Renovating a Century Home: What to Expect

Toronto is full of beautiful century homes — solid brick, high ceilings, wide trim and real character. It’s also full of century homes hiding knob-and-tube wiring, balloon framing and floors that slope an inch across a room. Renovating one is deeply rewarding, but it rewards a builder who has done it before. This is what to actually expect when you take on a house that’s older than everyone who’s ever lived in it.

Nothing is square, level or plumb

The first thing you learn in a century home is that a tape measure and a level will disagree with each other in every room. A hundred years of settling means walls lean, floors dip toward the middle of the house, and door openings are trapezoids. This isn’t a defect to be fixed so much as a reality to be worked with. Good finished carpentry in an old house is the art of making new work look intentional against old lines — scribing cabinets to a wavy wall, tapering a filler so the eye never catches it.

It’s also why cheap trim jobs look wrong in these homes. Machine-perfect mouldings butted against a leaning wall highlight every gap. Our trim and moulding work is fitted piece by piece to the house it lives in, which is slower — and the only thing that actually looks right.

Knob-and-tube, galvanised pipe and the surprises in the walls

Behind the plaster, century homes carry the history of every system that’s ever been installed. You may find original knob-and-tube wiring, which insurers increasingly refuse to cover and which should be replaced. Galvanised supply pipe that’s rusted to a straw’s width. Cast-iron drains at the end of their life. A chimney that was abandoned but never capped.

You cannot know exactly what’s there until the walls are open, which is why a century-home budget lives or dies on its contingency. We carry 15 to 20 percent on these projects rather than the usual 10, because the odds of finding something are close to certain. The upside: once it’s open, it’s the right time to bring everything up to modern standard so the next hundred years start clean.

The homeowners who enjoy their century-home renovation are the ones who budgeted for the unknown. The ones who struggle are the ones who priced a perfect house and got a real one.

Plaster, lath and the case for keeping character

Original plaster-and-lath walls are thicker, more solid and better at sound than modern drywall — but they crack, and they don’t love being cut into. Sometimes the right move is careful repair; sometimes it’s replacing a wall entirely with drywall while preserving the original trim and casings around it. The decision is case by case, and it’s where experience matters more than any rule.

The features worth protecting — original baseboards, plaster crown, a newel post, wide-plank floors, a set of pocket doors — are exactly the things that make the house worth renovating. We catalogue and protect them at the start, restore what we can, and match new work to old profiles when a section is beyond saving. A staircase in particular is often the heart of these homes; our stairs and railings work restores original runs and rebuilds them to code without erasing the character.

Structure, additions and opening things up

Century homes were built for small, closed rooms, and most people today want them opened up. That almost always means structural work — removing a load-bearing wall and carrying the load on a beam. In a balloon-framed house the load paths aren’t where you’d expect them in modern construction, so this is not a job for guesswork. Our structural openings and framing work is done with an engineer’s drawings and the right temporary shoring, every time.

If you’re going further — a rear or third-storey addition — the existing foundation and framing have to be assessed for what they can carry. Our home additions on century houses always start with that assessment, because there’s no point building new on old that can’t hold it.

Permits, heritage and doing it properly

Many of Toronto’s oldest neighbourhoods carry heritage designations or conservation-district rules that govern what you can change, especially at the front of the house. Structural work, additions and any change to the footprint need permits and drawings. We handle the permits and drawings as part of the job so the project is legal, insurable and clean when you sell.

Done right, a century-home renovation gives you the best of both — original soul, modern systems. If you’re planning one, get in touch and we’ll walk the house with you and tell you honestly what we see. It also helps to read our renovation timeline first, because older homes almost always run at the longer end of the schedule.