Mainland Ventures

Our 100 yr old house had a lot of challenges when it came to designing a working reno plan: a long skinny footprint, coupled with our rather unusual usage needs, made this a demanding concept.

The job: gut the entire basement to the studs; remove forced air heating system and all ductwork, replace with high efficiency boiler hot water baseboard heat (for two floors of the house, electric baseboards in the attic); rebuild floorplan using the recovered space from the furnace to build an additional half-bath adjoining home office; rebuild master bathroom adding a steam shower; replace all electrical and install halogen pot lights throughout; ; run new water service from the street and repair/rebuild drains /sewage system. reconfigure stairs to meet building code; replace flooring with laminate wood throughout.

After our initial meeting with Paul Pharaon we were impressed by his broad scope of knowledge, not only of the possibilities our home presented, but the pitfalls, the potential conflicts in bringing it up to building code, and the costs in money and time a job like this would incur. From the very first meeting throughout the several months of our job, we could always count on Paul for reliable, timely, accurate information. When things changed and problems presented themselves (as they often do when one is unearthing prior amateurish "home improvements" ) Paul and his team were able to change course and address the new issues, always keeping us in the loop, and with hardly a delay in the timeline. Despite these several "surprises" hidden behind our old walls, the Mainland team brought our job in only slightly later than originally predicted, and largely on the original budget. Where there were new expenses, none were themselves "surprises" and Paul always kept available an accurate running ledger showing the project's costs.

Once underway, Paul's team made every effort to minimize our disruption ( we were still living above) -- despite a LOT of dirty work, every day the site was cleaned and old debris removed. We live on a very narrow lot, and our neighbours' homes are very close. Neither neighbour reported any problem caused by noise, traffic, dust, or other causes. Paul's workers were all courteous, considerate, and pleasant to interact with. And did I mention, hard-working? They truly went the extra distance on our job, and it was wonderful to see the excellent teamwork in action.

We are now very happy living in our "new old" house. We would not hesitate to highly recommend Mainland Ventures to anyone looking into renovation done by this fine company.