You have just purchased a multiplex at a great cost, it needs tender love and care, but you want to convert it into a beautiful home for yourself and your family. What a great idea! You will have a spacious home with all the amenities you've always dreamed of.
Converting a multiplex into a single family home is a beautiful project. Undertaking it is great, but it needs planning ahead of time.
You can create your dream home or start with cost saving options.
Here are a few questions to ask yourself, in order to be more effective and reduce some of your costs.
1- Entrance, Front façade and Hallway:
In order to reduce your costs on these levels, is to try to work with the current state of the building. How can you replace without moving too many structural aspects of the home.
Does you current entrance have 1 or more doors?
If there are 2 doors, could you use the space and have a double doors?
If there is only 1 door for several floors, could you could look into having the current staircase to the other floors as your main staircase, with a few upgrades?
How big do you want your hallway to be?
2- Having several Kitchens
When converting a multiplex into a family home, you will inevitably have more than one kitchen. You are likely to need only one.
Which one would you like?
On what floor do you want it to be?
Can the plumbing and some of the electricity be reused for an "En-suite" bathroom?
There is always a way to make 2 become 1.
3- Having several Bathrooms
That is not much of a problem. Reusing the bathrooms from the other apartment, can become the bathroom on another floor or an "en-suite" bathroom with a bedroom.
The question that remains is, how big and how fancy?
4- Staircase
As mentioned in point #1, a staircase present inside the home does reduce costs. All you might have to do is give it a little bit of "tender-love and care - TLC". Possibly move a few steps and VOILÀ! You will have a beautiful staircase to lead you to your second floor and beyond.
However, if you current staircase is located outside the building, you will need engineering plans to build a new one inside the home, open between the 2 floors and do some finitions.
Lastly, you will have to finish the outside, but cutting the outside staircase or redoing the façade completely.
One step at a time.
5- Room Layout / Floor plan
With the conversion you want to do, you are now left with more rooms than you need. You have 2 choices.
1- Leave it as is, to save some money. Have more room, but smaller ones. You can always work on those later.
2- Take the opportunity to create big spacious rooms with big closets and possibly a beautiful adjoining bathroom. You could end up with the most spacious home in the neighbourhood.
If you choose the second option, make sure you have your engineer look into support walls. As your roof and other floors still need to have the proper support.
In order to create your dream home and convert a multiplex into a single family home, it is crucial to work with a team of professional in who you trust and get along with.
You want to make sure your team has the right credentials, the necessary experience, the right qualifications and the right attitude towards how they approach their clients and projects.
You want honesty, quality and passion. Those 3 qualities will give you the best finish and experience possible. (Considering a renovation is a stressful project to go through)
Lineaire General Contractor base their company on exactly those 3 qualities.
Honesty, Quality and Passion. The team members are held to a high standard.
In order to get a glimpse on what you futur conversion could be like with them, give them a call at: 514-686-0661 or visit their website at:
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