Growing up in the west end of Toronto, our three-storey attached Victorian row house had beautiful stained glass windows, spacious rooms and a third floor bedroom large enough to house four children. The basement, however, housed the mountain of coal dumped through the basement window, quarterly, which fed our furnace – that was it! In the early 1950s, people just accepted the fact that basements were dark, dank, wet and only about 6 feet high. Today it’s a different …

As a homeowner, you are not legally permitted to perform your own renovation work, with the exception of the electrical, but it is strongly recommended amateurs not do this as disastrous results can occur.