Greening Homes

Greening Homes Greening Homes: Renovations Done Responsibly Established in 2007, Greening Homes Ltd. We accomplish our mandate by using our 5-pillars:

1.

is a fully licensed, WSIB-registered, insured and bonded healthy renovations firm headquartered in the Junction Triangle area of Toronto, Canada. We are committed to being an impetus for change in what is often a very wasteful, unhealthy, and energy inefficient industry. Emphasizing our holistic building approach, our mandate acts to minimize the environmental impact of our renovations while maxim

izing the energy efficiency and indoor health of our client’s homes. Responsible Waste Management
2. Careful and Informed Material Selection
3. Efficient Design and Use of Resources
4. Ensuring Healthy Indoor Air Quality
5. Smart Transportation To and From Site

04/27/2026

Phase Two of our Upper Beaches deep energy retrofit is complete! We announced the start of this phased project at the end of August last year and, once the snow disappeared to give us unfettered access to the side walkway, the extension of the exterior insulation and cladding was able to happen. The result is seamless: completing an exterior transformation that we completed way back in 2014 (Phase One) with a large front dormer addition and partial exterior retrofit. In Phase Two, during the winter months, our team worked in the main floor and basement of this home to continue the air barrier and interior insulation work we began 12 years ago, upgrading the windows with and , and completely transforming the main floor, the stairs to the second floor, and the entryway into the home. Our Upper Beaches Phased Retrofit may not be the largest or most glorious of our projects, but the result is a much more functional main floor space and substantial savings on future energy bills. Could there be a Phase Three in the offing 12 years hence, sometime in 2038? Hmmm...

04/22/2026

Yowza! Our Caledonia-Fairbank addition and low carbon deep energy retrofit project has once again been recognized for its excellence! Today, at the , our project — entitled “Beyond Green: Urban Resilience for a Multi-generational Home”, was awarded “Best Innovative Renovation of the Year”. Kudos, once again, to our awesome clients, our deeply committed team, and the array of trades and specialists who worked collaboratively to make this project such an enormous success.

Project architect, Terrell Wong and Chris Phillips, owner/green building designer at Greening Homes, have taken this special project on tour with a speaking circuit catered to a wide range of audiences, including (December 2025), (March), with Passive Buildings Canada, and the Ontario Natural Building Coalition Conference/AGM (both in April). In June, this dynamic duo will be spreading the word out-of-province, as they have been invited to speak at the Conference in Halifax, Nova Scotia!

02/24/2026

Awards Finalist!! We’re thrilled to announce that our Caledonia-Fairbank low-embodied carbon multi-generational retrofit project, designed by Terrell Wong of , has been declared a finalist for the 2026 EnerQuality Building Innovation Forum & Awards (BIFA26)! BIFA26 will take place on March 12th.

Resiliency is the theme of this year’s conference, as industry peers will gather to explore how to design, build, and adapt homes to withstand a changing climate. The awards this year will recognize leadership and innovation shaping the future of high-performance housing. Let’s go!

11/02/2025

It’s a beautiful day to stop by at the Wychwood Barns! We’ll be here all day tabling and talking about alongside many other fantastic organisations worth checking out. ☀️🌱

10/27/2025

Finish photos by revealed! With gratitude to architect Terrell Wong, of , for introducing us to this very special project.

This is a post-WW II bungalow conversion into a three-storey ultra-energy efficient multi-generational home. Located at the bottom of a ravine (and atop a river) in Toronto’s Caledonia-Fairbank neighbourhood, the air tightness of this project has received results of between 0.78 ACH and 1.12 ACH (final blower door test TBD) and, above ground, uses low-embodied carbon cellulose-based insulation (the interior damp-pack cellulose is primarily post-consumer recycled cardboard). Clad-wood triple-glazed Passive House certified windows from look out onto landscaped edible gardens. The steel roof supports a PV panel array supplied by .solar and the materials for the entire assembly, including the plumbing connections, supports a buried cistern and system designed by to allow for potable rainwater harvesting. The home is heated and cooled electrically by two separate heat pump systems. The exterior cladding is primarily made of locally-produced Shou Sugi Ban charred wood. The vast majority of the interior finishes used end-of-stock items (floors and all tile) or were reclaimed (flooring, interior doors). Other highlights include a massive kitchen island for the whole family made of 96%+ recycled stainless steel, a gorgeous vaulted third-floor ceiling fashioned out of local reclaimed barn board, and warm, textured walls finished in natural earthen plaster.

We sure are proud of this one!

StopGap Foundation Needs a Champion Carpenter! The Greening Homes team has volunteered on several awesome community ini...
09/10/2025

StopGap Foundation Needs a Champion Carpenter!

The Greening Homes team has volunteered on several awesome community initiatives over the years, but our all-time favourite project has been building accessibility ramps for our good friend Luke Anderson, the Executive Director at the StopGap Foundation, .

These colourful, very easy-to-build ramps reduce barriers to access in older commercial buildings on main streets throughout Toronto and across Canada. They have become an important part of our city infrastructure.

We are proud to say that many on the Greening Homes team were part of StopGap’s first community ramp build, on Roncesvalles, back in 2013, and many of these colourful beauties remain there to this day. Chris’ kids, now 12 and 15, still point them out and say “my dad helped make those”. It’s a point of great pride for him. Members of our team have since chipped in a few times over the years, as some of the images from today’s post attest to.

Today’s StopGap Foundation (a registered charity) has the ability to pay for a builder, who needs to have access to their own shop space, by the ramp. Their current builder is taking a break and StopGap needs someone (or someones) new to continue to carry the torch.

Interested in being a part of StopGap? Want to learn more? Check out Luke and StopGap from Rick Mercer’s Mercer Report, circa 2016, here. While doing so, you’ll even see cameos of our old friends Steven Gray (OG champion?) and Shane MacInnes, who both look exactly the same almost 10 years later...

Still interested? Luke can be reached directly by email at [email protected]. We’re hoping someone in our network (with their own shop!) can help out this awesome person with his very important work.

New projects alert! Over the next several months we’ll be working on a third-floor energy retrofit and full home window...
09/08/2025

New projects alert! Over the next several months we’ll be working on a third-floor energy retrofit and full home window replacement in the Annex (the start of a phased DER to be completed at some future date), an energy-efficient rear addition with green roof in Riverdale, and completing the second phase of a future full-home DER (opening up the main floor this time) in the Upper Beaches. Two of these projects are continuing phased deep energy retrofit work for past clients that we began over a decade ago! How cool is that?

08/28/2025

Part 2 of 2: We plastered the whole place in a day!

We get motivated by good people trying to do good things. In celebration of our awesome clients building a super energy efficient, low environmental impact, low embodied carbon multi-generational home — now reaching its final stages of completion — we threw a party: An earthen plaster party, to be exact. On Saturday, August 16th we invited some dear friends to join us for a day of live music, food, drink and natural earthen plastering...because, why not? Some people deserve to be celebrated and our clients, who treat our team so well and were content to always make the best environmental choices even if it meant having to move into an unfinished drywall home, needed a boost to get them over the finish line. So over 20 (!) brave and incredibly generous souls answered our call and volunteered their mid-summer Saturday in the sweaty, humid heat, to take up a trowel and finish the interior walls of a complete stranger’s home with natural earthen clay plaster.

When the world sometimes feels like it’s falling apart and driven entirely by greed, a day like this — full of community and good will — is a reminder that all is not lost. With sincere gratitude to for designing and introducing us to this project, ! (See part 2) for providing us the perfect sound to accompany our work, and every one of the special people who joined us that day: YOU GUYS ARE AWESOME!










08/28/2025

Part 1 of2: We get motivated by good people trying to do good things. In celebration of our awesome clients building a super energy efficient, low environmental impact, low embodied carbon multi-generational home — now reaching its final stages of completion — we threw a party: An earthen plaster party, to be exact. On Saturday, August 16th we invited some dear friends to join us for a day of live music, food, drink and natural earthen plastering...because, why not? Some people deserve to be celebrated and our clients, who treat our team so well and were content to always make the best environmental choices even if it meant having to move into an unfinished drywall home, needed a boost to get them over the finish line. So over 20 (!) brave and incredibly generous souls answered our call and volunteered their mid-summer Saturday in the sweaty, humid heat, to take up a trowel and finish the interior walls of a complete stranger’s home with natural earthen clay plaster.

When the world sometimes feels like it’s falling apart and driven entirely by greed, a day like this — full of community and good will — is a reminder that all is not lost. With sincere gratitude to for designing and introducing us to this project, ! (See part 2) for providing us the perfect sound to accompany our work, and every one of the special people who joined us that day: YOU GUYS ARE AWESOME!










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1543A Bloor Street W
Toronto, ON
M6P1A5

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Tuesday 8am - 5pm
Wednesday 8am - 5pm
Thursday 8am - 5pm
Friday 8am - 5pm

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