Handyman Services in Etobicoke

Etobicoke runs from the Lake Ontario shoreline north to Steeles, west of the Humber River, and it has been part of the City of Toronto since 1998. Inside it sits more than a century of house-building: 1920s Tudor-revival homes in The Kingsway, post-war bungalows along the lakeshore, 1960s split-levels in Markland Wood and glass towers at Humber Bay Shores. A handyman visit in Etobicoke goes well when it is planned for the house that is actually there, because the same request — a TV on the wall, a cracked ceiling, a door that will not latch — is a different job in each of them.

The Kingsway and Humber Valley Village grew out of Robert Home Smith’s plans for the land along the Humber. Kingsway Park was built mostly between the mid-1920s and the late 1940s and reads like an English garden suburb: Tudor-revival and English-cottage houses in brick and stone, stucco and half-timbering, leaded-glass casements, plaster on wood lath, arched openings and oak floors. Humber Valley Village filled in from the 1930s into the 1960s, so one street can run from a Tudor house to a Cape Cod to a ranch bungalow. West of Islington Avenue, Princess-Rosethorn was laid out after the Second World War on curving streets and crescents, with mid-century bungalows and two-storeys on wide, treed lots. In all three, repairs are careful work — plaster patched as plaster, original trim kept or matched, and old hardwood protected while we are in the room. Our page on drywall and plaster repair explains the difference.

Down on the lake, the old lakeshore towns tell a different story. Mimico boomed after the railway yard opened in the early 1900s, and New Toronto was planned as an industrial town with workers’ houses on its numbered streets, most of them built after the First World War. Long Branch, which runs west to the Etobicoke Creek border with Mississauga, and Alderwood just north of it filled in after the Second World War with modest bungalows and storey-and-a-half houses on deep lots. Those streets are now in transition. A post-war bungalow can sit beside two new houses built on a severed lot, and the work follows suit: older houses that need doors rehung, bathrooms re-caulked and drafts sealed, and new infill homes with their own settling-in repairs.

Central and northern Etobicoke is the post-war suburb in full. Islington Village was subdivided around its old Dundas Street core shortly after the war. Eatonville, on farmland the Eaton’s company once ran, was built up through the 1950s east of Highway 427 and through the 1960s and 70s west of it. Markland Wood followed in the 1960s beside its golf course on Etobicoke Creek, with grey-brick two-storeys, bungalows and split-levels on wooded lots. North of the 401, Rexdale began in the early 1950s with Rex Heslop’s bungalows and storey-and-a-half houses near the old village of Thistletown, with townhouse complexes and apartment towers following in later decades. Houses of this age produce a predictable list: loose split-level railings, closet doors off their tracks, original tub surrounds, cracked hall tile, and textured ceilings that should be tested for asbestos before anyone sands them. Some homes from the late 1960s and 1970s also have aluminum branch wiring — and in any Etobicoke house, electrical work is done by a licensed electrical contractor, not by us.

Then there is the Etobicoke that went up rather than out. The towers of Humber Bay Shores replaced the motels that once lined Lake Shore Boulevard between Park Lawn and the mouth of the Humber, and the Etobicoke City Centre condos around Islington and Kipling stations and the rebuilt Six Points junction keep adding more. Condo work here means concrete ceilings and columns, metal-stud partitions, floor-to-ceiling window walls and a management office that sets the drilling hours, books the service elevator and usually asks for a contractor’s certificate of insurance. We are licensed, insured and WSIB covered, and we send that paperwork ahead so the visit is not held up at the front desk.

Across all of it, plenty of Etobicoke houses are at a crossroads: keep and renovate, or rebuild. FixitPlus came out of custom-home building — new builds, additions and whole-home renovations — so we can talk honestly about both, and keep the house you have working properly in the meantime. Whether you need a single home repair in Etobicoke or a list that has been growing for a year, Alan, our project manager, is the single point of contact from the first quote to the final walkthrough, and the whole list is quoted flat-rate before anyone picks up a tool.