About Maven

Someone who cares enough to notice.

Life is full of details. A house, a household, animals, a boat, a garage, a season changing faster than anyone planned for. Sometimes what is needed is a capable pair of hands. Sometimes it is someone willing to take the whole thing off your plate and see it through.

Portrait of Chantania Westin — Chantania Westin (Shan-TAN-yuh)

Diamond-stitched black leather upholstery in close detail

Maven is one woman who genuinely likes being useful — and who has spent her life learning how to do things properly.

Chantania with her mother at the Central Alberta Music Awards, 2025 — Chantania and her mother at the Central Alberta Music Awards, 2025.

The work is mobile. Everything arrives with the vehicle and happens where you are — the driveway, the dock, the house, the barn.

Look closely. Do the work properly. Photograph and record it. The same eye returns to the same place.

The range runs from hand finishing and detailing to household order, seasonal property care, small craft and refinishing, and teaching skills like hide tanning, canning, gardening, and off-grid living.

Chantania — owner and founder

I have always been happiest with my hands in the work.

I am a mother of two, raised on the Alberta prairies and in an off-grid mountain home, homeschooled for my first ten years and graduated from Prairie Christian Academy in 2011. My people are homesteaders, artists, poets, musicians, storytellers, teachers and backcountry lifers — a great-grandmother who was Blackfoot Métis, a great-grandfather who doctored in China for most of his life, a grandmother who taught high school English, a grandfather who taught social studies at Mount Royal University. My grandfather and step-grandmother founded Custom Woolen Mills, and I grew up in and around it, learning what good work looks like from people who made their living with their hands. It is a layered, colourful family of people who followed their own paths, and it gave me mine.

Chantania and her two children making art together at the kitchen table

Chantania's daughter and son laughing in a hug at home

Everything I know, I learned by doing it. Childhood sewing lessons turned into an auto and marine upholstery business I built myself and ran for years out of my own home workshop. It is still my craft, and still has its place in my life while I pour energy into Maven — the eye it gave me never shuts off. Sixteen years in the automotive world, four of them a hands-on apprenticeship in rodding and restorations, taught me how things are made, finished and kept alive. Home hot-rodding, small engines, refinishing, homesteading, all of it alongside raising a family. I still love a stripped bench, a stubborn small engine, a surface brought back by hand.

Hauling a classic car on a trailer along a gravel road

I have spent just as much time on the other side of a counter. Selling aftermarket accessories at Cap-it West Edmonton, service advising at Great West Chrysler, work with Trimline of Parkland Inc., housekeeping and hospitality at the Best Western Diamond Inn, front desk and housekeeping at Crazy Creek Resort here in British Columbia. That work means as much to me as the shop work does. It is where I learned how much it matters to people when somebody actually cares about their space and their day.

The rest came from the land and the water. Wrangling and breaking horses, working cattle through the full season, cooking at Pioneer Ranch Camps, guiding season work with Stricker Hunting Outfitters, homesteading through real winters, canning and gardening and keeping a household running on what you put up yourself. Animals have always been in it — veterinary work, grooming, boarding, and the patient behavioural work that settles a dog or a horse rather than overpowers it, from birds to big breeds. Ocean sailing and navigation, and the ticket to teach it. Coaching gymnastics since I was sixteen, a brown belt, EMR certification in 2018, a Class 4 licence and the ease to hitch a dump trailer or put a tractor, skid steer or grain truck to work.

Garden cucumbers washing in ice water before pickling

Rows of home-canned tomatoes, beans, pickles and sauce on the table

None of it was collected for a résumé. It came from believing a person should know how to do things — that competence is its own kind of freedom, and that showing somebody a skill is worth more than doing it for them. I love useful work. I love the moment a thing comes right. I am always itching to learn the next one.

Working on a car in the driveway on a summer afternoon

One of the kids holding the trouble light, little brother alongside, while work goes on in the van

Maven came out of all of it. A house is not a structure, an animal is not a task, and a boat or a workshop or a garden usually holds years of somebody’s life in it. I treat them that way. I do the work myself, I bring in a licensed specialist when that is the honest answer, and there is nothing I enjoy more than handing a place back better than I found it.

What you can rely on