How to fund accessible home renovations in Canada

My house, as I told my insurance broker recently, is the Canadian housing equivalent of ancient. Built in the 1910s in Saskatoon, this house has many foibles. To hang pictures, I have to use wood screws lest regular nails bounce off of the layers and layers of paint. My basement is a little more than a horror movie-esque concrete box. Perhaps its most damning feature until last year was its lack of a wheelchair lift. One grant, and more than $20,000 later, that has been rectified. The administrative costs of that effort, however, are something I’m still wrestling with.

The high cost of accessibility

The financial barriers to accessible home renovation are astronomical, and the procedural landscape when it comes to these sorts of projects varies wildly from province to province. Funding can come from insurance companies, governments, tax credits, and non-profits. None of it is easy to secure, and that’s before you go through the lengthy process of actually getting an accessible renovation started. 

You don’t need to take my word for it. Sean MacGinnis is the president of Ottawa-based BuildAble, a company focused on making accessible renovations more broadly available. He says that there just isn’t the funding that there should be available, even though organizations like March of Dimes try desperately to fill the gap.

“It is shamefully underfunded, this need,” MacGinnis says. MacGinnis and his partner Kyla, a nurse by trade, started their company after seeing that need first-hand and the financial barriers at play for disabled people wanting to have accessible housing. 

What are those barriers? For one, disabled Canadians are chronically unemployed or underemployed, with an employment rate gap of 16% when compared to non-disabled counterparts according to data from the Government of Canada. Beyond that, financial relief for housing renovations is limited amid ballooning costs thanks to tariffs, labour, and lumber costs. MacGinnis says that companies like his, and their clients,  are also feeling that weight, which can be especially heavy when the costs of durable medical equipment you wouldn’t need for a typical renovation—like that lift I mentioned—are factored in. 

“They’re paying more for that equipment, which means there’s less budget for the renovation, because obviously the cost of the cost of living is steadily increasing, and it just makes it harder and harder to avoid it…Having durable medical equipment and the cost of care skyrocketing as well makes it very difficult to have the total package.”

Planning ahead can lower renovation costs

MacGinnis says there are things you can do to lighten that financial load, like planning ahead for future needs and prioritizing must versus nice-to-haves.

“If we do like a planned approach, right now, somebody who’s had a new diagnosis with MS [Multiple Sclerosis] might just need a couple of grab bars to be able to safely get in and out of the shower, and then [they can] have a long-term plan where they can actually start to budget for that full bathroom renovation.”

While there is a relative lack of renovators specializing in making accessible renovations happen affordably there are some resources available. The federal government’s home accessibility tax credit opens up the path to a lower tax bill after home renovations, and different provincial governments have various programs to offset costs, like Ontario’s ADP or BC’s BC RAHA. 

In my case, I applied to Telemiracle, a non-profit that garners its funding from a yearly telethon. In terms of finding accessible renovation expertise in your area, the Canadian Home Builders’ Association has an online rolodex of available vendors.

MacGinnis also has advice for tradespeople who may be interested in filling this cavernous gap in the market after seeing his fair share of projects where someone else has done the work incorrectly before he is tasked with rectifying the problem. His message? Make sure you educate yourself and your clients.  

“Really take a humble approach and listen to your clients, listen to their needs, understand the impact that it has on them and that this is not just a renovation where you’re going in just changing the space for the sake of changing the space. This is impactful. This means a lot to somebody’s day-to-day life, and you have to make sure you get it right.”

Three lessons from my experience

I suppose, after starting this article by  waxing poetically about my home, I should end this piece with my thoughts on how to reduce costs and come out the other side of a house renovation relatively unscathed. 

First, make a plan—and not just for the current you, but for a more disabled version of you. We often fall into this trap where we portray ourselves on our best days, and it desperately affects disabled people’s already limited finances. When you’re applying for these funds or talking it over with your contractors, picture yourself on your worst day. You’re still going to want to feel like your house is a home on those bad days.

Second, if you can, find contractors you trust who know where you can lessen costs and where you can’t. If you don’t know anyone (and I didn’t), ask around. Talk to disabled people in your area about who they chose to work with and why. I have chosen contractors because they understood that getting a lift put in or moving my laundry room upstairs—another project that I paid for out of pocket—weren’t being done to increase my property value.

And lastly, and this is going to sound cliche, be kind to yourself. A house renovation is prime mental real estate (pun intended) for negative feelings about your financial well being. Take the smallest step and install that grab bar or that shower chair, get that quote, start to imagine yourself in a space that you love rather than loathe.

Read more about Canadians and disabilities:

A tax guide for Canadians with disabilities All about the Canada Disability Benefit Disability tax credit changes will help the most vulnerable

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