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All posts by Perfect Fit Ltd.
The Test of Time
The biggest testament to both quality workmanship and materials is how well the end result stands up to the test of time. Everything looks great when it is new! New clothes have bright, vibrant colours with no pills, stains or tears. New floors don’t squeak. Neither skylight or windows leak when they are new. Kitchens gleam with shiny new appliances while the cupboards and drawers open and close smoothly and properly.
Over time, however, all of these things can break down if not cared for properly. Yet hardwood still shouldn’t squeak, millwork should still open and close, and windows are never supposed to leak.
Here are some projects that we’ve done that have stood the test of time.
Guelph – Project completed in 1999
This post-war era bungalow used to have 3 small bedrooms and a cramped kitchen. There was a hallway that connected the bedrooms, washroom and kitchen which ate up valuable living space and restricted the possible layouts for the bathroom. The project removed the hallway and transitioned that space to be into working space included in a bright open concept kitchen. One of our specialties is the barrel vault with light alcove as these pictures show.
The middle bedroom was opened up to become this lovely dining room. The ceiling was vaulted and the skylight was installed. The original owner had sage green walls, but even though the new owner has changed the paint colour the vaulted ceiling and skylight remain as they were. The client had room in the basement that let them take the bedroom that was removed and create a new one downstairs so that the home still had the same number of bedrooms.
When the hallway was removed and the dining room created next to the existing bathroom, it removed any restrictions holding the clients to the existing washroom floorplan. It allowed the door to move from the hallway over to the new dining room. This allowed us to create a large walk in shower where the door used to be. This room also had the ceiling vaulted and another skylight installed here too. Even though the shower is now far away from the room’s window, it is still nice and bright.
Now that someone would be living in the basement, a washroom needed to be created. There’s no need for a washroom to be dark and cave-like because it’s in the basement. If you have the room, a full bathroom with luxurious spa steam shower can be created.
Stay tuned for another project that has passed the test of time!
Barn Doors – Here to Stay, or Already Gone?
Barn doors – either you love them or you hate them. Usually it’s a response tied to having the decorative element “Barn” aesthetic in your home. If you’ve ever been in a barn you know it can be smelly, drafty and they are typically run down, which is not something that a lot of people want in their home. So let’s change the key word from Barn, to Sliding Doors.
Make no mistake about it, sliding doors have been a very hot trend for a few years. Some people say that they are an outdated trend that is not only on it’s way out, it’s gone. Others say that it’s still hot hot hot. Owners both love and hate them, depending on which poll you happen to be viewing in which area.
This begs the question, are they right for you? That’s really going to depend on what layout you happen to have. If you have a frustrating space in your home that already has you contemplating a pocket door and the budget to implement it, then absolutely go forward with the sliding door. Bi-fold doors are my least favourite door as they restrict the opening and make getting items out of corners difficult. Regular doors require swing space, which can make hallways restricted, conflict with other doors and sometimes be challenging for furniture layout. Pocket doors are great in that they can be locked/latched, but they require having no restrictions of existing plumbing or electrical wiring in the wall that you want to put them in to.
Sliding doors also have their own restrictions. The hardware and usually the door that you pick (especially if it is a solid door) are very heavy. Newer homes will typically have the ability to carry the weight, but older homes may fall apart as soon as you try to hang something that dense. In that case, a pocket door is probably going to cause a lot of construction problems too. They also do not seal to the door opening as they float in front of it which makes them less than ideal if you need a sound barrier as well as visual privacy. Sliding doors also require wall space on which to slide, which you might have wanted to use for artwork.
On the plus side, latches can be purchased and added to your wall if you need a locking mechanism. You can purchase a door much larger than the door opening if you wish to reduce sound. The doors don’t have to be rustic, they can be elegant or decorated to suit your style. Sliding doors designed to suit the space and maintain the overall decor are less likely to become fad items that are quickly torn out.
Studies have been done showing the return on investment for barn doors. Depending on the area, they have increased the value of the home significantly and reduced the time on the market by months. In the Greater Toronto Area where there is a lack of inventory resulting in bully offers, bidding wars and selling prices that are way over asking price as standard practice, this information probably isn’t going to sway you very much. If you live in an area where those conditions are not the norm, then this information might be helpful if you keep in mind that not all buyers are going to love them.
All of this being said, sliding doors are a solution to creating a living space that suits your needs. Whether you have an architectural challenge to overcome, if you need a visual separation, or if you simply adore sliding doors we believe that they are a viable solution that will be around for a long time even if they are not as widely implemented as they have been over the past few years.
Besides, if you normally have the sliding door closed and desperately want artwork on the wall that the door slides over, we can build a marvelous art niche for you (or one of the lovely solutions shown below like the sliding mirrors over the window).
White bathrooms
To most people white means bright and clean, especially when discussing bathrooms and kitchens. Others think of it as too stark, and it can be a cold colour. However, the warmth and coldness of the bathroom heavily depend on what the white is paired with. The easiest thing to change is the paint colour on the walls if your permanent and hard to replace items like tiles and fixtures are white. Below are some samples of white bathrooms that are all completely different even though the base is white for those permanent items.
White on white
The light coming through the windows might make the paint colour look like something other than white, but this room really is white on white. The simple colour scheme really makes the veining on the Carrera marble really stand out. It’s bright, simple and the artwork maintains the same colour scheme. The change from square Carrera to linear mosaic tile in the soap niches is the only thing to draw your attention to those features.
White and blue
Once again the paint on the walls is a simple white leaving the accent tiles and the countertop and sink on the vanity to make the statement with colour. The herringbone pattern on the floor and shower wall adds visual interest and depth without adding any different colours to the pallet.
White and grey
Once again the tiles are white and Carrera marble, with the addition this time of “bling” in the shower with crackled clear glass tiles. What can we say, we love the herringbone pattern, which shows on the floor in the runner tile. However, this time the walls are a warm grey which completely changes the room, especially when you consider it against the rooms shown above. The artwork in this washroom pulls in pink and purple as accent colours, without making the room overwhelmingly pink or purple. It also pulls in the grey, chrome and the whites found in various parts of the washroom. Change the artwork out for something else and the tone of the room would change as well.
We like all of these rooms, and are proud of our work in each of them. Which one is your favourite that you’d love to see in your home?
Social Media
There’s lots of different media out there, the majority of which we haven’t written (darn it!) but that is interesting, funny or informative. Typically that’s the sort of thing you’ll find that we share on our Facebook page www.facebook.com/PerfectFitLtd that we’ve had for quite a while.
It’s a new year, and a new us, and we’ve finally gotten on the Pinterest bandwagon too. Save our projects to your boards from
https://www.pinterest.com/perfectfitltd/renovation-portfolio/
If you find anything interesting, please share it with us!
We’re growing!
Perfect Fit is a company that is dedicated to excellence and we take pride in our completed projects. We are looking for trades people to help us transition from the downtown core to north of Toronto, specifically we are based out of Cookstown. We are looking for the following trades to help us grow:
- Carpenter
- Drywaller with metal stud experience
- Tiler
- Jr. general labour
We are looking for professional, dependable people with experience in delivering exceptional product. You MUST have your own reliable means of transportation (to rural sites or other cities/towns), and your own tools.
FOCUS Community Development Corporation and The Town of New Tecumseth are hosting a Job Fair this Thursday November 3, 2016 from 4:30pm to 6:30pm. Please join us at the:
The Gibson Centre
63 Tupper Street West, Alliston
Please bring a copy of your resume, and pictures of your previously completed work would be advised. For more information on the job fair please visit: http://focuscdc.on.ca/job-fair-2016/ . We can be found at www.PerfectFitLtd.com
You’re famous! Ok, you’re on YouTube…
When a commercial job happens, most times the contractors are only hired for a specific portion of the whole job. This means that if you’re not doing the finishes, you don’t get to see the completed project. So it’s a nice change when pictures come in showing the results of our hard work.
This time, not only do we get to see the end result, we’re lucky to get a glimpse of the work as it happened courtesy of ELLE on their Time Lapse Transformation of the ELLE Canada Closet! Our Doug Cochrane is in here quite a few times at the beginning, but most easily recognizable in the red shirt. Our thanks to ELLE Canada for the video and to D&S Management for adding us to the team for this project.
“The Icebox” – AKA the Room Over the Garage
- Staying warm at home.
As things get colder, yet again, we start to hibernate in our homes even more. Sure, we usually all congregate in obvious places like the kitchen or the TV room, but what isn’t always obvious is the rooms that we avoid and why we avoid them.
Ok, sure, if you have a storage room you’re not going to be spending a lot of time there. Nor are you going to be in that unfinished basement a lot either. But what about your bedrooms? Adults usually don’t spend a lot of time in their bedroom outside of sleeping and getting ready in the morning, but children can spend hours in their rooms playing. If they aren’t doing that, why not? Could it be because their room is too cold and they just don’t want to spend any time there?
There are a few reasons for a bedroom to be cold. Let’s go through a quick list so that you can see for yourself where the drafts or coldness might be coming from.
- Venting – The quickest and easiest thing to do is to see if there is a return air vent in the room. The furnace can push as much air as it wants, but if there is nowhere for it to go, then no air is going to enter the room. Plus, there is no way for the cold air to be pulled out of it either.
- The window! – Usually this is a great culprit for letting in the cold air. Carefully take a lit candle and see if you’re getting any air leaking from around the edges. The direction of the flame flickering and how much it flickers will tell you how much of a draft you have. Wood frames tend to warp and shrink, the insulation around the frame may not be stopping all of the air flow coming in. Plus, if the windows themselves are older the crank may not be keeping a good seal either.
- Cold from below – Building codes are pretty strict these days with respect to garages. There must be separation both for fire and for CO exhaust from cars and trying to prevent both of those from entering the house. However, older homes might not be up to the same standards as new ones. The ceiling of the garage/floor of the bedroom should be treated as if it was an exterior wall. This includes proper insulation and vapour barrier. If the floor is cold, this is a good indication that this is your problem area. This is especially true if the air vents run through the floor, and all you’re getting out of the floor vent is cold air as it is getting chilled prior to arriving in the room.
- The ceiling – Heat always rises, and just like we have hair and hats to keep our heads warm, insulation keeps the heat in your house. If your attic has not been properly insulated then heat is escaping out through the roof. If you can’t climb into the attic to look (or aren’t sure what to look for) have a look at the snow on the roof outside. If you have a lot of ice under the snow, then it is melting from the heat loss. If you have way less snow on your roof than your neighbours, then this is also a good indication of poor insulation.
We pay a lot for our homes and our interior spaces are too precious to simply not use them due to temperature discomfort. There are things you can do, and no reason why you shouldn’t do them. Even if you have to spend a little bit on a fix now, it will quickly add up on heating savings both now and over the long term.
Stop running away from your own home
Admit it. When you turn the light off to the basement, you get the heck out of there, don’t you?
There is just something creepy and icky about old exposed floor beams, scraggly insulation, unfinished cement walls and floors. That is, if you’re even lucky enough to have cement. A lot of the older homes have river stone walls and bricks for floors. I always wonder if there is going to be a spider or some other creepy crawly dropping on my hair in those sorts of spaces. (Insert shuddering here.)
We recently rented a cottage for a week with a walk-out basement that went to the beach. Somehow, between the cramped stairs to the basement combined with the unfinished state, all of us would walk out on the deck to get down to the beach. Ok, I understand that they store things like the canoe and lifejackets down there, but that doesn’t mean that it needs to remain unfinished! We would scurry with hunched shoulders from the exterior door to the lower level bathroom despite the two foot of clearance to the joists above us. Once in the finished bathroom with the door closed, I felt a sense of relief and comfort.
Can you imagine a bright and clean functional workspace you could create if your washer and dryer are in the basement? Ahhh… no more stuffing your clean laundry into the basket in order to launch yourself upstairs where you can fold them in comfort. Storage spaces can still be utilitarian for those areas where you just need to dump seldom used items, but a finished space with shelves and/or cupboards will help keep you organized and prevent your floor from becoming a mess of a dumping ground.
One last thought on a possible way to use your basement: the Man Cave (also known as the home theatre and place to hide away the electronic gaming systems).
Stop scurrying away with the heebie-jeebies from what can be a valuable addition to your home. Finishing a basement means more than just getting rid of that annoying damp smell. It increases the value of your home, increases the amount of usable living space and decreases your heating/cooling bills.
- Finished basement
Out with the old, in with the new?
When planning a renovation, a lot of clients like to choose environmentally friendly options. These are great when you consider how they affect your monthly costs for utilities. When problems are encountered as part of the renovation process, the best choice is to fix any deficiencies. This is especially true when it comes to insulation and vapour barrier as these things also improve the energy efficiency of the home.
Unfortunately, one of the things that is often overlooked when budgeting are the current appliances and how much they cost you every month in utilities. There are times when clients have said to us that they would just keep their old fridge in order to save money during their kitchen renovations even if they are old and ugly. It’s time to look beyond the aesthetics of your current model and the up-front costs of a new one.
When we moved in to our current house, it came with a fridge. We already had a fridge that we love, but we kept the one that came with the house. We don’t use it very often, it is stashed away in the basement and it is rarely turned on. We keep it for those big family get-togethers where everyone brings food and there are always lots of leftovers.
I’ll admit, there are times when I’m lazy and forget to turn the extra fridge off (especially if there is extra ice cream hiding in the freezer). There have been times when it has stayed on for a month at a time even if the need for the extra fridge is minimal. That is, until I get my next hydro bill! There have been a few times when that hydro bill has come in with an extra $60-80 that I wasn’t expecting to have to pay. This always prompts me to run downstairs, throw out any unnecessary items (eat some ice cream) and turn it off!
Now you might be thinking that your costs for your fridge aren’t that high. You might also think that a new fridge would just be replacing your current costs. In part, you’re correct. However, the fridges that they make today are much more energy efficient than older models. Your hydro bill will indeed show savings with a newer model, especially when you consider that the single biggest electricity user in an average gas heated home is the refrigerator. Even if you only save $30 a month, that is $360 saved this year, and $1800 over 5 years.
We love to help you create beautiful spaces. We also like to help you consider all of your options, including the possible hidden costs as well as the potential savings.
Who We Are
We want you to feel comfortable and to be able to trust the people that you work with, so here is some information about our management team.
Doug Cochrane
Doug started in the commercial drywall business back in 1986. During his 18 years of working for others, he completed projects in practically every commercial tower in downtown Toronto, as well as the majority of malls across the GTA. At that point, Doug struck out on his own and started Perfect Fit, which was incorporated in 2007. Since then he has acquired a broad scope of related skills including site supervision and project management for both residential locations as well as restaurants, stores, condominiums and other various commercial locations. With these many experiences under his tool belt, he is fully equipped to handle any construction job.
Laura Hammond Cochrane
Laura is a change management professional with over fourteen years of project management, operational, logistics and customer service management experience in implementing practice management software. Laura went to school at Carleton University for Hon. B.Sc. in Computer Mathematics, which is how she wound up in the software industry. Along the way she discovered a passion for seeing projects become beautiful finished spaces and transitioned over to Perfect Fit.
We look forward to working with you!