Full Home Renovation in Toronto & GTA

Our own crew does the work. Demo, framing, drywall, tile, trim and finishing are in-house staff, not a rotating cast of subs who have never met each other, and licensed trades handle plumbing, electrical under ESA and HVAC because that work has to be done by a licence holder. What that buys you is sequencing. The single most common way a renovation goes wrong is not bad workmanship - it is a trade showing up on a day the previous trade has not finished, then disappearing for three weeks onto another job. One project manager owns your schedule from the estimate to the final walkthrough, and you get a written update every Friday saying what got done and what is next. Every project carries a 5-year workmanship warranty.

6-12 weeks on site, and where you land depends on two things: whether walls move, and whether the kitchen is in scope. A cosmetic whole-house refresh - flooring, paint, trim, lighting - runs 6-8. A kitchen plus two bathrooms with relocated plumbing takes 10-12. Structural work goes past it. Permits come before all of that, so signed quote to move-back-in is realistically 4-6 months on a full gut. Anyone promising a full home renovation in six weeks start to finish is quoting the on-site phase and leaving out the permit, and that is how people end up with a rental lease that expires a month before the house is ready.

Depends on scope, and it is worth being honest with yourself. A phased project - basement first, then bathrooms, then main floor - is livable, and plenty of clients stay. A full gut really is not. If the kitchen is out for six weeks and the only working bathroom sits behind a dust barrier, you are washing dishes in a laundry tub through a Toronto winter. Families with young children and anyone working from home usually regret staying; the noise starts at 8am and drywall sanding is not a background sound you can take a call over. The workable middle ground we set up most often: keep one bathroom live and a temporary kitchen in the basement or garage, then book somewhere else for the two-week window covering demo, jackhammering and floor sanding.

Before a tool comes out: ram board over the floors on every path the crew walks, zippered poly dust barriers at each work-zone boundary, and covers over anything staying in place. During dusty phases we run negative-air machines with HEPA filtration so the dust leaves the building rather than settling into your HVAC returns - that is the failure people discover three months later when drywall dust turns up in a closet on the other side of the house. Seal the returns, or you redistribute the entire renovation through the ductwork. The crew cleans at the end of each day, not the end of the week, and debris goes off-site to licensed facilities so there is no bin sitting on your driveway for a month collecting the neighbourhood’s garbage.

We quote full-home renovations at $50-$150 per sq ft, and that range is wide because it has to be - a cosmetic refresh and a down-to-studs rebuild are not the same job. Kitchens typically run $25,000-$50,000 inside that. What decides where you land is mostly the age of the house rather than the finishes you choose. A post-1990 home needs finishes. A pre-1960 Toronto home often needs a 100A to 200A panel upgrade, knob-and-tube or aluminum branch wiring replaced, galvanised supply lines swapped for copper or PEX, and sometimes a cast-iron drain stack - $20,000-$40,000 of work that photographs terribly and cannot be skipped. We itemise scope by area against your actual square footage, so you can cut deliberately instead of guessing.

Flooring throughout, staircase rebuild or refinish, kitchen, bathrooms, paint everywhere, new interior doors and trim, and an electrical and lighting upgrade. That is the visible list. The one people forget to budget is everything behind the drywall, and in older Toronto housing stock it is rarely optional: panel upgrades, rewiring, supply lines, insulation where walls are open anyway, and bringing stair rise-and-run to current code when a staircase is rebuilt. Doing that work while the walls are open costs a fraction of doing it later. You get an itemised page per area rather than a single lump sum, which matters when the number comes back higher than you hoped - you can see exactly which room to trim rather than negotiating blind against a total.