Woodbridge Kitchen and Home Renovations, Upstairs and Downstairs

The first thing many owners in Woodbridge Highlands and Sonoma Heights want out of the kitchen is the builder's hood. Their 1990s and 2000s two-storeys already put the kitchen, breakfast area and family room along one back wall. In many of these houses it is a microwave over the range that filters the air and blows it back into the room, which is no match for a stockpot of sauce or a pan of frying. A ducted hood needs a clear path through the wall or the floor joists to the outside, so we plan the uppers around the duct run. A licensed gas fitter moves the range connection, and an HVAC contractor decides whether a strong hood also needs make-up air.

In the houses that went up north of the old village in the 1970s and 1980s, many basements were finished once already, with wood panelling, a bar and a suspended ceiling, and our first job is stripping that out to see what is behind it. It is common to find strapping nailed straight to the foundation with nothing between, and sometimes a tide line from an old leak for a waterproofing contractor to judge before anything is closed in. On the newer streets north of Major Mackenzie Drive, toward the former hamlet of Purpleville, the basement is more often bare; if an apartment might come later, the side or rear entrance is the first thing to settle, and a licensed plumber roughs in the suite's kitchen and bath lines.

The late-1980s and early-1990s houses that carried Woodbridge west to Highway 27 often came with a two-storey foyer, a curved oak staircase and a living room open to a high ceiling. In one of these, a whole-house update turns partly on access. Repainting or patching a foyer wall that rises past the upstairs landing needs a scaffold set securely on the stairs; replacing carpeted treads on a curved stair with hardwood is careful work, because each tread has to be scribed to its own curve; and a licensed electrician lowers or replaces the foyer chandelier while the scaffold is up. We group those tall jobs so the scaffold goes up once, then move room by room through the rest of the house.

In the 2021 census close to half the residents of the Vaughan-Woodbridge riding reported Italian origins, and in Italy a 1975 decree requires a bidet in at least one bathroom of every home. If your main bathroom has one beside the toilet, the renovation is the time to decide whether it stays. Removing a floor-mounted bidet frees space for a wider vanity or a longer shower, and a licensed plumber caps its hot, cold and drain lines below the floor; we then repair the subfloor where it stood. Keeping it means centring the tile layout and vanity around it. A third route is an electric bidet seat on a new toilet, which needs an outlet beside it, added by a licensed electrician.

Plenty of households here know the room beneath the porch as the cantina and stock it with jars of tomatoes and preserves, and the porch slab is its roof. Loose or cracked tile out front lets water reach the slab, freezing lifts more pieces every winter, and in time a stain spreads across the cantina ceiling. Re-tiling one of these porches means stripping tile and old mortar to bare concrete, having a concrete contractor repair spalled or cracked areas, then setting frost-resistant porcelain over an exterior-rated membrane, pitched away from the front door. Inside, where the tiled front hall meets wood or vinyl plank, we set the tile height so the two floors meet flush instead of with a raised strip.

Woodbridge Avenue is still the old village's main street, with restaurants, cafés, salons and shops, and Market Lane sits partway along it, built where older storefronts were cleared in the late 1970s and 1980s. Inside and outside are handled differently on this street. Work confined to a unit's interior generally stays outside heritage review, although a fit-out usually still needs a building permit, while a new storefront, awning or sign normally goes to the City's heritage staff first. For a café or trattoria, a licensed HVAC contractor installs the kitchen exhaust, a fire protection contractor fits the hood's suppression system and a plumber adds any grease interceptor. We frame partitions and build ceilings, counters and washrooms, and schedule the noisiest work around the neighbouring tenants.