A tailored building-maintenance and consulting firm, where one phone scan carries all the way through to a signed contract.
Year
2026 / Jun
Type
Service Design
Scope
Six-step service pipeline
Status
In progress
Overview
Scan to contract, in one continuous flow
GridOne turns a smartphone scan of a room into a measured scope, a transparent estimate, a code check, an instrument-verified inspection, and a signed contract, without the owner re-entering anything or chasing a different person at every step.
Renovation is one of the largest purchases a household makes and one of the least legible. I designed the service around continuity rather than around features, because the thing that breaks trust is the handoff between steps, not any single step on its own.
Snapshot
Every price the owner sees traces back to a measurement somebody actually took.
6 stepsOne pipeline from scan to signed contract, each step inheriting the data the previous one produced.
$61BCanadian residential renovation spend in 2025, roughly 56 percent of all residential construction investment.
32%of Ontario homeowners say they have been scammed on a renovation, and only 15 percent think enough is done to prevent it.
Problem Definition
Owners approach renovation with almost no leverage. I narrowed that into three structural frictions, because each one needs a different mechanism to dissolve.
Three frictions that make renovation a black box
Information asymmetryEstimates arrive as a black box. Owners cannot see how a number is built or whether it is fair, and overruns surface only after work begins. No transparent, measured basis for the price.
TrustContractors go unverified, and it is hard to know which firm deserves the job. 32 percent of Ontario homeowners admit being scammed, and only 15 percent think enough is done to prevent it.
Regulatory complexityThe Ontario Building Code and Toronto by-laws are close to impossible to self-assess, covering structure, energy, plumbing, and fire safety. Four to twelve weeks is a typical Toronto permit review, and incomplete applications are the leading cause of delay.
These are not three separate products. Each one is the reason the next is hard to fix, so I treated continuity as the design problem and built the pipeline to carry evidence forward rather than to add features at each stage.
Discovery
Toronto's housing stock is old and getting older, which makes the demand durable rather than cyclical. That is what made a single-city beachhead defensible.
The context that makes demand durable
~60%of Toronto's housing stock was built before 1981, and nearly 30 percent before 1960. City of Toronto housing data, Woodsmith, 2025
87%of the GTA's purpose-built rental stock predates 1980, which is a deep and recurring maintenance backlog rather than a one-time wave. BILD GTA, 2023
1.2Mpre-1980 units targeted by 2025 building-code retrofit mandates, pushing that segment to roughly a 5.2 percent CAGR through 2033. Mordor Intelligence, CHBA, 2026
One pipeline, three sides of the market
The service only works if all three sides show up, so I mapped what each one gets before designing anything.
DemandAging-home and condo owners in Toronto and the GTA, plus property and condo managers running recurring upkeep across multiple units. They face opaque estimates, unverified trades, and unreadable code, and they carry all the risk.
Expert supplyVerified consultants matched by fit score, certified inspectors operating the instruments, and Toronto-registered contractors receiving the locked scope. They get one working tool instead of a scatter of disconnected apps.
GovernanceThe City of Toronto through the Ontario Building Code and municipal by-laws, instrument vendors including Leica DISTO, Protimeter, and FLIR, and the verification layer that turns scans and readings into an auditable record.
From a $105B sector to a Toronto beachhead
Renovation is now the majority of Canadian residential investment, yet nobody owns the transparent, code-verified estimate. Narrowing to one wedge is what makes the entry credible.
TAM · $105BCanada, renovation, maintenance and repair. The outer boundary, of which $61B is renovation expenditure in 2025, up 2.9 percent year over year. Made in CA, Statistics Canada, IBISWorld, 2025 to 2026
SAM · ~$30BOntario residential renovation and maintenance, the country's largest provincial market on the back of the oldest owner-occupied stock. $7.58B was spent in Q1 2026 alone, averaging $11,560 per homeowner. Wood Industry, Made in CA
SOM · ~360KOwner-occupied Toronto homes built before 1981, drawn from 601,652 owner-occupied dwellings at 51.9 percent of the city. These are the households that need modernization and cannot self-assess code. City of Toronto census, Point2Homes, 2024
Three horizons
I sequenced it so the compliance backbone is in place before the marketplace opens, since a trust product that launches without an audit trail has nothing to defend.
H-1 · 0 to 12 moLand the Toronto wedge. Direct-to-consumer scan-to-contract MVP for aging-home owners. Onboard verified consultants and registered contractors on standardized scope and e-sign templates, map the OBC and Toronto by-laws with the City and ESA, and launch the capture app.
H-2 · 12 to 36 moA two-sided maintenance marketplace. Recurring upkeep subscriptions across the GTA, framework agreements with contractor networks and property managers, insurer referral partnerships, PIPEDA data governance and instrument-calibration standards, and an open API with a BLE instrument ecosystem.
H-3 · 36 mo+The trusted building-data layer. Predictive maintenance and condition data across Canada, enterprise and municipal contracts, underwriting data deals, a hand in retrofit standards and code modernization, and the platform as infrastructure.
Prototyping
Four layers, one continuous data handoff
Each layer transforms the one below it and passes structured data up. Nothing is re-entered, so the scan captured in the first layer is still doing work at the contract in the fourth.
System layers
L1 · CaptureA 3D polygon scan built from smartphone camera footage, with terrain and spatial data extracted as vertex geometry. This measured mesh is the single source of truth for everything downstream. Passes up a measured spatial mesh.
L2 · AnalysisArea, ceiling height, and openings are auto-extracted from the mesh. An Aging Index plus latent plumbing, electrical, and insulation risk are quantified into an instant estimate range and a fit-scored consultant match. Passes up a measured scope and estimate range.
L3 · VerificationOn site, a ten-item Ontario Building Code and by-law checklist verifies compliance while BLE-paired instruments stream live telemetry that the system reads and ranks into scored repair recommendations. Passes up verified, code-checked findings.
L4 · ContractVerified results are locked into a standard contract, closed with an e-signature, and matched to a Toronto-registered contractor, with the whole chain traceable back to the original scan. Outputs a signed, auditable scope of work.
Six steps, one pipeline
Capture, auto-analysis, estimate, code check, measurement, contract. Each step inherits what the previous one produced, which is the whole mechanism.
01 · ScanA 3D polygon scan from smartphone footage, extracted as vertex geometry. Input: camera footage.
02 · MatchArea, ceiling height, and openings auto-extracted, then a verified consultant matched against the scope by fit score. Inherits: the scan mesh.
03 · EstimateAn Aging Index plus latent plumbing, electrical, and insulation risk quantified into an instant, transparent range rather than a black box. Inherits: the measured scope.
04 · CodesA ten-item checklist grounded in the Ontario Building Code and Toronto by-laws, run on the consultant's site visit before anything is committed. Inherits: the estimate and the visit.
05 · InspectLeica DISTO, Protimeter, and FLIR pair over BLE and stream live telemetry, which the system reads and turns into a ranked action list. Inherits: the code-checked scope.
06 · E-signVerified results locked into a standard contract, closed with an e-signature, and connected to a registered contractor to start work. Inherits: the verified inspection.
Conclusion
Resolve asymmetry, trust, and complexity with continuity
When capture, analysis, estimate, code check, measurement, and contract all live in one flow, the owner stops chasing a different person at every step, and every price becomes a measured, auditable claim.
The lesson I take from this one is that the trust problem in renovation is a continuity problem wearing a different name. Nobody is lying at any single step. The evidence simply stops travelling between them, and once it stops the owner has no way to check anything, which is the condition a scam needs to work.
The case study is still in progress. The walkthrough videos for each stage are in production, and the open question I want to answer next is calibration: an instrument reading is only auditable if the instrument itself is provably in spec, which is why calibration standards sit in the second horizon rather than the third.