Full gut renovations and refacing for families that have to live in the house while we work. Dust contained, layout in 3D, one crew front to back.
The kitchen is the room you use every day — and the room people most often try to renovate around a family still living in the house. Most of what we do on a kitchen job is about making the construction tolerable: dust containment, staging, a temporary kitchenette, and a realistic plan for living through a GTA kitchen reno. Then making the finished kitchen worth the four weeks of takeout.
Priya and Raj had a 1970s galley kitchen with a wall separating it from a dining room nobody ever used. They knew they wanted the wall gone. They didn't know what the kitchen on the other side should look like, and they didn't trust a contractor's first sketch on the back of a quote.
We pulled a Sawzall through a small section of drywall to confirm the wall was non-load-bearing (if it had been, we would have handled the LVL and the permit ourselves), then spent the next week in SketchUp building four layouts — a peninsula, a small island, a long island with no seating, and a 9-foot island with butcher block and three bar stools. We walked them through each layout in 3D on a laptop on their dining room table.
They picked the 9-foot island. We then spent another week working out the things you can't see in renderings: outlet locations under the overhang so phones can charge without snaking a cord across the counter, pendant spacing tied to the new ceiling joists (not the old ones), and a dishwasher placement that doesn't open into the path between the fridge and the stove.
Demo took two days. The temporary kitchenette in their dining room — induction burner, microwave, kettle, mini-fridge — ran the family for the next thirty-one days. We sealed the kitchen entry with a zipper wall and ran a HEPA air scrubber the entire time.
Final walk-through happened on day thirty-one and the family ate their first dinner on the new island that night.
“We didn't lose the room. We just stopped living around the wall.”
The single biggest reason kitchen renos go badly is dust escaping the work zone. The drywall sanding alone produces enough fines to find every air vent in the house. We seal the kitchen entry with a zipper wall — a poly sheet with a heavy-duty zipper — and run a HEPA air scrubber under negative pressure for the duration of demo and any sanding. The rest of the house stays clean enough that you can sit on the couch in regular clothes.
Cabinet boxes that go in plumb and level get the doors closing right the first time, the countertop sitting flat with no shimming, and the toe-kick scribed clean to the floor. Cabinet boxes that get bolted to the wall and called good get cabinet doors that drift, drawers that scrape, and grout lines on the backsplash that look fine until you see the photo. We shim every box with a 4-foot level on top and a torque driver on the screws.
Our plumber and electrician are on the crew. Not subcontracted, not scheduled around — on the crew. That means the rough-in for the new island sink happens on the same morning the framer is laying out the joist for the bar seating, and the GFCI under the overhang gets pulled before the cabinet boxes go in. No phone tag, no missed days, no "the electrician is on a different job, can you reschedule."
It also means the inspection passes the first time. We've worked with the same town inspectors for years. They know how we run a job site, they know where to look, and they know that when we say a circuit is on a dedicated 20-amp breaker it's because we pulled new wire — not because we tested an existing one and called it good.
Cabinets are the other place most kitchen jobs go sideways. We'll walk you through IKEA versus semi-custom versus full-custom cabinets honestly — and when the answer is full-custom, our in-house finish carpenters build and scribe the face frames on site so nothing reads like a catalog box pushed against a wavy wall.
We use a non-contact voltage tester on every circuit before we touch it, a moisture meter on any wall we open up, and a torque driver on every cabinet screw so the box stays plumb after the doors get hung.
Most of our clients do. We set up a temporary kitchenette in another room (induction burner, microwave, kettle, mini-fridge), seal the kitchen entry with a zipper wall, and run a HEPA air scrubber the whole time. Water and power stay on for the rest of the house. The dust is the thing people worry about; the containment is the thing that makes the worry go away.
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