Ren­o­vat­ing a condo dif­fers vastly from ren­o­vat­ing a single-family home.

David Males

Remem­ber the Toronto condo boom of the 1980s? Back then, con­dos were spring­ing up in this town faster than dan­de­lions on a spring lawn.

Accord­ing to Canada Mort­gage and Hous­ing Corp., 58,665 high­rise con­do­minium units were built in Toronto in the decade start­ing in 1984.

Now, 20-plus years later, those con­dos might be start­ing to look a lit­tle old. A lit­tle tired. In other words, they need a reno.

Ren­o­vat­ing a condo is not the same as ren­o­vat­ing a single-family home. There are big dif­fer­ences that can trip you up if one under­takes the process unprepared.

So why would some­one buy one of these old, tired units that needs to be ren­o­vated as opposed to a brand spank­ing new unit with all the bells and whistles?

Condo buyer Judy Wing­ham has the answer to that one – and it, of course, starts with loca­tion, loca­tion, location.

“We really wanted to be in the St. Lawrence Mar­ket area, and there weren’t any new projects in the area when we were look­ing,” she explains. But, equally impor­tant to Judy and her hus­band, Brian Smith, was the size of the unit itself.

“How do you find a place big enough when you’re down­siz­ing from a four-bedroom house? We only looked at older units because they’re gen­er­ally larger than the new ones,” says Wing­ham about the 1,300-square-foot, two-bedroom condo they purchased.

Con­do­minium lawyer and Toronto Star colum­nist Gerry Hyman says buy­ers (or own­ers) who are con­sid­er­ing a condo ren­o­va­tion need to be very cog­nizant of the rules that gov­ern ren­o­va­tions in that par­tic­u­lar build­ing or risk find­ing out too late that they can’t do what they were planning.

“Condo buy­ers should make their agree­ment of pur­chase and sale con­di­tional on the exam­i­na­tion of the sta­tus cer­tifi­cate,” explains Hyman. “This will include a copy of the dec­la­ra­tion and the rules. If you sign an agree­ment of pur­chase and sale with­out tak­ing that step, you may be too late.”

The dec­la­ra­tion out­lines what is owned jointly by all the own­ers in the build­ing (called com­mon ele­ments) and what is owned by the unit owner. As a gen­eral rule, you can change what you own, but can’t change any of the com­mon ele­ments with­out the express per­mis­sion of the corporation.

This is where what is or isn’t a com­mon ele­ment becomes impor­tant, because things like win­dows, bal­conies and unit front doors are almost always com­mon ele­ments, and many dec­la­ra­tions pro­hibit any struc­tural, plumb­ing or elec­tri­cal renovations.

“Peo­ple may have car­ried out renos they shouldn’t have and the cor­po­ra­tion can require them to put it back the way it was,” says Hyman. “It’s rare, but it does happen.”

The con­do­minium rules may also con­tain addi­tional guide­lines regard­ing how the work is to be car­ried out. Things like park­ing for trades­peo­ple, the hours they are allowed to work and dis­posal of garbage may be spelled out in the rules.

Because of the added com­pli­ca­tions involved in ren­o­vat­ing a condo, there are con­trac­tors who won’t even con­sider doing that kind of work. Oth­ers, like San­dra Bald­win, pres­i­dent and owner of Life­time Con­tract­ing in Toronto, find it’s not that dif­fi­cult if you have the right approach. She’s com­pleted a cou­ple dozen condo renos in recent years and says the key is to involve the con­do­minium cor­po­ra­tion from the beginning.

“If you approach the con­do­minium cor­po­ra­tion right up front, they are usu­ally very help­ful and try to accom­mo­date you,” explains Baldwin.

She gives condo clients a detailed writ­ten esti­mate that they can give to the cor­po­ra­tion, along with a cov­er­ing let­ter, so they can seek approval long before the work begins.

For her, the biggest dif­fer­ence in condo vs. single-family home renos is the time factor.

“Get­ting mate­ri­als and debris to and from the unit – that’s a big has­sle,” she explains. But, on the plus side, build­ing per­mits are often not nec­es­sary, as they are often not doing work that involves plumb­ing, elec­tri­cal or struc­tural elements.

I, too, have found that the tim­ing issue is the most dif­fi­cult to man­age when ren­o­vat­ing a condo. Many cor­po­ra­tions will have set hours that trades­peo­ple can work – usu­ally from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. – which means that I can’t just sched­ule trades to work a few extra hours if the job gets behind. Park­ing can also be a pain as many build­ings only have one or two (if any) ser­vice park­ing spaces and these are snapped up early. Most expe­ri­enced con­trac­tors will build an allowance for park­ing fees into the orig­i­nal quote or contract.

While Brian Smith and Judy Wing­ham did their home­work before pur­chas­ing, there were still a few sur­prises along the way.

“We couldn’t do pot lights because the ceil­ing above is a cement slab,” explains Smith. “Of course, that makes sense, but it’s not some­thing you nec­es­sar­ily think about right away. And, all the struc­tural walls in our unit are con­crete slab as well, so you can’t even put in a new plug. It made plan­ning more challenging.”

Waste removal was also a big chal­lenge. Dur­ing the ren­o­va­tion process, Smith nego­ti­ated bring­ing in a dump­ster, but the cor­po­ra­tion would only allow it to be on site for one day – mean­ing all the waste had to be stored in the unit and carted out all at once.

“You can’t dirty the hall­ways or the ele­va­tors either,” explains Smith. “An awful lot of care had to be taken at every step of the process.”

Every room of the couple’s condo was tack­led, with new trim work and paint­ing through­out, new hard­wood floors in the main liv­ing areas, new tile in the entry, kitchen and bath­rooms. Both bath­rooms and the kitchen were also com­pletely ren­o­vated and a den was cre­ated where there was a solar­ium. The price of the reno ran about $120,000.

Another big chal­lenge is try­ing to change the loca­tion of things like sinks and toi­lets when you can’t touch the plumb­ing behind the walls. In Judy and Brian’s kitchen, for exam­ple, the pipes were extended behind the cab­i­nets to move the sink and dish­washer to their new location.

The ensuite bath­room was more chal­leng­ing. To move the toi­let, a step up was built so that the new drain could slope prop­erly to the old drain loca­tion. To min­i­mize the visual impact of this step, a half-height wall was added between the toi­let area and the rest of the bath­room, adding more pri­vacy in the process.

To replace the bath­tub with a built-in shower, the new shower was located so that the exist­ing drain from the bath­tub could be used with­out rais­ing the floor level or drilling for a new drain.

The costs for these kinds of changes is com­pa­ra­ble to those incurred in a tra­di­tional ren­o­va­tion, it’s just the method­ol­ogy that dif­fers. (Of course, the con­do­minium man­age­ment was con­sulted before proceeding.)

Smith and Wing­ham have some words of advice for those con­sid­er­ing a condo reno: Be flex­i­ble, work with a con­trac­tor you can trust and make your deci­sions on time.

“That was what really sur­prised me, how quickly we had to make deci­sions,” said Smith.

“We were on a tight time­line (two months) and we had to get out there and choose the tile, gran­ite and fire­place sur­round on time, or it would have held up the whole project,”says Smith.

Condo own­ers con­sid­er­ing a ren­o­va­tion need to make sure they hire a pro­fes­sional who has done condo work in the past, says Baldwin.

David Males is pres­i­dent of North­ern Edge Con­struc­tion Ser­vices, a res­i­den­tial ren­o­va­tion com­pany, and chair­man of the BILD Ren­o­va­tors Green Com­mit­tee. For more infor­ma­tion, go to www​.noredge​.com.

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