Back before the boom, when people talked about putting an addition on their house, they were likely talking about those out-the-back jobs agents call a “discreet enlargement.” But double- and triple-digit appreciation has left home­owners with little time for discretion. We’re now out of the backyards and onto the roofs, slapping very indiscreet second storeys onto our modest homes.

This city is littered with bungalows—roughly 7,000 in East York alone—most built after the Second World War as temporary housing for soldiers who’d marched on Paris and didn’t want to go back to small-town Ontario when the fighting was over. But as anyone who ever spent Grade 6 in a 35-year-old portable knows, temporary has a way of becoming permanent. As downtown property became more expensive, people started migrating to the burbs, and the bungalows became starter homes for those not yet requiring the amenities of a suburban villa.

Now that living downtown is all the rage, bungalow owners in such post-war ’hoods as Leaside, central Scarborough, central Etobicoke, Martingrove and the area north of the 401 between Bath­urst and Yonge are expanding skyward, and at quite a clip. Adding a second storey can be quite painless. Sometimes, homeowners don’t even have to clear out for the duration, which in some cases can take just a week. In 2006, the city issued 636 permits to add second storeys. As of October of this year, it had issued another 474.

That’s good news for Vladeta Jericevic, co-owner of Modular Home Additions, a company that builds second storeys in a Bermondsey Road factory and lowers them onto houses for as little as $54,000 a pop. A large portion of his company’s second storeys are added in Leaside. “People in that neighbourhood love the schools,” says Jericevic, “and if they don’t have a lot of money, [a second storey] is the least expensive way to get more space.”