Woodsmith Construction Project Journal: Fulton Home Renovation

Our Fulton home renovation, was located around the Pape and Danforth area of Toronto. This neighbour is a very sought after place to live and for good reason. Whether it is the great schools or the shopping and food on the Danforth, everything is right at your door step in this community.

To continue our discussions on various projects and how to better formulate renovation budgets. I thought this project would be a great one for anyone considering doing a basement renovation. This project actually started out on the small side and ballooned, as they sometimes can because of what we found under the floor and in the walls.

As with any successful renovation we do our goal is two fold. Firstly we want to make sure that whatever problems are found, get fix properly. Secondly we want make sure we leverage all additional funds as much as possible.  Making sure we end up with more finished product throughout the home at the end of the project.

There were two areas on our Fulton home renovation that came to light during the job and forced us to increase the scope of work. The first was water infiltration and the second was mold.

Water Infiltration

This basement project started out as a simple laundry room rework and an existing basement entry fix. Simple enough it would seem but once we start to remove the existing wall cladding. We realized we were going to have to do more than we had originally planned. Our Fulton home renovation project had a leaky foundation and because it was mostly a finished basement. We could not see how much water was actually coming in. The renovation budget lesson here, was always make sure that no matter how nice you basement might look to start. Make sure that if you are planning to do work on it, always cut out some sections of the drywall through out the basement to see if there are any bigger problems at work.

Mold

Mold is probably one of the most common things we deal with in any older finished basement. Given the environment is usually perfect for the continued production of mold. It is always a safe bet, that if you have a damp basement you will have some mold. It is also usually a good idea to just plan to gut any basement that has signs of mold or has any musty smell. Our Fulton home renovation was no exception to this rule. In the end what we had thought was mold in our potential laundry area. Turned out to be heavy mold throughout the finished basement. This was an area that the family used regularly and was completely unaware of the danger that was behind their walls. Always budget to explore for mold and remove mold in any older basement renovation.