I had spoken to some of our neighbors and they had told me a story about flooded basements with raw sewage and the city taking the extraordinary measure to big up the whole street and replace the sewer lines with brand new ones. This happened back in about 2006, so I assumed we had a brand […]

Read more "Part 4.1 – The great sewer adventure"

The basement in this house was a place you didn’t go. It was poorly lit, was damp, smelled musty, and if you didn’t watch where you were going, there was the very real risk of KO’ing yourself on one of the many steel radiator pipes down there. The massive 175,000 BTU boiler sat in the […]

Read more "Part 4 – The basement"

Before I move on to the basement, I need to explain a couple of things. When we bought the house, among the many things that needed to be decided was how we were going to use the house. Were we going to leave it as a very large single family home? Or somehow divided it […]

Read more "Part 3 – The structural parts of the house"

Actual demolition began in April 2015. Because we had decided to completely remove the interior of the house, replace windows and replace all the internal services (plumbing, electrical, heating, and so), we weren’t too concerned about any additional damage we might do inside. Excluding the brickwork of course, which had it’s own problems that needed to be resolved. More […]

Read more "Part 2 – Demolition"

Welcome to our new Blog. This is the 1st installment of our Blog about our renovation project in Stratford, Ontario Canada. Just a quick note. In some areas, I have put in links to pages with further information, definitions, or contacts of people who assisted in the project. These links are in bold and blue. This grande […]

Read more "Part 1 -34 Birmingham St. – The Start"