Whole-Home Renovation in Burnaby

A whole-home renovation coordinates work across most or all of the house in a single project: kitchen, bathrooms, flooring, lighting, and whatever electrical, plumbing, or structural work the scope requires. Done as one project, you pay for one mobilization, one permit package, and one trade schedule - which is why renovating all at once generally costs less in total than tackling the same rooms one at a time over several years.

Our job is as much project management as construction. We walk the entire house, price every room and every system as one complete scope, and sequence framers, electricians, plumbers, tilers, and finish carpenters over the months the project runs. You deal with one point of contact, the owners visit the site often enough to catch issues before they become problems, and you hear from us every week about what's done, what's next, and what to expect. Whether you stay in the home or move out during the work is a real cost and schedule decision - we help you run both scenarios before the plan is locked, not after.

This scope suits owners of older Burnaby homes where the systems need updating anyway, families who've outgrown their layout but not their street, and anyone who has watched a room-by-room approach quietly cost more than it should have. It's a big number no matter how you slice it - which is exactly why it shouldn't be a moving one.

The building code doesn't only ask what you're adding - it asks how much of the original house is left. Strip a home back to its skeleton of studs, floors, and roof framing, and building officials can treat the project less like an alteration and more like new construction. Vancouver formalizes this in its own building by-law, which devotes an entire part to existing buildings and defines "reconstruction" explicitly; other Lower Mainland municipalities reach similar conclusions through their alteration provisions.

Crossing that line can pull in current-code requirements you weren't planning to touch - most notably energy performance, since a substantially reconstructed home can be asked to meet the same efficiency standards as a new one. Whether your scope crosses it depends on your municipality and your drawings, which is why we settle the question during design rather than discovering it at plan review, after the budget is set.

If your house predates 1990, provincial law assumes its walls may be hiding asbestos - in drywall compound, vinyl flooring, insulation, duct wrap - and WorkSafeBC requires a hazardous-materials survey by a qualified professional before renovation or demolition work begins. Since January 2024, asbestos abatement in BC may only be done by licensed firms with certified workers, and there's a public registry where anyone can verify a licence before the containment goes up.

If the project involves taking down large parts of the house, a demolition permit enters the picture, and some municipalities go further: Vancouver, for one, requires most of an older home's materials by weight to be reused or recycled rather than landfilled. None of this is optional, and none of it should be a surprise - it belongs in the scope and the schedule from the first version of the plan.

A whole-home renovation is your one clean chance to size the electrical service for where homes are actually heading: a heat pump, an EV charger, an induction range. Each is manageable alone, but together they can push an older 100-amp service past its limit - a question a licensed electrician answers with a load calculation against your square footage, heating, and appliances, not a guess.

Upgrading the service involves a licensed electrical contractor, a Technical Safety BC permit, and coordination with the utility - straightforward during a renovation, when the walls are open and the electrician is already on site, and disproportionately disruptive as a standalone project two years later. Even if the heat pump or the car is a someday plan, running the capacity and the rough-ins now is the inexpensive version of that decision.

Municipal inspections arrive in a fixed order - footings where there's excavation, framing with the plumbing and electrical rough-ins still visible, insulation and vapour barrier before drywall, then the finals - and on a whole-home scope that rhythm repeats zone by zone. Closing a wall before its inspection passes risks being ordered to open it again, so the schedule is built around inspection days rather than in spite of them.

If you're living in the house in Burnaby while it happens, the same sequencing is what keeps you sane: dust barriers between zones, utility shut-offs announced days ahead rather than discovered at breakfast, and the one working bathroom renovated last, not first. The mid-build weeks are the real test of a contractor's communication - you should always know what's happening tomorrow, and why.

Nearly every whole-home renovation triggers permits - structural, electrical, and plumbing changes almost always require them, with inspections at set stages, and structural work needs drawings stamped by a licensed engineer. In Burnaby we assemble the permit package as one coordinated application, bring in the engineers, and attend the inspections, so approvals never become the reason your schedule slips.

Building permits go through the City of Burnaby, and the process is conventional: application, plan review, inspections at the standard stages. Suite legalization and structural changes are the scopes that add review time, and condo work adds the building's own strata approval on top of anything the city requires. We prepare both tracks in parallel — the city package and the strata package — because waiting for one before starting the other is how condo projects lose a month for no reason.

Burnaby runs its building permits through the city's Building Division, and most of the process now lives in one place: the My Permits Portal. Alteration and addition permits are applied for online, fees are paid by card, and status stays visible throughout. Like-for-like work such as swapping cabinets, fixtures, or flooring needs no permit at all; structural changes, additions, and most plumbing and electrical work do, with separate trade permits pulled by the licensed trades doing them.

Inspections are booked through the same portal or by phone, at least one business day ahead. We fold those bookings into the construction calendar so the framing, insulation, and drywall stages each land with an inspector already scheduled, instead of losing a day to a missed booking.

One change worth knowing: as of July 2026, Burnaby's updated development approval process means some projects need a development permit before a building permit can be submitted. The city is still publishing detail on which project types are captured, and most interior renovations will not be. We confirm which path applies during the estimate, so the approval route is settled before anyone commits to a start date.