General Contractor
in New Westminster, BC

New Westminster has the oldest residential fabric in British Columbia, and working here means working on houses that have been standing for a century or more. That is a privilege and a technical challenge in equal measure.

Century-old homes reward careful work and punish careless work. We approach New West projects with the assumption that the house has something worth keeping and that what is behind the walls will not match the drawings.

Queen's Park and Heritage Considerations

Queen's Park contains one of the most significant concentrations of character housing in the province, and the city has put protections in place for it. Properties in the heritage conservation area face additional review for exterior alterations and demolition, and that review is real rather than a formality.

Practically, this means exterior changes need to be designed with the original architecture in mind, and the process takes longer than a standard permit. It is entirely workable, and the homes are worth it, but a schedule that assumes a routine permit timeline will be wrong.

Interior work in these houses is generally less constrained, which is where most of the transformation happens: opening up compartmentalized main floors, adding bathrooms, modernizing kitchens, and developing basements, all while keeping the character elements that make the house what it is.

What Century-Old Houses Actually Need

The system work on a pre-1940 New Westminster home is substantial and it is rarely optional. Knob and tube wiring is still present in many of these houses and most insurers will not cover it. Original plumbing is often galvanized steel, which corrodes closed from the inside. Insulation is frequently minimal or absent. Windows are original single pane. Foundations may be unreinforced concrete or, in the oldest houses, something less predictable.

Pre-1990 construction also requires a hazardous materials survey before demolition under WorkSafeBC rules, and on a century home the probability of finding something is high. We arrange this as a standard first step.

None of this should discourage anyone. These houses have detailing, proportion, and material quality that nobody builds anymore. But the budget has to account for the invisible work, and we scope it honestly at the start rather than discovering it at framing.

Sapperton, Uptown, the West End, and the Slopes

Outside Queen's Park, New Westminster's neighbourhoods carry a wide mix. Sapperton and the West End hold a lot of early twentieth century housing on compact lots. Uptown has a mix of eras. Much of the city falls steeply toward the Fraser, and that slope affects access, staging, and drainage in ways that flatter municipalities do not.

Compact lots and narrow streets also affect logistics. Bin placement, material delivery, and parking all need planning in a way they do not in Surrey or Langley, and we account for that in scheduling.