A full-home renovation in Mount Royal.

Some renovations touch one room. This one touched the whole house. A character two-storey in Calgary's Mount Royal came to us dated on the outside and dark on the inside, with a backyard nobody wanted to sit in. Over the project, the same team reworked the exterior, the kitchen, and the back deck — so the finishes, the schedule, and the accountability all ran through one place.

From the street, the house read tired. The siding had gone flat and dark, the windows wore heavy dark trim, and a low red-brick porch wall boxed in the front — solid bones under a dated skin. Inside, the kitchen was the bigger problem: a cramped L-shape with pale flat-slab cabinets, oak trim strips, and — the part you felt more than saw — a dark painted ceiling and upper walls that swallowed what little light the small window let in. Out back, a weathered grey wall, a rounded dome awning over the door, and a small, aging deck made the yard somewhere you passed through, not somewhere you stayed. None of it was falling down. It was a good house asking to be brought forward a few decades — the kind of project where the plan matters more than the demolition.

Here's the part that makes a whole-house project survivable: it was one team. The exterior, the kitchen, and the backyard weren't three contractors with three schedules pointing at each other — they were one project lead and our trusted network of long-term licensed trade partners, working to one plan. The colours were chosen so the new kitchen, the new siding, and the new deck actually belonged to the same house. When a decision on the outside affected the inside, the same person was holding both ends of it.

That's the whole argument for how we work, tested on a project with a lot of moving parts: not fancier, more accountable.

The front is where the transformation reads loudest. The tired dark siding gave way to crisp white lap siding; the heavy dark window trim became clean black-framed windows; and the boxed-in brick porch was reworked into a warm, modern entry — natural cedar posts and vertical cedar-slat screens against the white, with a wood-decked porch and new concrete steps and walkway. New sod and planting beds finished the ground. Same house, same footprint — a completely different first impression.

Before After

Inside, the kitchen changed character completely. The dark painted ceiling is gone; in its place, a bright white ceiling with clean surface-mounted lighting. The pale laminate cabinets and oak trim gave way to warm wood-veneer cabinetry, run floor-to-ceiling, paired with white quartz counters and a white hexagon-tile backsplash. A larger window pulls in the front-yard light the old kitchen never had, a gas range replaced the old electric one, and the space opens now toward the living area instead of hiding behind a wall. Underfoot, a herringbone wood floor ties it to the rest of the main floor. It's the same room, reading twice as big — because light and layout, not square footage, were the actual problem.

Before After