Renovations in Port Alberni

Port Alberni has one of the oldest and most affordable housing stocks on the Island, much of it built between the 1940s and the 1960s for mill families. Investors and landlords are active here, and the common jobs are full interior updates, basement and suite conversions, and repairs to homes that have had decades of partial fixes.

Mill houses from the 1940s and 1950s were built plainly and altered ever since, so what turns up is layered: knob-and-tube abandoned in a wall behind newer wiring, a basement dug out and half-finished, three floors laid one over another. Anyone converting a basement here has ceiling height and egress windows to solve before anything cosmetic is worth spending money on.