Renew Stairs

We recently had our first floor hardwood floor replaced, and wanted to update 2 vintage wood staircases to give our 112 year old High Park home a new and fresh look. We contacted Moe from Renew-Stairs, and had a pleasant experience with setting up the project, and through to completion. The workmanship of the tradesman who did the work was fantastic, and he was extremely pleasant and accommodating. The finished results exceeded our expectations.

There are a few key negatives that we had with the experience. One big one was with the timing of each work day. The tradesman showed up no earlier than 9:30 AM each day, which made getting to work on time for us impossible unless we left an entry key, which we had not arranged to do when planning the project with Moe. While we understand that the worker had to travel a great distance (he lived in a suburb of Toronto) to get to our home, we also had a long distance to get to work, and ended up being late for work not only on the first day of the job, but then again repeatedly throughout the project, which dragged on longer than what was originally quoted, largely because of the late start to each day.

Also, our son was 5 years old at the time of the project, which Moe and the worker were aware of. I had to wonder then why the stairs were left with nails and sharp wood sticking out after the original treads were removed. Our son had to walk up 2 flights of the stairs to get to his bedroom, and were it not for us hammering in all of the exposed nails and removing the wood shards as best we could, he might have been hurt.

Finally, similar to the point about leaving a dangerous work area noted above, the worker wanted to apply a strong scented varnish at 6 PM one day. The fumes of the varnish were extremely strong, and given that our son's bedtime was around 8 PM (not to mention we were about to have dinner), I asked the worker to stop work, and return the next day to apply the chemical. This seemed to put him off as he said that he would not be able to complete the job the next day (a Friday) as he had planned to. With an earlier start he could have easily avoided this situation.

Regardless of the negative points cited above, we would still recommend Renew-Stairs for the quality of their final product. Just be sure to have Moe clearly state what each work day's timing will be (i.e., provide an actual work plan), and anticipate schedule delays, as seem to happen so often with contractors and trades people.