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Renovating a Calgary Bungalow
Updated 2 min read
The short answer
Calgary’s post-war bungalows — Killarney, Glendale, Acadia, Charleswood, Bowness — share a predictable set of conditions: 8ft ceilings, significant settlement, original fir trim darkened with age, and plaster or early drywall. Nothing is square, so every piece of new work is scribed rather than cut to a dimension. Budget for that, and these houses reward carpentry more than almost any other stock in the city.
What you will find
- Nothing is square or level
- Sixty or seventy years of settlement means openings are out of plumb and floors slope. New cabinetry is built square and reconciled to the house with scribes and shims, which takes longer than installing into a new build.
- Original fir trim, darkened
- Often worth keeping. Fir darkens considerably with light exposure, which is why new fir never matches old fir straight away. Matching means either accepting a difference initially or tinting to compensate.
- Plaster in the older examples
- Harder than drywall, more brittle, and it does not patch the same way. Removing trim from plaster needs more care.
- 8ft ceilings
- Which sets the trim scale. Resist the temptation to install 180mm baseboard because it looked good in a magazine of a 10ft room.
- Small original kitchens
- Frequently the reason for the renovation. Bungalow kitchens were designed around a different way of cooking and entertaining.
- Good bones
- Genuinely. These houses were built with dimensional lumber and they are solid. The problems are cosmetic and dimensional, not structural.
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Where carpentry pays off most
- Built-ins in the living room
- Bungalow living rooms are often a good size but featureless. A shelving wall or a fireplace flank transforms them.
- Trim matching into renovated areas
- The single detail that makes a renovation read as original rather than added.
- Kitchen carpentry
- Where the layout works, refacing or new cabinetry in the existing footprint is transformative. Where it does not, the walls usually need to move.
- Window seats
- Bungalows frequently have deep window recesses that are doing nothing.
- Basement development
- The basements are usually low but usable, and the added floor area is significant relative to the main floor.
Answers
Frequently asked questions
- Is it worth keeping original trim in a bungalow?
- Usually yes, if it is in reasonable condition. The profiles are often better than current stock and the fir is good material. The difficulty is matching new pieces to old, because the existing wood has darkened over decades. A custom knife plus careful tinting gets close.
- Why does everything take longer in an old house?
- Because nothing is square. New cabinetry is built square in the shop and then reconciled to walls that lean, floors that slope and openings that are out of plumb. That reconciliation is skilled hand work and it is genuine labour, not padding.
- What ceiling height should I plan trim around?
- Whatever you actually have — usually 8ft in these houses, which suits 90–140mm baseboard. Oversized trim in a low room makes it feel lower, which is the opposite of what most bungalow renovations are trying to achieve.
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