If you’re gutting a kitchen, opening up a floor plan, or doing a full home renovation in Toronto, you’re already dealing with electricians, drywall, and a dozen other trades. It’s easy to treat “smart home stuff” as an afterthought you’ll deal with once the walls are closed up. That’s usually a mistake — and an expensive one to fix later.
Renovation is the one window where adding whole-home automation is straightforward and relatively cheap. Once drywall goes up and floors go down, retrofitting proper wiring means cutting into finished surfaces, which drives costs up significantly. Here’s what’s worth thinking through before your electrician starts running wire.
Why Renovation Is the Right Time to Plan for Automation
Whether or not you’re ready to commit to a full automation system today, renovation is when you should at least build in the option. That means running low-voltage cabling to key locations — even if you don’t connect it to anything for a year or two.
The reasoning is simple: a spool of Cat6 cable costs very little compared to the labour of opening a wall to add it later. Homeowners who skip this step almost always regret it the first time they want to add a camera, a keypad, or a speaker in a spot that isn’t wired.
Wiring and Infrastructure You Shouldn’t Skip
A few categories of infrastructure are worth planning for regardless of your budget or timeline for actually using them:
- Low-voltage runs to key rooms — living room, kitchen, primary bedroom, and home office, at minimum, even if you’re not installing speakers or panels immediately.
- A dedicated equipment location — a closet or panel space near your network gear where processors, switches, and controllers can live out of sight.
- Conduit at exterior walls — for future security cameras or exterior lighting control, running conduit during framing avoids drilling through finished stucco or brick later.
- Extra electrical capacity near the panel — automation systems, motorized shades, and networking gear all draw power; a panel with no spare capacity becomes a limiting factor.
None of this requires deciding on a specific brand or system up front. It just keeps your options open.
Lighting: Plan the Switches Before You Plan the Paint
Lighting is the area where renovation decisions get locked in fastest — and where most homeowners realize too late that they should have planned differently. If there’s any chance you’ll want dimming, scheduling, or scene control (lights that adjust automatically for movie night, or all turn off from one switch at the front door), that decision needs to happen before your electrician roughs in standard switches and non-dimmable fixtures.
Systems like Lutron RadioRA 3 can sometimes be added with minimal rewiring since they use wireless dimmers, which makes lighting one of the more forgiving categories if you decide late. Structured lighting control that ties into a broader automation system generally requires more planning up front.
Don’t Forget the Network
A surprising number of renovations upgrade every visible finish in the house and leave the home running on a single consumer router in a closet. For a smart home to actually work reliably — cameras, streaming, control systems, and multiple family members’ devices all on the same network — the underlying network needs to be treated as real infrastructure, not an afterthought.
At minimum, this means wired access points instead of relying on Wi-Fi extenders, and a network closet with proper ventilation and power. If you’re adding any automation at all, this is worth budgeting for before finishes, not after.
Bringing in a Specialist Early
The biggest mistake we see in Toronto renovations isn’t choosing the wrong technology — it’s bringing in a low-voltage specialist too late in the process, after the electrical rough-in is already locked. A short consultation during the design or permit phase, even if you’re not ready to commit to a full system, is usually enough to make sure the infrastructure decisions above get made correctly the first time.
Companies like SmartAV, a Toronto-based automation integrator, often get called in mid-renovation to fix wiring gaps that could have been avoided with a single planning conversation before drywall went up. It’s a far cheaper conversation to have early than a wall-opening project to have later.
The Bottom Line
You don’t need to decide on a full smart home system to renovate smart. What you do need is to run the right wiring, leave room for equipment, and get your electrical and network infrastructure right the first time — because those are the parts that are genuinely expensive to change once the renovation is finished.
This post was contributed by a home technology writer covering the Toronto renovation and design industry, with input from local automation integrators including SmartAV.
