Materials, Systems & Comfort

The decisions that compound

Three categories of decision define how the renovated house actually performs: envelope, mechanical, and material. Get any one wrong and the others can't fully compensate.

Envelope: walls, windows, roof

When a renovation opens up exterior walls, you have a once-per-house chance to upgrade the assembly. The current BC Energy Step Code has driven the industry toward continuous exterior insulation, better air-sealing, and higher-performance windows, and the BC Housing residential construction guides document the assemblies that actually perform in our coastal climate. Cheap windows on a renovated house are the choice you'll regret in November when condensation runs down the inside of the frames — the background is in our piece on windows and glazing for Burnaby winters.

Mechanical: heat, hot water, ventilation

Renovations are the right moment to convert from gas furnaces to heat pumps with proper HRV. The federal Canada Greener Homes program and provincial rebates from BC Hydro and FortisBC stack to make the math comfortable, but the real value is comfort — quieter, more even temperatures, lower humidity in winter, no combustion inside the building envelope.

Heat pumps work in BC. They've worked in colder climates than ours for decades. The ones that disappoint are usually undersized, badly ducted, or installed without an HRV pairing — all design problems, not technology problems.

Material: floor, surface, finish

Materials that age beautifully aren't always the most expensive — they're the ones that handle moisture, sun, and twenty years of family life without looking tired. Solid hardwood, real stone, properly sealed concrete, quartersawn millwork, and clay or porcelain tile have long track records. We've put our taste on this in writing in Materials that age beautifully and the related Why we don't believe in builder-grade.

The renovation-specific traps

• New finishes over old systems. Beautiful new kitchen on ungrounded wiring, or new flooring over a substrate the contractor didn't level. Address the system layer before the finish layer or the finish becomes the most expensive bandage in the house.
• Mismatched envelope upgrades. New windows in old walls can shift dew points and cause condensation problems if the rest of the assembly isn't reviewed at the same time.
• Mechanical sized for the old house. A renovated house with new windows, better insulation, and tighter air-sealing has a dramatically different heating load than the original. Sizing the equipment to the new load — not the old — is the difference between comfort and a lifetime of short-cycling.

Comfort is invisible

Clients walk into the finished renovation and notice the kitchen, the flooring, the light. Six months later what they tell their friends about is the comfort — quiet, even temperature, no draughts, fresh air without opening windows. That comfort is invisible the day they move in and undeniable a year later. It's worth designing for.