Painters in Willowdale, North York

House Painters in Willowdale, North York

Willowdale runs up Yonge Street from Highway 401 and Sheppard to the hydro corridor north of Finch, Bathurst Street on the west edge and Bayview Avenue on the east. North York City Centre, centred on Yonge at Empress and Park Home, is the core of it. The city keeps the tall building on Yonge itself, so the towers line the main street and the houses sit behind.

The census numbers show how lopsided that is. In Willowdale East, 72% of the 23,901 private dwellings are apartments in buildings of five storeys or more, and 73% of occupied dwellings are condos. Across the City of Toronto those same two figures are 44% and 26%. Willowdale West is quieter but still 61% apartments, with single-detached houses making up 27% of 8,054 dwellings.

The age of the stock catches people out. Willowdale is not an old neighbourhood. Only 7% of Willowdale East dwellings were built before 1960 and 57% went up in 2001 or later. Willowdale West is older at 22% pre-1960, still under the city average of 33%. So the first question here is not how old the place is. It is tower unit or house behind Yonge.

The City's 2021 profiles carve Willowdale into smaller neighbourhoods. Two of them sit side by side, and their numbers could hardly be further apart. Yonge-Doris is the tower strip on Yonge and Doris Avenue. There, 9,090 of the 9,845 occupied dwellings are in buildings of five storeys or more, and the average home has 3.5 rooms. East Willowdale is the house side behind it, on streets like Kenneth, Holmes and Parkview Avenues. There, 2,970 of the 5,610 dwellings are single-detached houses, and the average home has 6.3 rooms. That's close to twice the rooms per door, and it's the gap between a suite repaint and a whole-house job.

What Painting in Willowdale Actually Deals With

Take Doris Avenue, running parallel to Yonge behind North York Centre. It sounds like a house street. It is not. Doris sits inside Yonge-Doris, where more than nine in ten homes are in buildings of five storeys or more. On a street like that, painting is a building job first.

Every one of those buildings writes its own rules, and under Ontario's Condo Act everyone inside follows them, contractors included. So we book the service elevator through the property manager before we lock in your date, send the certificate of insurance the corporation wants, pad the lift and corridor, and park where we are told. The dock is shared with movers, so that booking sets your start day.

Hours are the other one. The Toronto noise bylaw blocks construction noise from 7 p.m. to 7 a.m. on weekdays, until 9 a.m. Saturdays, and all day Sunday and statutory holidays. Most boards tighten that further. We keep the loud work inside the window the building allows.

Interior and Exterior Painting in Willowdale

Inside, condos need paint that meets Canada's VOC limits, protected hallways, and a crew that respects the building rules.

The houses behind Yonge are a different job. Cracks above door frames, wood trim buried under decades of coats, hallways worn by family traffic. Newer walls are drywall and older ones can be plaster, and the repair is not the same, so we check before we quote. Then we cut the cracks open, fill, prime, and finish the wall.

Two Globe and Mail sale reports from 2010 show the range on those streets. 64 Claywood Road, near Edithvale Park, was a solid-brick raised bungalow on a 42 by 125 foot lot, kept by the same owners for more than 50 years, with wood-panelled walls in the lower-level rec room. Near Bayview and Sheppard, 307 Parkview Avenue was a two-storey rebuild about a year old, in brick and stone, with 10-foot ceilings, plaster mouldings, and a hexagon skylight over a circular stair with wrought iron railings. The agent said the street had a lot of conversion done already. Wikipedia says the big replacement two-storeys went up on a large scale from the 1990s, and that Willowdale is where Torontonians first used the term monster homes. The two paint differently. Old panelling gets deglossed and a bonding primer before it takes colour. Plaster mouldings get filled and brushed, not rolled. A stairwell under a skylight needs staging, not just a tall ladder.

Outside, sun on the south wall and Toronto freeze-thaw lift paint off wood siding every few years. We scrape back to solid wood, prime, and repaint when the weather allows. See our interior painting and exterior painting pages for more detail.

Residential and Commercial Painting

Willowdale is mostly homes and condos. We also paint the small retail and office units along Yonge and Sheppard. If the work has to happen outside your business hours, tell us when you ask for the estimate.

Old Paint and Lead in the Older Willowdale Houses

This never comes up on a 2008 condo, and most of Willowdale is that new. On the older houses it does, and the advice you usually read is wrong. Canada did not regulate lead in paint until 1976, not 1960. Assume any house built before 1980 has it, inside and out, and that exterior paint from before 1990 can still carry high levels. Before 1960 it ran as high as 30 to 50% pure lead, worst on the surfaces people touch: window trim, baseboards, banisters, doors and porches.

So we do not dry sand old paint and we never use a heat gun. A heat gun turns lead into vapour. Dry sanding turns it into a fine dust that travels through the house. We seal the room, prep wet, vacuum with a HEPA filter, and sheet the ground outside so the scrapings stay out of the soil.

The Painting Services We Offer

These are the jobs we handle on a North York home, most of them on the same visit.

• Interior painting

  Walls, ceilings, trim, doors, and closets, patched and primed first. Paint that meets Canada's VOC limits, matched to the surface.

• Exterior painting

  Wood siding, aluminum, brick, porches, and railings. We wash, scrape, and prime first, because that is what lasts a Toronto winter.

• Cabinet painting

  Doors come off, get degreased, sanded, and sprayed, so there are no brush marks. See cabinet painting.

• Drywall and plaster repair

  Cracks, holes, water stains, and open seams, skimmed flat and primed so the repair disappears. See drywall and plaster repair.

• Deck and fence staining

  Backyard wood greys out fast. We wash, dry, and stain it so it sheds water. See deck and fence staining.

• Wallpaper removal

  We score, steam, strip the glue, and skim the wall smooth so it is ready to paint.

• Ceiling painting

  Flat, even ceilings with the water stains blocked first. On a wavy ceiling, flat paint hides the dips instead of lighting them up.

• Trim, crown molding, and doors

  Baseboards, casings, crown, and doors filled, caulked, sanded, and finished hard enough to take daily knocks.

• Stucco and siding

  We prep stucco, aluminum, and vinyl, then use coatings that move with the surface instead of cracking off.

• Power washing

  Dirt, chalk, and mildew washed off before any exterior paint, so the new coat grabs the surface.

Great customer service, job done professionally, very happy with the result, definitely recommend.

Written Estimates in Willowdale

We paint across Willowdale, from the towers near North York Centre to the streets south of Finch. Call or fill out the form and we come to you.

The run up from our base is St Dennis Drive to Wynford Drive, through Concorde Place and Concorde Gate, north on the Don Valley Parkway, then west on Highway 401 and north on Yonge. About 14.5 km and 17 minutes to North York Centre on clear roads, 13.8 km and 15 minutes to Yonge and Sheppard.

We cover this whole stretch: the towers around North York Centre station and Empress Walk, the civic block at 5100 Yonge with Mel Lastman Square, the houses near Earl Haig Secondary at 100 Princess Avenue, and the streets around Gibson House and Edithvale Park.

Co Painting, 25 St Dennis Drive, North York, ON M3C 1E6. Call (416) 319-8444.

See the Other Areas We Serve

We also serve the neighbourhoods around Willowdale: Bayview Village, York Mills, North York Centre, Don Valley Village.