York here means the former City of York inside Toronto, northwest of the old city and east of the Humber, not York Region north of Steeles. Much of its housing went up between the 1910s and the 1950s: modest brick detached houses and semis, many of them for families who worked at Kodak, the stockyards and the factories nearby. We renovate these homes knowing that low basements, storm water and decades of owner repairs usually shape the plan more than the floor area does.
Workers' houses built before the sewers arrived
York Township once reached north to Steeles Avenue. Its rural north broke away as North York in 1922 and its east side became East York in 1924; what remained merged with the Town of Weston in 1967, became a city in 1983 and was folded into Toronto in 1998. Its housing tells a working-class story. Mount Dennis grew around the Kodak plant that went up at Eglinton Avenue and Weston Road from 1913, and many people employed there, at the stockyards or at CCM, built their own houses before water mains reached their streets, the kind of place urban geographer Richard Harris called an unplanned suburb.
Silverthorn Heights went on sale in 1914 and sold quickly, yet its owners waited until the late 1920s for sewers and paved roads. Fairbank, on hilly streets west of Dufferin, was mostly laid out between the wars with small two-storey and storey-and-a-half detached houses. Rockcliffe-Smythe came later, built up after the Second World War around Conn Smythe's worked-out gravel pit, now Smythe Park, with homes offered to returning servicemen.
On site, that history means we assume very little and look at the structure from the basement and through the attic hatch before pricing anything. When a wall is coming out, an engineer sizes the beam, Toronto Building issues the permit and our framing crew builds to the stamped drawings.
Storm water, creeks and the Humber
Water has shaped this part of the city more than once. In October 1954, Hurricane Hazel pushed the Humber over its banks and washed away part of Raymore Drive in Weston; the losses led to stricter floodplain rules and turned low land along the river into parkland. On July 8, 2013, the heaviest rain of a storm that flooded basements all over Toronto fell on the west side of the city, close to 140 mm in a few hours. In Rockcliffe-Smythe, Black Creek and Lavender Creek put 366 properties inside the regulatory floodplain, and City reports call it the most flood-vulnerable area in the jurisdiction of TRCA, the regional conservation authority. The City's flood works there start with a new Jane Street bridge over Black Creek and continue in phases into the 2030s.
So before a basement gets finished here, we start outside: downspouts should already be disconnected from the sewer, soil should fall away from the walls and window wells need somewhere to drain. Inside, the backwater valve is a licensed plumber's job under a permit, inspected before anything covers it, with a sump pump where the plumber recommends one. Toronto's flood-protection subsidy pays part of the plumber's bill when its conditions are met, so read them before work starts.
Two heritage districts with different concerns
Weston was a village from 1881 and a town before it joined York, and its Victorian houses east of the rail corridor still define it. Part of it has been the Weston Phase 1 Heritage Conservation District since 2006. Ontario's heritage law leaves building interiors out of district permits, so a new kitchen normally needs only a building permit, where one applies. A new porch, different window openings or an addition that changes what the street sees normally goes to Heritage Planning first. Behind the brick, some of Weston's turn-of-the-century houses are wood frames on stone foundations, and repointing that stone is a mason's job, not ours.
Baby Point sits on a promontory above the Humber where Teiaiagon, a seventeenth-century Haudenosaunee village, once stood. Robert Home Smith began the subdivision in 1912, and most of its English Cottage and Colonial Revival houses went up in the 1920s and 1930s. City Council adopted the Teiaiagon-Baby Point Heritage Conservation District plan in December 2024, and on these streets the archaeology rules matter as much as the rules on facades. Home Smith also developed The Kingsway across the river, which our Etobicoke page covers.
Humewood, Cedarvale and Oakwood Village
York's eastern edge holds some of its larger houses. Humewood's houses date mostly from the 1920s and many of Cedarvale's from the 1940s, close to the Cedarvale Ravine, while Oakwood Village, with its shops on Oakwood Avenue and Vaughan Road, grew as a streetcar suburb. Typical plans here include a second-floor ensuite, a kitchen that opens to the back garden and a lower level for teenagers or a parent. These brick houses raise many of the same questions as their neighbours in the old City of Toronto, though the zoning paperwork can differ, as the questions below explain.
Whatever the street, the first step is a visit, then a written estimate that separates our carpentry and finishing from the plumber's, electrician's and engineer's share.
