What to do, when to do it, and when it is worth paying someone. Written for houses and condos in Oakville, Mississauga, Milton, Burlington and Etobicoke — with the local schedules and bylaws that actually apply here.
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The house looks clean on Sunday and grey again on Wednesday. Renovation dust is finer than household dust and it hides in more places — here is where it sits, what removes it, and the two things to check first in an older GTA house.
Renovation dust is finer than household dust and settles into filters, fabric, clothing and high ledges, so dry dusting and a filterless vacuum move it around instead of removing it. Health Canada's advice after a renovation is to wipe hard floors and surfaces with a wet cloth or mop, use a vacuum with a HEPA filter, and change the furnace filter if the work was dusty. In a home built before 1991, the asbestos and lead questions come first.
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Two companies can quote you a deep clean and mean two different days of work, because the term has no fixed definition. Here is what reliably separates the two, and the short list of problems that no amount of cleaning will finish.
You are handing back the keys on the 31st and someone will look at the place before the money settles. What they are allowed to look at, and what it can actually cost you, is narrower and stranger than most people expect.
You wash every pane on Saturday and by Sunday the front windows look worse than before. The reason is almost never dirt you missed — it is what got left behind, and the order you worked in decides how much of it there is.
August is a good month to think about gutter guards and a poor one to judge a quote, because the leaves have not fallen yet. What a mesh actually stops, what walks straight past it, and the four problems it was never going to solve.
The reason half the GTA moves on the same date is written into Ontario's tenancy rules, not into anyone's preference. Three bookings decide how the day goes — and the free resident parking permit you are about to apply for will not cover the truck.
A trough that is already struggling in August will fail in October. Almost everything you need to know about it can be seen from the driveway — and two of the tests only work while it is raining.
Thick lawn by the driveway, bare soil and surface roots under the maple. Two different things are wrong under that canopy, and a bag of shade seed only addresses one of them.
A bare front yard in August gives you a real choice: seed while the window is open, or sod and water it every day. The answer is usually decided by what is under the surface, not by the price per square metre.
A ground-floor window is a hose and a squeegee. A full second storey is a different job — the ladder has to be set at the right angle, tied off, and footed by someone else, and the pane in the corner past a comfortable reach is exactly where most falls happen.
A month away in a GTA growing season is long enough for a lawn to clear the 20 cm bylaw limit that every municipality in this service area enforces, and long enough for a clogged gutter to cause damage nobody catches until you're back.
Halton Region's odd/even rule tells you which days you are allowed to water. It does not tell you how much water to put down on those days, and most sprinklers left running on the right day still waste most of what they put out.
A sprinkler head that clips a window all summer leaves a hazy white film that soap and a paper towel never quite clear. Here is why that film is not dirt, what actually dissolves it without scratching the glass, and how to stop it coming back.
The mower height you pick in July decides how your lawn handles August heat. Here is the one-third rule, the right height for a GTA lawn, and what actually happens to grass that gets scalped in the middle of summer.
Both start the same way: a patch that will not green up. Water the wrong one and nothing changes. Here is the test that tells you which problem you actually have, and what to do about each one in Ontario.
The seeding window in the western GTA is short: warm soil, cooler nights, and enough weeks left before frost. Here is how to tell whether your lawn needs seed at all, and how to put it down so it takes.