Two units, one address.
Montreal · Nuns' Island
- Type
- merger of two units in a residential tower
- Structure
- concrete slab
- Collaborators
- architect, engineer member of the OIQ
The starting point
Two neighbouring apartments on the same floor of a Nuns' Island tower, to be merged into one large home. Almost every room changed purpose: what was a kitchen became a bedroom, what was a bedroom became a bathroom. A major transformation, with a precise architect's plan and a client who had no intention of watching it get watered down along the way.
The constraint
The floors are concrete. The building's rules forbid drilling anything into them.
In this type of building, moving the plumbing is normally done from below, in the ceiling of the unit underneath, with its owner's consent. That consent was never obtained.
So we were facing a closed equation: the pipes could neither go through the floor nor be reached from below. And the plan called for a wall-hung toilet and a linear-drain shower, which are precisely the two installations that normally require moving pipes under the slab.
What we did
We went back through the building's technical file to trace the real path of the existing drainage lines, floor by floor. The goal was to find connection points usable from our side of the slab, without ever drilling it and without ever asking the neighbour for access.
Those points existed. They just weren't the ones normally used, and they imposed a different construction sequence: an access hatch was built and kept open until a precise stage of the work, then closed once the connections were validated. Everything that had to go through there therefore had to be planned in advance, in the right order, with no way back.
The result
The toilet is wall-hung, where the plan put it. The shower has its linear drain. The architect's dimensions were respected, no room was reduced, no opening was moved to accommodate the mechanics.
Nothing was drilled in the concrete. No access was requested from the neighbours below.
So, what are we working on?
Eight questions, two minutes. We call you back to talk it through, and we tell you frankly whether it's a project for us or whether you'd be better served elsewhere.