Condo Painting in Davisville and Mount Pleasant West

Davisville really feels like two neighbourhoods sharing a name, and which one you live in decides what your painting job looks like.

Walk east on Merton from Yonge and the buildings are turning twenty-five. The Metro and The Rio went up in 2000, The Rio III in 2002, The Parkside on Davisville Avenue in 2003, The Domain in 2007. Brick and glass, eight and nine-foot ceilings, windows punched into walls, the ordinary way you'd see in a house.

Keep going north toward Eglinton and the towers start. Life Condos finished in 2016, The Madison in 2017, Plaza Midtown in 2021. Glass from floor to ceiling, nine-foot ceilings, open plans, small suites.

Both are condos in the same postal code. But as far as painting jobs go, they have little in common.

If your building went up between 1999 and 2007

Your walls are probably still wearing the paint the builder put on them.

Builder flat paint is chosen to cover drywall cheaply and go on fast. It is thin, it is porous, and it does not survive contact. Rub a mark on a builder-flat wall, and you get a shiny patch where the sheen has burnished, which is why so many of these units have a faint halo around every light switch. Twenty years of that does not wash off.

What it means for the work: these walls need filling and spot priming before anything goes on top, because fresh paint over a porous, patchy surface dries unevenly and the repairs telegraph through. That prep is in the quoted price when the walls are in ordinary shape. It is also why the first proper repaint changes a unit more than owners expect. People think they are getting a colour. They are getting an even surface for the first time since the building opened.

You also have more wall than you think. Your windows are punched into the wall with real drywall underneath the sill and beside the frame. A glass tower down the street with the same square footage has less to paint, because a chunk of its perimeter is window.

The bathroom and the kitchen are where the time goes. Twenty years of shower steam lifts paint at the ceiling line and above the tile. Twenty years of cooking puts a film on the wall behind the stove that paint will not stick to until it is cleaned off properly. Those two rooms carry most of the prep on an older unit, and skipping that step is how paint ends up peeling in a strip above the shower a year later.

If your ceiling is textured

Stipple ceilings, commonly referred to as popcorn ceilings, turn up in some of the older stock here, and they completely change the ceiling job.

Texture is porous, and it drinks paint, roughly one and a half to two times what a flat ceiling of the same size takes. It is also fragile once it is wet. Work it too hard, and the texture lifts off the ceiling instead of taking the paint, and a ceiling that has never been painted needs sealing first.

That is why a textured ceiling does not get an online price. Whether yours is straightforward or a problem depends on its condition, and a form cannot see your ceiling. Flag it in the quote, and we will sort it out on a call.

We paint textured ceilings. We do not scrape or sand them. If you want yours removed rather than painted, we bring in a specialist to do that part and handle it for you.

One note for anyone in an older building: ceiling texture from before the early 1990s can contain asbestos, which is why nobody should be scraping one without knowing what is in it. Worth noting that every condo in Davisville was built in 1999 or later, so this is a question for the neighbourhood's older rental towers rather than its condos.

If your building went up after 2014

Your unit is brighter, smaller and mostly glass, and it inverts what people expect about painting.

The rolling is the fast part. The cutting in is the job. Every window frame is an edge that has to be cut by hand, slowly, with a brush. A wall that is two-thirds glass has less surface to roll and more edge to cut than a solid wall of the same width. So a bright, open, expensive-looking suite can take longer than a plainer one twice its size. Anyone quoting your unit off its square footage alone has not thought about this.

The bulkheads are the other half. Most suites in these buildings have HVAC bulkheads dropping down where the ductwork runs, usually through the kitchen and hallway. On a floor plan, a wall looks like one clean run. In the room, it is broken by a boxed-out soffit with three or four extra corners. Every one of those is another cut line. The Madison adds exposed structural columns inside some suites, which puts corners in the middle of a room where you would expect flat wall.

Your paint is hitting the age where it shows. Builder paint in a 2016 or 2017 building looks fine for about eight to ten years and then stops looking fine fairly suddenly. It shows first around light switches, at door frames, and on the wall behind whatever furniture nobody moves. Life Condos and The Madison are right in that window now.

A lot of these units are half-day jobs. Suites here start around 400 square feet. A studio or small one-bedroom, walls only, keeping the colour, is a morning. Worth knowing that our $450 minimum applies before tax: if the rooms you pick come to less, the quote tops up to $450 and shows that as its own line before you book, rather than folding it in quietly.

Getting a crew into your building

Every condo here has its own rules for contractors, and they are stricter than most owners realize until they try to book something.

Two real examples from this stretch, both from the corporations' own documents.

319 Merton Street (The Domain) allows noisy work between 9 am and 8 pm on weekdays, and noon to 6 pm on weekends and holidays. Furniture and equipment move through one designated elevator, booked with the manager along with the loading dock, and there is a refundable damage deposit held until an inspection clears.

25 Holly and 50 Dunfield (Plaza Midtown) goes further. A contractor cannot begin work until the corporation has approved it in writing. The service elevator books in blocks of no more than three hours. Protective pads go up before anything moves. The elevator gets inspected immediately before and immediately after, and anything found at the second inspection that was not there at the first is charged to whoever made the booking.

The city sets an outer limit on top of all this. Toronto's noise bylaw bans construction noise before 7 am, after 7 pm, before 9 am on Saturdays, and entirely on Sundays and statutory holidays. Hand tools and power tools both count.

Here is the part that catches people out: The Domain's 9 am start is later than the city's 7 am, and when a building's rule is tighter than the bylaw, the building's rule governs. Getting that backwards means a crew standing in a lobby arguing with a concierge while the clock runs.

We read your building's rules before the job, provide the certificate of insurance your property manager asks for, and work inside whichever window is narrower. You book the elevator, we give you the paperwork they will ask you for.

What it costs and how it works

Pick your rooms and their sizes, choose walls or walls and ceilings, pick a colour, and the price appears. That price is what you pay. The building pages have the priced plans building by building for the buildings we have measured, including 119-139 Merton Street (The Metro) and 8 Manor Road West (The Davisville).

Get your price, or text us at 437-475-4010.

Common questions

Do you need a certificate of insurance for my building? Yes, and we provide it. Most condo corporations require one on file before a contractor can work in a unit. Some go further: Plaza Midtown requires the corporation to approve the work in writing before a crew can start.

My condo is from 2016 and the paint still looks okay. Is it too early? Builder paint typically holds up eight to ten years before it starts showing wear at switch plates, door frames and behind furniture. Buildings like Life Condos and The Madison are reaching that point now.

Can you paint a two-storey loft? Yes, but not at an online price. Those suites have eighteen-foot ceilings, which roughly doubles the wall area a floor plan implies and needs staging to reach. We measure in person so the number is right. Text us at 437-475-4010.

How long does a Davisville condo take? A small one-bedroom, walls only, is often a single day or less. A two-bedroom with ceilings is one to two days. Colour changes add a coat, so add time.