Home Renovation in West Vancouver

Folkestone Way is a three level house on a sloped West Vancouver lot that we renovated from end to end. The main floor was opened up into one living and dining space with the water in view from every seat. New skylights were cut into the roof over the kitchen and the stair, so the middle of the house is as bright as the rooms on the view side.

The kitchen got an island with a breakfast bar, a range wall with oak upper cabinets and quartz counters. The stair was rebuilt with a glass rail so it no longer blocks the sightline through the house. Upstairs, the ensuite has a soaker tub under the window and a separate walk in shower, and the roof deck was rebuilt as an outdoor room looking over the water. The same project supplies the photo behind our homepage headline. Open any photo below to see it full size, or browse the complete set in our gallery.

Almost every West Vancouver site slopes, and that shapes the job before a wall comes down. Steep driveways limit what a delivery truck can carry up, so cabinets, drywall and lumber are often staged at the street and moved in by hand. Retaining walls, terraced yards and the way the house steps down the hill decide where a beam can land and where a drain can run. We plan access, parking and material storage on the first visit.

Many of the houses date from the 1950s to the 1970s, with post and beam framing, low ceilings on the lower floors and windows that are small for the view they face. Opening a main floor usually means new beams and an engineer, and enlarging windows means looking at the envelope at the same time. Permits go through the District of West Vancouver, which has its own rules on trees, slopes and creeks, so we check those early and fold them into the schedule rather than discovering them mid project.

We quote from a site visit and a written scope, not from a price per square foot, because two West Vancouver houses of the same size can be very different jobs. A lot that needs hand carried materials, a main floor that needs steel to open up, or a roof deck that needs new membrane and drainage all move the number in ways a formula cannot.

What we can promise is that the quote is itemised, the allowances for finishes are listed, and changes during the job are priced before they happen. The items below are the ones that most often set the budget on the North Shore's west side.