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Our Story

This is the contractor
we wished we'd hired.

Craft & Key started after our founder Nick got burned by a bad contractor on his own century home renovation. He finished the work himself. Then he started doing it for other people.

Craft and Key on site fitting cedar by hand
The Approach

Twenty years circling back.

Nick worked construction in the UK while paying his way through university. Real job sites, under a general contractor, learning the trade from people who'd been doing it for decades. He learned what a square frame felt like. He learned you could tell everything about a contractor by how they cleaned up at the end of the day.

Then he went a different direction professionally. The trade stayed in his hands but not in his career.

Years later Nick, his partner Sonja, and their son Max bought a century home in Toronto. It needed work. He hired contractors. The work was bad: late, opaque, with surprise invoices and finishes that wouldn't have passed the UK sites he'd learned on. By the end of the second project he'd taken over and finished it himself. By the third he realised there was a version of this business that didn't lie to homeowners, and Toronto didn't really have one. So he built it.

Nick Farnborough, founder of Craft & Key
Nick FarnboroughFounder & On-Site Lead
01
We answer the phone.
Sounds basic. It's the thing every client says their last contractor didn't do. You call. We pick up. If we can't, we call back the same business day.
02
Every number, shown to you.
Our quotes don't hide allowances or markups. Materials, labour, margin, contingency, listed separately. If a number changes during the build, you find out the day it changes, not at final invoice.
03
We don't disappear.
Every Craft & Key project comes with a written workmanship guarantee. If something we built fails inside the warranty period, we come back and fix it. No invoice, no excuses.
★★★★★
5.0 average · 10 Google reviews
The Team

People behind the builds.

🔨
Nick Farnborough
Founder & On-Site Lead
Trained on UK construction sites under a GC during university. Twenty years between then and now. Runs every Craft & Key project personally: quotes, scheduling, on-site work, final walk-through. His mobile goes directly to him during business hours.
🛠️
Small Build Partner Team
Carpentry · Framing · Finishing
Nick works alongside a small, consistent group of build partners who've been on Craft & Key sites for years. Not strangers bid out the morning a job starts. The same hands, the same standards, project after project.
⚡
Trusted Trades
Electrical · Plumbing · Specialty
For licensed work (electrical, plumbing, gas) we use the same vetted tradespeople project after project. We're a certified Ontario Living Wage Network employer, which means everyone on your project earns at least the Toronto Living Wage ($25.05/hr in 2025). Fair pay buys better work.
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