From Maintenance to Care: Homemade Recipes for Retrofitting a 1930s Maison de colonisation in Rural Quebec

Abstract

This thesis advocates a care-centric approach to energy retrofits, challenging Quebec’s Rénoclimat program’s narrow emphasis on energy efficiency. While energy metrics are crucial, daily interactions, attentiveness, and maintenance by residents play a vital role in a home’s sustainability—yet are often overlooked. Focusing on Quebec’s 1930s maisons de colonisation, hastily built during an economic crisis to promote rural settlement, the project highlights how these modest structures have endured through decades of resident care. Reimagined through low-carbon “recipes,” the thesis offers hands-on strategies to improve energy performance, extend building lifespans, and preserve cultural meaning. These recipes are compiled in a cookbook—a familiar, playful format rooted in the kitchen, a core space of care, memory, and intergenerational transmission. By combining technical retrofitting with lived experience, this project envisions sustainability not as a checklist, but as a shared, ongoing practice of repair, adaptation, and care.