The Houses · H-02

Lunenburg, Nova Scotia · Established 1978 · Open to visitors

Shore House was a working boatyard and is still, on three days of the week, a working boatyard.

Region

North America

Residential places

16

Residence

Sixteen places, in periods of three to twelve days; the shop takes two residents at a time.

Recurring form

A seasonal shared meal and lecture is kept, spring and autumn.

Fabric

The kitchen, meeting room, and one bedroom are step-free. The shop floor is uneven and has a raised sill.

This is a register entry. No address, telephone line, or arrangement to visit is published here, and none can be taken up through this website.

The house

The house was given to the Institute in 1978 by a family who had built boats on the site for four generations and had run out of sons willing to do it. The condition of the gift was that the shop keep working. It has.

The oral history program began by accident in 1981, when a resident with a borrowed cassette recorder started asking the older men in the shop how they had learned to loft a hull. There are now four hundred and twelve recordings, and the earliest of them are the reason the house owns a dehumidifier of alarming size.

The annual reconciliation of the Common Record has been held here since 1990, in the week after the shop closes for the winter.

The work

• Coastal restoration in the county: marram planting, culvert clearing, and the long argument with erosion that nobody expects to win outright.
• A bereavement group has been convened in the town for many years by people qualified to convene it. It is not a Continuance observance and does not use Continuance vocabulary; the house lends the room and the kettle.
• Maritime oral history: recording, transcription, and deposit of copies with the provincial archive.

Observance kept here

The shared forms, here

The Weather Entry

The tide and the state of the landing are entered with the weather, in the same hand.

The house year

Kept in use

• The kitchen bell

  Timekeeping. It is rung for the meal, and at most houses to mark the end of the twelve minutes.

• The white cups

  Tea, at the table and at the bench. They recur in house photographs from the late seventies onward, which is an accident of ordering and not a design.

The house, day to day

Fish, potatoes, and a great deal of bread, which the house bakes well and knows it. The seasonal meal for sixty is cooked by four people who have done it together since 2009 and who do not welcome help, though they say they do.

A ship-chandler's premises of 1878 on the harbour front, clapboard over frame, repainted every fourth year because the salt takes it. The whole ground floor was levelled in 2013 when the grief group began meeting there.

Rooms

The front room, The long room, The slip, and the usual others (11 in all).

In the kitchen

The house loaf. A plain white sandwich loaf, four at a time, in tins that came with the building. Shore House sends the recipe to any house that asks and has sent it to Fell House eleven times.

Outstanding

Paint, harbour elevation — Due 2027. The scaffolding hire is the single largest line in the fabric budget. The receiving-room chair — Repaired six times. See REP/2024/08. Damp, north corner of the wash-house — Traced to a downpipe. Downpipe replaced. Damp continues.

Said here

“That's a chair job.” — This will be repaired again rather than settled.

Local custom

The chair. A Windsor armchair in the receiving room, cracked in 1991, repaired six times, and the standing test of what repair before replacement is actually for.

The life of a house

Local participation

• The boat-shed and slip inspection, monthly and after any gale.
• The winter phone round, shared between four members.

Separation

A member says so to the steward once. No reason is entered. The house writes once to acknowledge and then not again.

A life in the practice
The term a steward holds, and its limits

The steward

Records

• Oral history collection
• Public work

Other houses

• North House — Penobscot County, Maine
• South House — Southland, South Island

Entry H-02 · reviewed 2 February 2026