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Veronica custom home

PROJECT DETAILS

Veronica custom home interiors and exteriors

At Woodcastle Homes, we transform existing spaces into inspired environments that reflect your evolving lifestyle and design preferences. Whether you're modernizing a dated layout, refreshing your home’s curb appeal, or completely reconfiguring your interiors, our team delivers tailored renovation.

The clients were a young and growing family interested in a view of downtown, a feature the home delivered with a third story, absent in most surrounding houses, and a third-story roof deck, built with an east-facing deck to reveal the spectacular profile of downtown Toronto, especially when illuminated in the dark.

Description: Whole Home Renovation

Architecture: Lieux Architects

Basement Surprises and Strategic Solutions

We began, of course, with demolition, which is always interesting with plaster walls and 140-year-old materials. We gutted this home down to the brick walls, concrete basement, subfloor, floor plates, etc. Our first challenge became evident in the basement. This home had a 6’ basement, which is short, even for homes of this vintage. The homeowners wanted a usable basement, and we planned to create 8’5’ basement ceilings by underpinning. Underpinning a basement is a Our Process where we dig down underneath the home's perimeter in 3-foot sections and pour concrete to create a new, lower foundation and extend the basement space from below. The reason for the extra-short basement ceiling first made us laugh, then required us to plan. We broke up the concrete basement slab and found an enormous boulder in the middle of the basement, an inch below the concrete. This ancient fieldstone, deposited by mighty glaciers, was more than 6 feet in diameter and would have been completely immovable when the home was first built. Though the situation was more delicate than ever, as a historic home now encapsulated the massive boulder, the

Expansive Floor Plan Possibilities

Our next old home renovation engineering challenge came from the central columns supporting each of the three floors. While these were once required to keep each generously-wide story structurally sound, they had sunk further into the basement than the house as a whole, causing a curve to the main floor and second-story floor plates. Modern floor plates with thicker joists require no such secondary support, and removing the columns conferred the added benefit of opening up the space.

There are no supporting walls on the interior of this structure, leaving the owner with nothing but possibilities for future layouts. We completed this job half a floor plate at a time to maintain some side-to-side support for the home, which meant you could stand in the basement and look 30 feet up to the underside of the third floor during this construction phase.

Classic Kitchen

More modern elements appear in this fairly traditional, fresh, and open-concept clean white kitchen. The kitchen includes gleaming stone countertops, a sturdy walnut island crowned with cascading statement pendulum lights, and a stainless steel double-basin farmhouse sink. All-white cabinets feature glass doors with custom mullions at the top for display and further authenticity.

The modern features in this home are more prominent towards the back of the house and on the higher levels. The third-floor office features modern built-in bookcases and a large sliding glass door for plenty of natural light and city views. The attached third-floor deck is also a modern affair, made from Western Red Cedar 2x2s and1x6s alternated for texture and nestled atop a flat roof of the second-floor living space.

Perfect Basement Living Space

Our diligent work to create a taller basement living space paid off in spades. We also enlarged the windows and added ample lighting to create a warm, comfortable space for casual moments.

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