It is the first question almost every homeowner asks, and the hardest one to get a straight answer to. Search it and you will find figures ranging from $250 to over $1,000 per square foot — a spread wide enough to be useless for planning. The reason isn’t that builders are being evasive. It’s that […]
You have a design you like. Then the zoning review comes back and something doesn’t comply — the addition is half a metre too close to the property line, or the height is over by a fraction. At that point your project stops being a building permit application and becomes something else. The short answer: […]
The honest answer is that most published figures are missing about a third of the cost. Not because anyone is being dishonest, but because the number people quote is construction only — and construction is not what you write cheques for. The short answer: in 2026, hard construction for a home addition in Toronto runs […]
Most Toronto homeowners begin an addition project with a picture in mind — a wider kitchen, a family room that opens to the garden, a second storey that finally gives everyone their own space. The question that decides whether that picture is buildable isn’t architectural. It’s zoning. The short answer: zoning determines the invisible envelope […]
It’s the wall between the kitchen and the dining room, and it’s the reason the main floor of your Toronto home feels like a series of small rooms rather than one connected space. The question that follows is almost always the same: can it come out? The short answer: yes, in the large majority of […]
Homeowners rarely set out to take on a structural project. They set out to open up a kitchen, add a proper primary suite, or finally make the main floor work. Somewhere in the conversation the language shifts — engineers are mentioned, permits, load paths — and the project they described as a renovation turns out […]
It’s one of the most consequential financial decisions a Toronto homeowner makes, and it usually arrives the same way: the house no longer fits. A growing family, a parent moving in, a permanent shift to working from home. The space that worked five years ago doesn’t work now, and there are two ways out — […]
Homeowners planning a home addition usually arrive with a size in mind. A hundred and fifty square feet to widen the kitchen. Four hundred for a family room. Enough for a proper primary suite upstairs. It’s a reasonable place to start — but it’s not what determines the answer. The size of the home addition […]
You have lived with the awkward galley kitchen long enough. The third bedroom is really a closet with ambitions. The basement floods a little every spring, and the wiring behind the plaster is the same wiring that was there when the house was new — which, in much of Toronto, means sometime before the Second […]
For Toronto and GTA homeowners who have run out of room but can’t expand outward — whether because lot coverage limits have been reached, the rear yard is too valuable to give up, or the property simply doesn’t have the footprint to support a meaningful ground-floor addition — adding a second storey is often the […]
