Heidan Construction

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Making More Space for Your Growing Family

Buying a house is a big step and for many, it means settling down for good. However, sometimes plans change and we end up needing a little more space than we expected. If your family is growing beyond the space your house provides but you’ve grown attached to it, it’s time for some home renovation!

How to Expand

There are a number of ways to expand an existing home, many of them more extensive than many realize is possible. Did you know you can add a second floor to your one-story home? If you need more bedroom and bathroom space, a new sitting area, or even all three, this is a great solution. However, if your budget is more narrow than that, or you don’t need as much additional space, there are other options. Perhaps a new bedroom or two is all you need. No matter what your space requirements, Heidan Construction can make it happen.

Planning Ahead

When you have an idea of what kind of space you need added to your home, it’s time for consultation. Come see us at our office in Toronto and we can discuss plans for your home. If you’re not entirely set on what you want, we’d be happy to give you the pros and cons of each option. We have plenty of experience in the construction business and we know what each process involves.

When you’ve decided what kind of additions you need, we can work together to fit them into the existing building. We can give you a quote on how much the renovations will cost so that you can plan ahead.

Making Plans Reality

When it comes to actually constructing the additions, Heidan Construction really excels. Our company has over 15 years of experience delivering top of the line service. When your home renovation is finished, it will be truly finished. Our policy at Heidan is that we leave no mess behind. Your new space will be ready to use and with no construction remnants in sight. The same goes for your yard. We don’t expect our clients to clean up after us. Part of delivering quality service is truly finishing the job.

Excellent Service

Here at Heidan, we have high expectations for our crew. When you hire us to complete any kind of project, we prioritize these things:

  • Efficiency. We get the job done right and we get the job done in a timely manner.
  • Professionalism. Our crew is professional with clients. Heidan chooses employees that are respectable and reflect well on our company values. You can count on having good, professional service.
  • Friendliness and open communication. These two things are the cornerstone of good customer service. The construction crew you’ll have working on your home will be approachable and understanding. Your questions will be answered with honesty, to the best of our crew members’ ability. Ensuring you understand the construction process as much as you desire is important to us. After all, you have a right to know what’s going on in your home.

Contact us if you’d like to discuss home renovation plans. We’re happy to answer any questions you may have or schedule a meeting.

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Why You Should do Your Home Remodel in Summer

Planning to get your home remodeled? There are some methods to going about home remodels that you should take note of. For one thing, you should have your home remodel done in summer. Let’s take a look at why.

Get Away from the Noise

One of the small reasons you should consider planning for a summer remodel is the ability to escape the noise. Colder times of the year can leave you feeling trapped in the house while it’s being worked on. With not much to do outside the house, it may feel like there’s little alternative. However, in the summer, there are ample opportunities to leave. 

  • Going to a park for some sun or a walk
  • Taking a day trip to the beach
  • Spending a day at the fair or a farmer’s market
  • Going camping for a little while and taking the opportunity to enjoy the peace and quiet of nature
  • Grabbing lunch at a cafe with some friends

The possible outings you could plan over the course of your home remodel are only limited by the imagination. With great weather, you could do all kinds of things.

Better Weather

Speaking of better weather, there are more benefits to that than just making outings more attainable. They also make the building process faster. Cement for an expanded foundation or anchoring points will set faster in the heat. Paint will dry faster, making it possible to move on to new tasks quicker. Overall, having the heat around does good things for the progress of construction.

Happier Crew

One such good thing is make working conditions better for the construction crew. While heat is its own challenge, it’s certainly better than working in the cold. Bundling up to spend a day outside building in winter is a lot harder than coping with sweat. Plus, working in warm weather is actually better for the body. Injuries from repetitive motion are less likely to occur when it’s warm. The cold can make joints ache after a lot of work, especially in more seasoned crew members.

Selling Season

Last but not least, summer is a great time for your remodel because house-selling season is just around the corner. The end of summer and all throughout fall is when most real estate movement happens. Not only do people rush to get moved in to a new home before winter, there’s also the housing turnover from the new school year. College students return from school in search of new housing or search for housing nearby the campus. Parents try to move smoothly before their younger kids’ school year starts. 

There are a variety of reasons why this time of year is most popular for moving, but the specifics don’t all matter. What’s important is that getting your home remodeled in summer sets you up to be ready for sale season. If you plan on selling your house, having it done before fall is ideal for you and everyone seeking new real estate.

If you have questions regarding our services, contact us. Our team at Heidan Construction is greatly looking forward to helping with your home remodel.

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Update Your Outdated Medical Office with Heidan

After a number of years of regular use, a medical office really needs a facelift. It’s fairly often that one can stumble upon a medical office that looks like it hasn’t seen an update since the eighties. Heidan Construction is looking to fix that by extending our remodeling services to medical offices. Make your office look professional and attractive again with a little professional help.

Aesthetic

One of the most obvious parts of updating an old building is improving the aesthetic. After all, most people don’t much appreciate the look and feel of the seventies and eighties anymore. That’s especially true when things haven’t been upkept properly. Chipped paint, cracked tiles, and stained carpet aren’t doing you or your business any favors. It’s time to do a little touching up to breathe life back into your office.

Functionality

After a number of years, the functional bits of an office begin to wear down and break. There are so many things that fall victim to the passage of time that it’s hard to find a place to start. From sink faucets to filing cupboards and from windows to medical equipment, functional features need to be replaced.

When new clients show up to a medical office and feel that it’s been neglected, they’re going to worry that they, too, will be neglected. Investing in the functional parts of your office is a way of showing that you’re committed to quality and care about your clients. It isn’t just a show of up-keeping the building, it also means providing comfort and ease to those visiting the office.

Have your windows replaced so that that cold draft stays outdoors where it belongs. Have sink fixtures upgraded to be more sanitary and functional. Replace out of date or broken down medical equipment to ensure your patients get the best care possible. Get new cabinets for storing file boxes and other equipment. Your staff will appreciate working doors that don’t squeak and the new fixtures will look nicer too.

Hire Heidan

When you decide it’s time to put forward the money to invest in your office and the future of your business, Heidan will be ready. Our team of friendly and efficient workers will be glad to turn your medical office back into the beautiful, up-to-date building it once was.

Heidan Construction provides efficient and professional service with a focus on doing things right the first time. Nearly two decades of providing quality remodels in Toronto has made us one of the best in service. We’re ready to take on whatever level of project you throw at us and we’ll really give it our best. One of our best features? We leave everything ready to go and with no mess left behind. Your office will be able to go right back into business when the work is done!

Contact us if you have any questions or would like to inquire about a quote for your medical office project.

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The Importance of Accessible Medical Office Design

Designing a medical office means taking into account a whole lot of factors. From the psychology of paint color to the layout of a building, many things impact an office’s functionality.
Because of that, we want to take a look at how important accessibility is in medical office design.

A Variety of Disabilities

The first thing we should note is how varied disabilities can be. Many people, when designing their offices, only take into consideration the obvious things, like wheelchair users. While wheelchair accessibility is incredibly important, especially in a medical setting, there are other disabilities to consider as well.

  • Blindness makes it hard to navigate in a world made for the sighted. One way to make your medical office more accessible to those affected is by including braille at the bottom of each door placard. Doing this ensures that the blind can find their way around a building without finding themselves in the wrong room by mistake. It’s also important to keep braille copies of forms or provide assistance with filling out paperwork if needed.
  • Deafness can also make navigating public buildings difficult. Something to keep in mind for the safety of your deaf patients is including visual signals for things like smoke alarms and whatnot. If an emergency occurs and a deaf patient is unable to hear an alarm, it could have devastating consequences.
  • Something of huge importance that is often overlooked are invisible disabilities. These are the disabilities that aren’t visible to the outside observer. Things like Ehlers Danlos Syndrome(EDS), Fibromyalgia, and Postural Orthostatic Tachycardia Syndrome(POTS) are a few invisible disabilities that can make navigating public spaces incredibly difficult. EDS is a connective joint tissue disorder that can cause partial and full dislocations many times a day. Fibromyalgia causes severe pain in muscles and joints. POTS causes a person’s heart rate to rise 30+ BPM when they’re on their feet. All of these have something in common. People dealing with these invisible disabilities need adequate access to seating to prevent injury.

Making Your Office Accessible

So, now that we’ve taken a look at some under-represented disabilities, let’s consider how we can accommodate them.

  • Make signage and forms accessible to the blind by providing them in braille.
  • Ensure the safety of the deaf by making emergency signals visible to the eye.
  • Provide seating for those who suffer from body weakness and/or chronic pain. Allowing enough space in your medical office is incredibly important for this reason among many others.
  • Allow enough space in your office for wheelchair users to navigate freely and without difficulty. This one is very important. Many buildings offer ramps inside the building without ensuring enough space to navigate once inside. Make sure you have a wide enough main path that a wheelchair user can pass by someone walking without the two having to climb around each other or reroute.

Hire Professionals

The best way to ensure your medical office is as accessible as it should be is to hire a company that’s experienced in producing accessible results. Because Heidan Construction has nearly two decades of experience in bringing building designs to life, we know how to make a medical office its best. Therefore, we make a good choice for medical office design. Contact us today with questions or to get a quote.

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Design Choices that Make a Room Feel Smaller

An important part of designing an interior is keeping in mind how design choices affect the perceived size of a room. Everyone has unique tastes in how they want their interior. Some prefer large and spacious rooms while other prefer small and cozy. Whether you use this as a checklist or a what-not-to-do list, we want to inform you of what design elements make a room feel smaller.

A Lot of Furniture

One of the first things that will make a room feel small is having a lot of furniture or decor. The more floor space that’s taken up by belongings, the less space there is to move around. Not having much walking space will make a room feel smaller.

This can actually be used to your advantage. If you have a wide open space that feels too large and cold, adding some more furnishings can help. Try putting down a rug or two. Move your second couch or armchair to sit across from the first instead of cornered to it. Fill empty corners with plants or empty walls with bookshelves. Filling out empty space can be a great way to make a room feel more lived-in.

Dark Paint

One of the known taboos of home design is using dark paint. This seems to be a love it or hate it concept. While many say dark colors or black used on walls makes them feel too closed in, others love it.

Whether you want your room to feel bigger or smaller, dark paint is actually worthwhile to consider. While using black on all of your walls is bound to make a room feel smaller, there’s actually a use that does the opposite. Painting the back wall of a room with black can give the illusion of a bigger room. The black paint doesn’t display shadows very clearly. This dark wall can give the impression of a room that’s deeper than it really is. It’s as if you’re hiding extra space behind whatever furniture is standing in front of it.

Obstructive Layout

Even if you don’t have a lot of furniture in a room, you can still make it feel smaller with the arrangement. Because our brains equate floor space with overall size, an obstructive layout will make a room feel smaller

In a room that’s already small, this effect probably isn’t desired. Remedy this by rearranging your furniture so that it lines the walls instead. This will give you an easy path from one thing to the next, the middle of the room being more open. If you’re struggling with small rooms, it might be time to consider an addition.

However, if your room is large as it is, an obstructive layout can give it more dynamic. As long as it’s not difficult to maneuver around the room, it works as a positive filler. Have couches face each other and leave space between them and the wall. Use a coffee table instead of a side table, so it’s less compact. Bring your dining table away from the walls a bit. These things can fill out free space nicely.

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Making Your Home Feel More Spacious

When your house feels cramped, it can really be stifling. Maybe you’ve had kids since moving or maybe your hobbies have been accumulating. No matter what the circumstances, a crowded home isn’t a happy one. So how do you make your home feel more spacious?

Organization

The first step to creating more space in your home is organizing. It may seem like you need everything you own. However, if you haven’t looked through it in a while, you might be surprised what you forgot about. Checking through your belongings, especially those in closets or your back room, can lead to rediscovering lots of space.

Donating or selling old items and organizing what’s left in storage bins can free up closet space. But, before you get to using up the new closet space, make sure what’s joining the old is worth it.

Prioritizing and Rearranging Furniture

One of the things that can make a room feel small is the amount of furniture and the way it’s arranged. If a room feels cramped with what’s in it, try rearranging. Keep furniture along the walls to allow for easily traversable space in the center. The easier it is to move around a room, the less the size will get in your way

If you have trouble making more space by rearranging, consider donating or selling some unnecessary furniture. Maybe the side table makes the coffee table obsolete. Perhaps the potted plant in the corner is taking up space where the bookshelf could go. Prioritize what you’ve got and remove what’s unnecessary.

Lighten the Room

When you’ve minimized the contents of your room, adjust the lighting. Ample light in a room will give it a more open feeling. Utilize windows and consider investing in some lamps.

Actual light isn’t the only important thing. Using lighter paint colors will make your room feel less closed in. There is one exception: using black as a focus wall. Painting the furthest wall from the door with black or a dark color of your choice creates the illusion of depth. Because dark paint hides shadows, it can give the impression that the room is deeper than it really is.

Expand Your Home

Sometimes going through closets and rearranging the living room just doesn’t cut it. If you’re in need of some more genuine space, it might be time to expand your home. Adding on additional bedrooms or expanding upward with a second floor is completely possible.

Moving can be a huge hassle, especially if you want to remain at your current job, keep your kids in their current school, and hold on to the house you’ve grown attached to. Many people don’t realize they can expand their home. The truth is, it’s really as easy as calling professionals who know how to get the job done. Heidan Construction has nearly two decades of experience finishing the exact kind of projects you’re looking for help on.

Give us a call and we’ll help begin the process of designing and building whatever additions you may need.