Old houses, tall towers, and the floor between them
Toronto has the oldest combined housing stock of any city we serve, with close to sixty percent of homes built before 1980, and by a wide margin the highest share of high-rise living in the region. That split shapes two very different flooring conversations. In the older ground-related homes across Etobicoke, North York, and the Beaches, original strip hardwood under later carpet or vinyl is common, and sanding and refinishing it is often the better answer than tearing it out. In a condo or apartment, the corporation's own rules on sound rating and underlay usually decide the material before we even discuss style.
Flatness is the measurement that decides readiness, separate from level. A century-home floor can slope and still be flat locally; a level floor can still fail a straightedge check. A big porcelain tile or a wide engineered board reveals every dip in the substrate the moment it is set, in a way a narrow strip or a small tile simply does not. We recently levelled a subfloor before laying engineered hardwood across the main floor of a Beaches home, a job you can see in our portfolio, and that prep step is what keeps a straight-lay pattern reading straight years later.
Acclimatisation is not a countdown of days with boxes stacked in the room. It is the house running at its normal indoor temperature and humidity, wet trades finished and dry, and the flooring reaching a matching moisture content that we confirm with a meter. A number of engineered and resilient products barely need any wait at all.
Below grade, a Toronto basement slab behaves like any other in the province: without a vapour barrier beneath it, it keeps releasing ground moisture regardless of the house's age, and solid hardwood is the material that suffers most for it. Engineered hardwood, LVP, and tile all tolerate the condition better, and testing the slab before installing anything bonded to it is what protects the job. Toronto prices a basement finish at $6.20 per square metre, with a $214.79 minimum. See our flooring work, pair it with a basement renovation, or browse everything we build across our Toronto service area.
Nearby, we also take on flooring work in Mississauga and flooring work in Oakville.