area - everything is beautiful.

To show off the new shelter - there's going to be an Open House on Saturday, May 23rd from 12pm-2pm for a tour! That day they will also be having a barbecue as well as taking part in the Burnside Yard Sale with a big yard sale of their own, both running from 10-2. If you haven't been to the shelter in the last little while - you should definitely go and check out the yard sale - and check out the shelter - you'll be blown away.

Doing this blog post reminded me that I wanted to post about an article that appeared recently in the "Burnside News" about the renovations at the shelter - it said that Harold and Chris came to the shelter every week for a solid month and a half. It also said - a loyal volunteer paid to have the rooms painted, furniture purchased, and a new flat screen TV were generously donated for our Adoption Centre room. She was also able to supply the shelter with another contractor to finish adding big new windows and French doors to further brighten the front area of the building. As well, another improvement to the building’s infrastructure was made possible by a generous donation from Susan Kerslake.

The article ends by saying - The shelter would like to acknowledge the following people, who without their generosity these changes would have never been possible:

• Harold and Chris Porteous
• Dr. Leslie Steele and the staff at Eastern Passage Village Vet
• Floors Plus in Burnside
• Daniel Everson at Economy Glass located in Burnside
• Susan Kerslake

The article goes into pretty good detail about all the renovations that did happen, so if you'd like to know blow by blow, you can read it at http://www.burnsidenews.com/index.cfm?sid=248760&sc=400

And watch Live at Five tomorrow (Friday) - and meet Harold Porteous and his son receive the kudos they so definitely deserve for their job very well done.

Thanks to Kat Horne for sending out an email letting us all know that it's going to be on!!