Home Renovations in Peachland

Peachland is a small town stretched along the lake, with Beach Avenue at the bottom and most of its homes climbing the slope behind it. It sits one stop past West Kelowna on Highway 97, close enough to our Kelowna base that crews and deliveries run there on an ordinary working day.

Most of what we are asked to do here is make a well-loved house work for the next twenty years: a kitchen that opens to the view, a main floor that no longer depends on the stairs, a bathroom that is safe and still looks like it belongs in the home. We handle the design conversation, District of Peachland permits, and every trade through to the final walkthrough.

Peachland has one of the oldest populations of any municipality in BC, with a median age in the high fifties, and that shapes the work. The most common request is main-floor living: moving a primary bedroom and a full bathroom onto the entry level, widening doorways, and replacing a tub with a curbless shower. A curbless shower is a framing question before it is a tile question, because the floor has to be recessed or the joists reworked to get the slope, so we look at what is under the bathroom before promising one.

Sewer is the detail that surprises people. The District has extended sanitary sewer in phases, and a large number of Peachland homes, particularly up Princeton Avenue and through Trepanier and Ponderosa, are still on septic. A septic system is sized to the bedroom count it was approved for, so adding a bedroom, a suite, or sometimes a bathroom can mean the system has to be assessed by a registered wastewater practitioner before a permit is issued. We ask which service the house is on at the first visit, because the answer can change what is practical.

Nearly everything above Beach Avenue is on a slope. Walkout basements, retaining walls, and driveways that drop below the road are normal, and they affect a renovation in plain ways: where a bin and a delivery truck can sit, how materials reach the lower level, and which walls are holding up the floor above. On the lakeshore itself, homes along Beach Avenue tend to be older cottages and rebuilt infill on narrow lots, where the structure and the setbacks both need checking before a layout is drawn.