Total gut renos moves to Junction

The area of Dundas West and Islington Ave, and many other WTO areas have been undergoing major house expansion renos of existing houses or complete tear-down and rebuilds. The entire community is under an intensive build big, built new boom. Now that same course of action has come to the Junction with at least 4 active right now.

This 1st set of images is front one about 3/4 finished.





Dug out area where the veranda used to be, probably going to be a room under the new veranda.



New side brick.

Hopefully as this intensifies in the Junction the gut build crowd will maintain some of the character of their buildings.

Take a small house & lot and build big and new

Draw a sqaure kilometer around the intersection of Dundas West and Islington Ave, and you will not find a street where a major house expansion or complete tear-down and rebuild isn't taking place. The entire community is under an intensive build big, built new boom. The example house pictured above is built on a lot that had a house half this size on it a few weeks ago. While people see a need for more interior space and  societal norms are changing to bigger houses and smaller yards in WTO, this area will change in character very much over the next few months.

Posted by Robert

Not just poor people get gentrified

On Dundas St West between Royal York Rd. and Islington Ave., various infil projects have been transforming this stretch of prime residential real estate over the past few years.

Perhaps when many of these 50's and 60's (?) homes were built on the cheaper main-street land of an older area they were the homes of middle class people in the first wave of those moving out of the busy part of growing city to what was then, the burbs. These properties now have taxes unaffordable for people in similar jobs or on fixed incomes.

First it appears that two neighbours with wide, ranch bungalo style lots got together and each sold enough of their adjacent yards to one buyer. That buyer then had enough room to build a deep, two storey ~4 bedroom home. This sporadic infil is normal for any in-demand area but now this short tree-lined stretch is the site of several more infil projects. Perhaps those original sellers didn't know how different it would feel in their much smaller back yard after a deeper and taller structure loomed beside them.

-last three pics of opposite (south) side of Dundas

Posted by David