Modern Edwardian – Built By Pros, Toronto

We spoke to Suzanne Morgan of Built By Pros about their whole-home renovation of a 100-year-old house in downtown Toronto.

This is a project that’s downtown. It’s Ossington and Dundas area, so it’s an older part of the city. You can see the building that’s just to the left – that’s an old Victorian home that was built in around the 1880 mark. We think this property probably was like a laneway to that and would have had horses and buggies going down it. This house and the one on the right were infill, from what we can tell,  but they were still built in the Edwardian period, so around 1915 to 1920. This client approached me and they wanted to know what I would do with the property. Money wasn’t really too big of an issue for them because they bought it at the peak and the market had already crashed by the time they approached me. So they didn’t really want to lose a lot more money on this. They wanted to do something that made sense. One thing we do at Built By Pros, we help clients make decisions like that. So I try to help people make the right decisions so that they’re not swimming in debt or putting themselves at risk and, at the same time, they’re able to get something out of the property even if they lost money because of the big change in our real estate market.

They wanted it to be as close as possible to a new home and they even talked to me about let’s put in a new home. Let’s just tear this out and build brand new. I talked them out of it. There are a few reasons but one of the main reasons that we don’t recommend building new on a property like this is we’re so tight to the neighbors and we’re going to need to shore up the neighbour’s foundation on both sides. It opens you up to legal issues. It opens because they’re downtown. They’re really close to the lake there, there’s underground water. We definitely would have to pump that water out and the neighbors are going to be just squirming about all the work that’s going on and be worried about it as well. Those are very heavy foundations. The one that’s under the house we renovated is stone. It’s really the top of a stone wall – they’re mammoth stones. The top of the the stone wall is almost twice the width of a regular foundation wall. So most of our new walls are eight- or 10-inch block, right? Or concrete. The top of that wall was 16 inches. And then it widened out at the bottom because those those stone walls were built like that. So the bottom was over two feet wide before the footing and the footings themselves were about 30 inches wide. All hand-placed stone. And so it makes it a bit challenging to build on but it is a very strong foundation and it’s been there for well over 100 years. So we recommended keeping the foundation. This house was already over the depth that it’s allowed to be from face of the house to the very back face of the house. We’re allowed around 47 feet and it was 54 feet, so, tearing it down completely, we probably wouldn’t have been able to build the same thing on that footprint.

We talked to the engineers and we talked to zoning and the house was able to carry a third floor. They could have definitely got permission for using half of the third floor without even going to the committee of adjustment, but if they wanted the full third floor they would have been approved because there’s a lot of them in the neighborhood that have full third floors. The client wanted us to make sure that we structurally set this up so if they ever do want to add a third floor or if somebody down the road wants to add a third floor that it’s able to hold that third floor.

So we kept this structure. We kept the brick. And a lot of these homes have the double brick wall that you see on the front there. They have that wrapping the entire home. This one didn’t. It was wood walls, two-by-four normal wood walls on the sides in the back and only the front, where it’s pink on the front, was the only spot that had brick. So that brick was not structural brick. It was veneer brick, one of the early precursors to the kind we use now. They’re bigger, they’re chunkier, and they aren’t there to support the roof. They had had a couple contractors through and the contractors had thought, like I guess most people would, that this whole structure was brick just because the front wall had veneer brick on it. I thought the whole thing was brick, but it wasn’t. And that had its pros and cons. The roof is being supported by the two-by-four wood structure behind it. That gave us a lot of flexibility because we were not stuck with all this brick that we have to cut into. It was very easy to change our window openings. It was easy to add skylights and the roof. And we kept the whole roof.

Above the front door there was a little room there and it was only four feet high and they had a washer in there – no dryer, just a washer – and it had no headroom at all. So we built that up with a square roof.

The windows were covered with concrete because the bricks were were falling out and they hid them. It was just beyond saving. But the clients were so sad because they thought they had bought a masonry home. We already had a lot of weight on the foundation and we didn’t have a lot of confidence in putting a brand-new masonry wall there. We quoted it for them but it was a two-by-four wood structure so whatever we put in front would be a veneer that would have to be hanging from that old wood structure. So I suggested stone-look stucco and that’s what we ended up with there. It is stucco and has a nice little V-groove. When you look close at it, it looks pretty good but you can tell that it’s not real stone when you look close. The other thing that was a real uplift for the facade was downplaying the stucco. We used ACM panels and ACM panels are not cheap. Those are really expensive. They come out and they measure just like they do for a countertop with everything within an eighth of an inch, make it, fabricate it and then bring it out and install it for you. So we hired a company to do that. We looked around and there weren’t there aren’t too many companies doing it. I think it’s a really nice finish and architects love it, so architects are starting to try to incorporate it into a lot of designs. So I think we’re going to see a lot more of it in the future but right now most of it’s coming from Europe – I think Turkey or even one company from Dubai. I think it’s something we should be making in Canada. Maybe somebody actually produces the material. But as far as finding a company to install it here in Toronto, it was hard to find somebody that would give us even a reasonable price because this was a fairly small job. They want to do commercial but we had about 500 square feet. So it was a small project for them, but I’d recommend using that material again and I’m hoping it becomes more available with more companies that are able to install it. You have to be certified with the fabricator to install it. What we liked about the ACM is the fact that it’s prefabricated, that it’s lighter and a little quicker and easier to install. It’s a more dramatic clean-line finish that especially the younger generation is very comfortable with. They love that because it has more appeal to them than a Victorian home. It’s not modern modern – if we were to go all out modern we would be building a square front and not keeping the peak roof and not trying to do the stone. It’s kind of a nice transitional look that gives you a little bit of the features of an older home from a past era. But it’s a new home and it’s like a condo. It’s like your downtown commercial buildings. It has that glossiness to it with the ACM.

We could have done columns that were probably fibreglass and you know, curved or a little bit ornate at the top and maybe fluted or something just to try to fit with the era that the house was built, the Edwardian time period, but how do you pick an era on that street where you’ve got, Edwardian or even older to the left and then you’ve got ’70s square triplex. This is what I love about this photo. Some people would try to crop out the other two homes, but I like that. It really shows the personality of downtown. This is downtown. This is when you’re looking at people in the street or you look at shops on the street. It’s the same sort of mix that you’re going to get. You’re going to get old and modern and traditional and falling apart and brand-new put together. It’s just such a nice a nice blend. And I think people like that. It’s exciting. What’s interesting too about this one is I’ve had two neighbours reach out now and I’m going to see them next week. They they walked by this house and they were watching the progress as it was being built and they couldn’t wait to see it finish. And then they want to call us, and which they’ve done, because they’d like us to come over and take a look at their house and see what we can do with the the front of the house.

With the modern look, a lot of people go to steel windows so they can do larger, clear windows. We buy from Casa Bella, and most of our windows come from Casa Bella. They’re much more affordable. They’re Canadian-made. They have stainless steel extrusions, so they don’t have that problem with the condensation that you get with imported vinyl windows. And having them black on the the the outside really makes them more modern looking. So I think it works. The little transoms at the top were just kind of a flashback to the original home. Transom windows would have been really popular in the time when the house was initially built. It might have had transom windows or would have had double-hung windows, perhaps, but at least you would see some horizontal lines in the windows. So we replicated the size and shape from the main floor up to the second floor. You can see the old second floor windows did the same so we’re basically keeping with that same geometry and the same kind of scale for the windows that we had before. That was very important for me to try to keep the scale of everything the same as what we had originally with the house because it’s nicely proportioned. It’s got a lot of the thirds: three windows and then the one window we did over the top. The top of the door is lined up perfectly over the door. We centered the door in the portico space. We actually debated for quite a while about that door position, because you can see the steps are off centre. So they wanted to keep the steps. They didn’t want to spend the money on changing the steps. They were going to epoxy and to make the cold room waterproof. So with the cold room with the epoxy there, it didn’t make sense to be rebuilding that front porch. So they kept the the steps. I said we can take out the steps and repour new ones that are wider so the door will will be in the centre but they didn’t do it.

On the back the water was getting in behind the siding and the siding was all discoloured because the roof had failed at the top. There’s a little addition that you see on the left-hand side. That was a bathroom they tacked on so the main floor would have a bathroom with a tub. This little tiny door, which is only two foot wide, on the right hand side went up a skinny little stair to the second floor and that was a whole unit on the second floor. There was also on the side of the house concrete steps that went down to the basement.

Because that room was so bad and the foundation underneath it was so bad, we poured a concrete foundation. So we put up temporary supports just in case, because this thing was a mess. And our guys, as they poured a new concrete foundation underneath, they put jack posts up from that foundation to hold up the second floor. And while that was held up we rebuilt the first floor. We rebuilt it with the balcony and the new doors. There’s a significant beam in there for structure because of those glass walls. The the glass walls are 12 feet and they open. The centre panels open right up. So you have six feet in the in the centre open from the bedroom or the main floor. There’s a moment frame structure in there. Basically, there’s a lot of steel – we had to put a lot of steel into this house. We put 13 steel columns and nine steel beams. And that’s how we’re supporting the second floor and making it solid enough that, if they ever wanted to, they could take that flat roof off and they could build another storey.

The glass back wall is not window wall, it’s a 12-foot-wide system. We built basically a steel moment frame. It has a 14-inch-high steel beam in the middle between the two. This is to keep the structure from moving side-to-side. When you have a large percentage of the wall being glass, you need to build that frame because you can’t have any of that movement with the glass. That will keep it all square. These are more or less two patio doors but the the middle opens up and then there will be a double panel on the two sides and you’ll have six feet clear in the middle. The walk-through has the support, obviously, still down the middle but it’s so beautiful from inside the master bedroom. We’ve done this to a lot of homes because it’s way cheaper than getting a full steel system built like we’ve we used to buy from Alumilex in Montreal. We use their systems but only when we have houses where we’re going 10 feet high and 15 feet or more wide. We’ve done a few of those too. They’re beautiful.

They wanted to be able to put a hot tub up on the upstairs balcony. They could put a small one. They don’t have a huge master bedroom upstairs but they wanted it to feel big and they really wanted this width for the glass. I said, are you sure you want it like this? Because the neighbors on the right with the big brick Victorian have a two-unit laneway house and the windows of that house look back into the balcony. I wouldn’t have wanted that but they love it. Honestly, it’s a beautiful spot just to hang out and just sit in the sun. It’s facing west so it has that evening sun. The balcony is composite wood. We did double-up on the joists. They might not do the hot tub. We brought power up there.

They couldn’t picture their backyard because she couldn’t visualize anything. I said, you gotta get involved with my landscaper. I have a horticultural patio guy and he’s amazing. He went to University of Guelph for landscape architecture and he’s really great and he has a great team He does most of my landscaping work for my clients. They hire him directly. I keep it separate because it’s always it has to be done at the end of the project and we’d like to get out of the project and move on to something else. So I usually give him that work and then he does some stuff for us here and there. He explained the garden to them and when they got the explanation of what they could do with the backyard they decided to put it in the backyard. They have a two-car garage at the back of the property and it’s going to go right against that garage so they can look from their back at their home and they also put in a fire pit. His company is Con-Tech and his name is Roger Walker.