Renovation Contractor in Burnaby

Burnaby renovates on two fronts at once: post-war family homes on generous lots in neighbourhoods like Burnaby Heights and South Slope, and thousands of condos in the tower clusters around Metrotown, Brentwood, and Lougheed. The same week can have us opening up a 1950s bungalow and coordinating elevator bookings in a 30-storey high-rise, and the two jobs share almost nothing except the city that permits them. What they do share is our approach: one written scope, one fixed number, and a schedule that accounts for Burnaby's approval steps before work begins.

Burnaby's single-family streets filled in largely between the 1940s and the 1970s — bungalows and two-storeys on lots that are wide by today's standards, most with full-height basements. Burnaby Heights and Capitol Hill carry the older end of that stock, while the streets toward Deer Lake and South Slope skew 1950s–60s. The condo stock is its own world: concrete high-rises have risen around Metrotown since the 1980s and around Brentwood and Lougheed more recently, alongside older wood-frame apartment buildings from the 60s and 70s. Suited homes are common, and many basements that aren't suites yet could be.

Burnaby runs its building permits through the city's Building Division, and most of the process now lives in one place: the My Permits Portal. Alteration and addition permits are applied for online, fees are paid by card, and status stays visible throughout. Like-for-like work such as swapping cabinets, fixtures, or flooring needs no permit at all; structural changes, additions, and most plumbing and electrical work do, with separate trade permits pulled by the licensed trades doing them.

Inspections are booked through the same portal or by phone, at least one business day ahead. We fold those bookings into the construction calendar so the framing, insulation, and drywall stages each land with an inspector already scheduled, instead of losing a day to a missed booking.

One change worth knowing: as of July 2026, Burnaby's updated development approval process means some projects need a development permit before a building permit can be submitted. The city is still publishing detail on which project types are captured, and most interior renovations will not be. We confirm which path applies during the estimate, so the approval route is settled before anyone commits to a start date.

In June 2024, Burnaby replaced its twelve single-family zoning districts with one R1 small-scale multi-unit housing district covering roughly thirty thousand lots. Most former single-family properties can now hold three or four dwellings depending on lot size, and up to six near frequent transit. A single-family home remains perfectly legal in R1 - nothing forces change - but the ceiling on what a lot can become has moved. Council also trimmed the rules in late 2025, reducing heights and lot coverage, so it is worth checking the current bylaw rather than last year's summaries.

Most homeowners use the new flexibility the modest way: legalizing a basement suite, or adding a laneway home for family or rental income while keeping the main house. Burnaby's laneway program has been in place since 2023 for lots with lane access, and its suite rules set clear requirements on size, ceiling height, entrance, and parking. Both are well-worn paths at city hall, and we design to the current requirements from day one.

Burnaby's noise bylaw sets construction hours at 7 am to 8 pm on weekdays and 9 am to 8 pm on Saturdays, with no contractor work on Sundays or statutory holidays. Working outside those hours takes advance city approval, granted case by case and never assumed. We plan crews and noisy stages like demolition around the six-day week from the start.

Disposal bins are their own small piece of planning. Burnaby's default position is that bins and site trailers should not sit on city property, so the right plan is usually a bin on the driveway, sized and scheduled around demolition days. Where street space is genuinely unavoidable, permission is arranged with the city before delivery, not after.

Trees are protected by a bylaw with real teeth. On an ordinary lot, conifers of thirty centimetres diameter and deciduous trees of forty-five need a permit to remove; on a lot under a development application, the threshold drops to twenty centimetres for every tree. Removals carry replacement-planting requirements and a security deposit, so if an addition sits anywhere near a protected tree, we bring it into the plan early.

Burnaby's process reads as refreshingly conventional next to Vancouver's. Vancouver builds to its own building bylaw - the only city in BC that does - while Burnaby follows the BC Building Code, and Burnaby's portal carries a renovation from application to final inspection in one system. The paperwork and review streams genuinely differ across the boundary, which is why identical scopes get planned differently a few blocks apart.

Against its eastern neighbours the differences are texture, not substance. New Westminster layers heritage review over its oldest streets, which Burnaby has no equivalent for, and Coquitlam publishes a first-review target for residential applications. Saturday work runs later in Burnaby than in either. None of this changes the building code - but it changes the schedule, and we build each city's rhythm into the timeline we quote.