Kitsilano’s housing is largely 1910s and 1920s character houses on 33-foot lots between West 4th and Broadway. The kitchens are 90 to 130 sq ft, at the back, with a rear porch or pantry beside them and a swing door to the dining room.
Nothing in these houses is square. Walls lean 15 to 25 mm over their height, floors fall 20 to 40 mm across a room, and ceilings are 8 ft 4 in or 9 ft. All three are normal, and all three are why stock cabinetry disappoints here.
Why the cabinetry has to be built to the room
Stock cabinets are fixed widths made for plumb walls. Against a Kitsilano wall they produce filler panels, a tapering gap between counter and wall that gets caulked and cracks, and a base run that follows a sloping floor and becomes obvious the moment a straight countertop sits on it.
Built-to-size cabinetry fixes it twice over. The run is made to your wall’s actual dimension, so a 2,840 mm wall gets 2,840 mm of cabinetry instead of 2,700 mm plus two fillers. And the end panels are scribed on site to the actual wall profile.
The height is the second gain. A 9-foot Kitsilano ceiling can carry cabinetry that stock ranges do not make, which is how a 100 sq ft kitchen gets the storage it otherwise lacks. See custom kitchen cabinets.
Gaining space without touching structure
Three moves work in these houses and none of them are structural: absorb the enclosed rear porch, absorb the original walk-in pantry, or replace the swing door to the dining room with a wide cased opening. Together they typically gain 40 to 80 sq ft for $2,000 to $6,000.
The rear porch is the best value. Many Kits houses have an enclosed porch off the kitchen already inside the building envelope but uninsulated and unheated. Bringing it properly into the kitchen costs a fraction of an addition.
Where a wall genuinely has to come out, it is frequently load-bearing in these houses — and they have often been altered before, occasionally without proper support having been put back. We open an inspection hole and look. See open-concept conversion.
A representative Kitsilano project
The pattern: a 1922 house on a numbered avenue, 105 sq ft kitchen at the rear with an enclosed porch beside it, original walk-in pantry, 100-amp panel, some knob-and-tube surviving in one wall, and a floor falling 30 mm from the dining room door to the outside wall.
What typically gets specified: the porch absorbed to bring the kitchen to about 150 sq ft, the pantry absorbed and its storage replaced with a pull-out larder, the subfloor levelled, the knob-and-tube replaced while the walls are open, a panel upgrade, and built-to-size inset-door cabinetry running to 2,600 mm with the casing profiles matched to the existing house.
Typical cost $62,000 to $88,000 including the remediation. Seven to nine weeks on site. We recommend holding 15% contingency on a house of this age rather than the usual 10%.
What the remediation actually costs
| Item | How often in Kits houses | Cost (CAD) |
|---|---|---|
| Subfloor levelling | Most houses | $1,200 – $5,000 |
| Panel upgrade | Common — 60 or 100 amp | $2,500 – $6,000 |
| Knob-and-tube replacement | About 1 in 5 pre-1950 | $3,000 – $11,000 |
| Galvanised pipe replacement | About 1 in 4 | $1,500 – $6,000 |
| Hazardous materials survey | Every pre-1990 home | $350 – $550 |
| Asbestos abatement if found | About 1 in 8 | $2,000 – $12,000 |
We open the sink base and check the panel at the measure, so most of this is quoted rather than discovered. That is the whole point of the 90-minute visit.