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About Aurora Home Hardware Building Centre
For over 55 years, Aurora Home Hardware Building Centre has been the family-owned lumber yard serving York Region. Three generations of the Barfitt family — and 70-plus employees — work out of our 25,000-square-foot store on Wellington Street East.
Our Story Started in 1969
Stuart Barfitt arrived in Aurora from Newfoundland in 1948, back when “horse country north of Toronto” was a literal description, not just a real estate phrase. He worked at Canada Packers for 18 years before getting into the hardware business with a small store in town. In 1969, after a visit from Home Hardware’s local Area Manager, Jeff Lee, and a quick trip to St. Jacobs, Stuart joined the Home Hardware network. That decision turned a small-town hardware shop into what’s now Aurora’s longest-serving independent building supply.
Stuart and his late wife Doreen ran the business through three locations: the original 2,000-square-foot store on Yonge Street, a larger spot at Yonge and Wellington in 1974, and finally the current 25,000-square-foot building on Wellington Street East, which, in 1986, was still a farmer’s field.
We Built the Store With Our Own Hands
When Stuart and Doreen bought the Wellington Street East property in 1986, there was no store. There was a field. So the Barfitts built one, themselves.
They levelled and compacted the ground using an old backhoe that was already a relic. They trucked in the fill, at one point, 20 trucks were pulling 100 tons of fill up Yonge Street. Randy did the welding. Stuart and the family did most of the rest, with help from friends and, on one memorable day, even the Home Hardware sales rep, who showed up and was handed a pair of rubber boots, got to work on the asphalt.
The whole project took about ten months, through what Stuart remembers as “probably the worst fall ever,” with the backhoe sometimes needing to be pushed through the muck.
That’s how the store you walk into today was built. Not by a developer. By a family.
“Never Missed a Day”
The most telling moment of the whole 1986 build wasn’t the groundwork or the welding. It was the move.
The old store stayed open and running through the entire construction. When the new building was finally ready, the Barfitts moved the inventory in stages, and managed the cutover so cleanly that they closed the old store on a Saturday night and opened the new one on Monday morning.
“Never missed a day,” Randy says. Still proud of it. Still true of how the business runs today.
Three Generations of Barfitts
Stuart Barfitt is retired now, though for years after stepping back, he could still be found in one of the many garages on his son Randy’s property, building picnic tables that were sold in the store. (He’d finished 22 of them on a single rainy June day, the last time anyone counted.)
The business is now owned and run by Stuart and Doreen’s three sons, Russ, Randy, and Robert — and their wives. They’ve divided responsibilities so that all the Barfitts stay busy and the store runs smoothly.
The third generation is already in place: Robbie and Carlie (Randy’s kids), John (Russ’s son, and now the store’s Owner), and Calvin (Robert’s son). Between them, they’ve grown up in the aisles and the lumber yard, learning the business the same way their fathers and grandfather did, by working it, every day after school and every summer, until it became second nature.
More Than a Hardware Store
Some things never change at Aurora Home Hardware. The first dollar the business ever earned is still here, framed, kept as a reminder of where the family started. Stuart and Doreen used to travel together on Walter Hachborn’s Home Hardware study trips, where Doreen and Walter’s wife Jean famously got the bus into trouble in a town with strict no-honking bylaws. (They got out in a hurry.)
The store cat is named Tigger — also known as Garfield — and was adopted in 2016 to take over from Cloak, a longtime store cat who retired that year to an employee’s home.
We keep the picnic tables. We keep the cat. We keep the stories. The store has gotten bigger, and the systems have gotten more sophisticated, but the things that matter, knowing our customers, hiring people who care, doing the work right, those have never changed.