By Christopher B. Smith — Red Seal Carpenter and BCIN-licensed designer, Woodsmith Construction. East Toronto.
For about twenty years, there was an easy answer to “is renovating worth it.”
You renovated, the market went up, and the question answered itself. Nobody had to think very hard about whether the work was worth doing, because the number on the house went up faster than the number on the invoice. The renovation was a financial decision that happened to also improve your life.
That answer has gotten thinner. Prices in this city are not doing what they did for two decades, and homeowners know it. So the question comes back, and it comes back sharper: if the house isn’t going to be worth dramatically more, why am I doing this?
It is a fair question and it deserves a real answer. Ours is this: the return was never really the resale. It was the years you spend inside the building. That was always the larger number — it was just easier to ignore when the market was doing the arguing for you.
What we all learned about our houses
There is a before and after here, and it is 2020.
Before, a house was substantially a place you slept and ate and left. The hours you actually spent inside it were easy to underestimate, because most of them were unconscious or rushed. Then, for a long stretch, the house became the office, the school, the gym and the only place you were allowed to be — and everybody found out exactly what their home was and wasn’t.
People discovered which rooms they could not stand being in. Which corner of the house was too cold to work in from November to March. That the basement smelled a particular way after heavy rain. That two people on calls in the same house was impossible. That the layout the family had lived around for a decade did not actually work, and never had.
Most people went back to work. Very few went back to underestimating their house.
And a great many did not go back fully. Hybrid work has settled in as the ordinary arrangement rather than the exception, and for a large share of homeowners in this city two or three days of every week are still spent at the kitchen table, or in a spare bedroom that became an office and never turned back.
That matters more than it sounds, because proximity is what turns a building problem into a worry. A defect you drive away from at eight in the morning is an item on a list. A defect you sit beside for eight hours a day, three days a week, is something else entirely. You look at it. You hear the furnace working too hard. You feel the draft off the window at your desk in January. You notice the smell in the basement because you are down there in the middle of a Tuesday.
The more of your working life happens inside an older house, the more of your attention that house takes — and the less able you are to file the problem away and forget it until the weekend.
That is the real shift, and it is why “what’s it worth on resale” has stopped being the right frame. You are not buying an asset. You are buying the next fifteen years of your daily life.
The thing nobody puts in the budget
Here is what we see, over and over, in the first conversation with a homeowner in an older East Toronto house.
They are not really describing a renovation. They are describing a list they have been carrying.
The window in the back bedroom they don’t open because they aren’t sure it will close. The breaker that trips when two things run at once, and the fact they have quietly rearranged how the family uses the kitchen around it. The stain on the basement wall they check after a big storm. The section of the porch they tell the kids to step over. The knob-and-tube they know is up there somewhere and think about at eleven o’clock at night. The quote they got four years ago from someone who then stopped answering, which they never followed up on because the whole thing felt like opening a door they couldn’t close.
None of these items is an emergency. That is exactly the problem. They are all unresolved, and being unresolved is their permanent state.
And this is the part that does not show up in any budget spreadsheet: that costs something. Not money — attention. It is a low, constant background process running in people who are already working full-time and raising a family and have no spare capacity for a house that keeps asking questions.
We have watched this wear on people. Not dramatically. Cumulatively. Over years. More than two decades of doing this work, in the same neighbourhoods, has made that pattern impossible to miss: the homeowner who is tired in a way that isn’t about work.
Why the worry is not a soft problem
I want to be careful here, because this is exactly the place where a renovation company would be tempted to overclaim, and where the research does not support very much.
The honest position is this. The evidence linking poor housing conditions to physical illness is substantially stronger than the evidence linking housing conditions to mental health, and much of the mental-health research struggles to separate bad housing from low income — which independently causes both stress and illness. Anyone who tells you the science firmly proves that renovating makes you happier is selling something.
But one finding is worth knowing, and it reframes the whole thing.
The most-cited study on damp housing and depression found that the association was partly explained by people’s sense of control over their own home. Not the mould as a toxin. The experience of living somewhere you feel unable to fix.
Read that again, because it means the worry is not a side effect sitting next to the building problem. The worry is part of the mechanism. The powerlessness is doing some of the damage.
That maps onto what we see on site so precisely that I find it hard to dismiss. The relief people describe at the end of a project is rarely about the finishes. It is about knowing. They watched the wall go in. They know what is behind it, because they were standing there. The list is gone — not managed, not deferred, gone.
Woodsmith Insight
The most underrated deliverable of a properly run renovation is not the kitchen. It is that you stop wondering. A homeowner who knows what is inside their walls has got back something the house had been quietly taking from them.
Cold: the rooms you stopped using
So much for how it feels. Here is what the institutions actually say, because some of it is more specific than homeowners realise — and all of it is fixable.
The World Health Organization’s Housing and Health Guidelines (2018) make a strong recommendation that indoor temperatures be high enough to protect health, and cite 18°C as a widely accepted minimum for cold climates. The mechanism they describe runs through blood pressure and the cardiovascular and respiratory systems.
Worth knowing locally: the City of Toronto’s own standard is higher. The municipal heating bylaw requires 21°C in rental units from October 1 to May 15. That is the City’s health-based floor for a habitable dwelling — and a great many owner-occupied older houses in this city have rooms that do not reach it in February.
If part of your house is unusable for four months of the year, that isn’t a comfort preference. It is floor area you are paying for and cannot use. It is also, more often than not, the room somebody is now trying to work in two days a week.
Damp and mould: find the water, not a lab
This is where the Canadian guidance is bluntest, and most useful.
Health Canada’s position is to control dampness and clean up any visible mould regardless of what type it is. They also note that mould will begin to grow in an area with excess moisture within 48 hours.
And this next part saves people money: Health Canada does not recommend testing the air for mould. In their words, an air test “does not provide information that can predict health effects and often offers little information on the cause of mould damage in the house.” There is an industry built on selling that test. The guidance from the federal health authority is to find the water and stop it.
The WHO puts the responsibility plainly too: dampness and microbial growth “should be avoided or minimized,” and there is no level of mould growth that can be considered safe.
For an older East Toronto house, the water is almost always the same short list — grading that falls toward the house, downspouts discharging next to the foundation, a rubble or brick foundation that was never waterproofed from outside, and a basement that has been finished over the evidence at some point in the last forty years.
Lead: the pre-1955 question nobody checks
The most locally specific item on this list, and the one most homeowners have never checked.
The City of Toronto’s own guidance is that lead can enter drinking water from water service pipes in homes built before the mid-1950s, from solder used before 1990, and from leaded-brass fixtures. The City states that the water leaving its treatment plants contains no lead — the risk is in the pipe between the main and your tap. By the City’s own estimate, just under 16,000 City-owned lead water service pipes remain in the ground.
Health Canada lowered the maximum acceptable concentration for lead in drinking water to 0.005 mg/L in 2019, on the basis that lead can have harmful effects at very low levels.
If your house predates the mid-1950s — which describes a large share of Riverdale, Leslieville and the older parts of East York — the City will test your water for free. You call 311. That is the entire process. We mention it on nearly every older home we work on and most owners have never heard it.
Stairs: the least glamorous item on the list
WHO’s guidelines make a strong recommendation on home safety devices and hazard reduction, and their own list of hazards names, verbatim, “stairs without handrails or in disrepair.” Falls are the largest category of home injury requiring medical attention.
The original stair in a century home is often beautiful, often steep, often out of level after a hundred and twenty years of settlement, and frequently has a handrail that was never adequate. This is the least glamorous item in any renovation and one of the few with a strong recommendation behind it.
What a renovation actually fixes — and what it doesn’t
Now the limits, because a post like this is worthless if it only argues one way.
What the evidence genuinely supports is narrower than the industry implies. The research on housing improvement and health shows real benefit in two specific places: improving warmth, and remediating damp and mould — and the benefit concentrates in the people who were coldest and the people who were already unwell. That is a real result and it is not a small one, but it is specific.
What the evidence does not support is the broad claim that a high-quality renovation improves health in general. There is no body of research on kitchens, finishes, or workmanship as such. Anyone citing “studies show renovation improves wellbeing” is stretching a narrow finding a very long way. We are not going to do that.
You can make an old house worse by improving it badly
This is the counterpoint we think matters most, because it is the one that actually determines how a job should be designed.
The WHO says it in its own guidelines: in the pursuit of energy efficiency, “changes to ventilation need to be carefully evaluated to avoid enhanced indoor exposure to radon and risk of lung cancer.” Reviews of energy-efficiency retrofits have found the same pattern — occupant-reported dampness usually improves, but measured radon and formaldehyde tend to increase where the retrofit tightened the building and did not add mechanical ventilation.
This is not an argument against insulating and air-sealing an old house. It is the whole argument for doing it as one designed assembly instead of a series of separately-sold upgrades. An old leaky house ventilated itself, badly and expensively. Seal it up and you have removed that accidental ventilation, and something has to replace it deliberately.
It is also why Health Canada tells homeowners to retest radon after finishing a basement — their guidance specifically names converting an unfinished basement into living space, and creating a new foundation for an addition, as reasons to test again afterwards.
On radon generally: don’t assume, and don’t panic. Geography does not reliably predict it, Toronto is a comparatively low-radon part of Ontario, and newer homes are not automatically safer. The only way to know is a long-term test — Health Canada says a minimum of three months, in the lowest lived-in level. Where levels are high, sub-slab depressurization typically reduces them by more than 80%, and Health Canada publishes the cost as $2,000 to $3,000.
The return, stated plainly
So: what do you get, if the market isn’t going to hand you a number?
You get a house that is warm in every room in February, which means you get back the rooms you had stopped using. You get a basement that stays dry, and you stop watching the wall during storms. You get water you don’t have to think about, wiring you don’t lie awake about, and a stair your parents can use. You get a layout that matches how your family actually lives, rather than one you have been apologising for.
And you get the list back. All that low-grade attention the house has been drawing off you for years — that returns to you, and it goes into your work and your kids and your evenings instead.
That is the return. It is not a resale figure, and it never really was. It is the difference between a house you manage and a house you live in.
We have spent more than two decades renovating older homes in the east end, and if there is one thing worth saying to a homeowner weighing this decision in a flat market, it is that the people who are happiest with the work they did are almost never the ones who did it for the resale. They are the ones who were tired of worrying and decided to stop.
Frequently asked questions
It depends entirely on why you are doing it. As a short-term financial play in a flat market, a major renovation is a poor instrument. As a decision about the next ten or fifteen years of your daily life in a house you intend to keep, the calculation is completely different — and that is the situation most of our clients are actually in.
On the evidence, the two with real support behind them are making the house warm throughout and eliminating damp and mould at the source. Those are also the two that the research on housing improvement and health actually measured.
WHO recommends indoor temperatures high enough to protect health and cites 18°C as a widely accepted minimum for cold climates (2018). Toronto’s own heating bylaw sets 21°C for rental units. If rooms in your house sit below that for months, it is worth treating as a building problem rather than a comfort preference.
Health Canada does not recommend it. Their guidance is that an air test cannot predict health effects and usually tells you little about the cause. Find and stop the water, and clean up visible mould regardless of type.
It is worth checking rather than worrying. Lead can come from service pipes in homes built before the mid-1950s and from solder used before 1990. The City of Toronto will test your water free — call 311.
Yes, if ventilation isn’t addressed at the same time. WHO warns that efficiency work needs ventilation evaluated alongside it to avoid raising radon exposure, and retrofit studies have measured radon and formaldehyde rising where a house was tightened without mechanical ventilation added. This is why the envelope should be designed as one system.
Health Canada says yes — it specifically names converting an unfinished basement to living space as a reason to retest afterwards. A long-term test of at least three months in the lowest lived-in level is what they recommend.
Honestly, the research here is weaker than the research on physical health, and it is hard to separate housing quality from income. What is interesting is that the best-known study on damp homes and depression found the effect was partly explained by people’s sense of control over their home — which suggests the feeling of being unable to fix your house is doing some of the damage. That matches what we see at the end of a project, where the relief people describe is mostly about no longer wondering.
