Taking urban development into our own hands
Construction Progress: a more harmonious pairing of words I have yet to encounter during our project!
Here are some images from Interactive’s below-grade work over the last couple of weeks.
Footings are poured into a 6″ thick foam form and prepped for the Insulated Concrete Form (ICF) foundation walls
ICF forms going in
ICF forms going in
More ICF forms!
Fergus, after hours security cat
After hearing from our structural engineer that we can’t keep our existing roof, and that we need to make significant modifications to the existing floor joists and structure to meet current seismic code; after being put on hold indefinitely by the company scheduled to do the house lift, and after considering other related complications, Matt and I made the difficult choice to disassemble what remains and reuse it for other purposes.
Not how we had imagined or hoped things would go, but given where we are, we are confident this is the most practical choice to keep the project moving and manage our costs. Learning has been a big part of this process, and we likely would have taken a few different turns along the way knowing what we know now.
A number of considerations tipped the balance:
In short, it was a move toward simplicity. Sometimes you have to make the most practical choice, emotions aside. And Matt and I are heartened by the fun possibilities in re-using the old wood in new ways. We intend to keep the same design, although we are considering the possibility of switching from the current hip roof on the ‘existing’ half to a gable roof, also for simplicity.
Wow, it’s amazing how quickly things can happen when you remove a barrier! This thing might get built yet.
Here was our house just before we made the call:
Then we had our meeting with Interactive and they got right to work, spending two days removing the roof and walls carefully enough to keep and stack the good wood, leaving us with just the basement:
And by the end of the week, we were down to this:
Then Level Lift came in with their machines to remove the rest and prepare the ground for the new foundation:
I have to say, progress feels good.
And in the spirit of Konmari, we wish to thank our old house for its service and acknowledge its time on the block and in our lives. We are grateful to have landed here and to have lived in this house before its transformation into something new.
We stopped by to check on things the other day, and arrived as our neighbour Patrick stood contemplating our house, his pair of pugs snuffling in the grass.
“Is it worth it?” he asked.
Was it worth keeping the existing house? His question hit squarely on the low-level malaise I had lately been nursing about the amount of our house that was left and would be left when all was said and done. Much less than I had expected or had wanted to believe.
If we could ignore all the steps that led to this moment, the answer might be no, it’s not worth it. Recall, though, that our original plan was a small lot subdivision. In this scenario, we wouldn’t have even touched our existing house until the new one was built and sold. We would then have had numerous options for improving our house incrementally. Melding the two together appeased some of our neighbours and led to a more interesting design, but it also required a more complex and immediate transformation to the existing house.
Our structural engineer came on board late in the process and said we can’t keep the existing roof. We don’t know a lot about structural engineering, but now that the roof’s underside is fully exposed, we see surprisingly little wood up there. So we will now be building a new roof to match the shape of the old roof.
The framing of several interior walls – the location of which dictated our new layout – was also removed during the strip out process. After peeling off the drywall and the wallpaper and the planking, there just wasn’t much left.
Similarly, if we were to consider only the cost of keeping an old house like this and carefully rebuilding around it, the answer to Patrick’s question would most certainly be no. Two of the three builders who bid on our project more or less bluntly told us that it would be easier (read: cheaper) to build new. The careful deconstruction to save parts of the building, or even to thoroughly salvage a house being demolished, takes time (read: money). Granted, Matt has done a sizable chunk of the manual labour, and even with a full demo and new build, we would still pay hazmat and some demolition costs.
Our next step is to lift and shift the shell of our former house, which is now delaying the project as we wait on the sub-contractor who will do this work. Again, more time and more money we would not be putting out if we just built from scratch.
Call it sentimentality if you like, but our house has become more than an “it” now that we’ve lived in it for a few years and have painstakingly peeled away the layers to reveal its bones. It (she?) is more like a person with a history etched by many hands over the years.
This house has stood in this place for over a hundred years. The sun has passed over it tens of thousands of times. Generations of people have walked their dogs past its front yard. Early owners added on the kitchen and bathroom, extended the roof, and shingled over the original lapped siding. Someone added bird wallpaper to the ceiling. Someone else painted over it.
In answer to Patrick’s question, I say no…and yes. We remind ourselves that our decisions are not informed purely by cost, as painful as that can be to our bottom line. It feels right to us to keep everything we can. I only wish we could have kept more of it. And I think what it comes down to is that, by the time you strip all the guts out, there actually isn’t much to a house.
If we’d found rot, the situation would have been even worse. But what is there is in great shape and we can be thankful for that. We can leave much of the exterior sheathing, walls and floor in place.
And so, here we are, our house waiting to be lifted, shifted, and placed back down on her new super-insulated, seismically resistant foundation.
We’ll keep and reuse many of the materials that we did remove, like:
We found new homes for many other things:
These parts and pieces of our original house will live on, their histories morphing as they are re-used by us or usefully absorbed or into other people’s homes. That is worth something too, right?
We spent three winters in our existing house before starting construction. Even during the strongest wind storms, our house stood surprisingly firm – nary a shudder or creak – and now we know why!
After the hazmat crew stripped out the asbestos and lead containing materials (found in paint, drywall, duct sealant tape, and vinyl flooring), Ty and Brittany from Interactive and Matt have been peeling back the layers to prep the house for its lift and rebuild.
Underneath the drywall, we uncovered up to five layers of wallpaper – even on the ceiling! Under that was some sort of wallpaper fabric, then fir planking. We even discovered a second roof – left in place when the house was extended out the back – and the original exterior lapped siding behind the kitchen wall.
Here are some shots of the work in progress from the inside.
bird wallpaper – on the ceiling!
looking into the house from the front doorway
original exterior siding from before the kitchen and bath were added out the back
look at all that beautiful wood!
I was joking with a friend that every milestone we reach on our project comes with an asterisk. Like when we finally got our financing approval, which was an incredible relief, right? Except…the financing isn’t actually enough, and we’ve immediately had to get to work on other ideas to cut cost and access more capital.
So here’s today’s version.
We finally got our Building Permit- hooray! Bring out the confetti and chocolate cake!
First of all, it took a really long time and, second, I’m still getting over the sticker shock of what it cost us. Confetti doesn’t quite capture the mood, and we probably can’t afford that chocolate cake anymore.
The City strives for a 20-day turnaround on permit reviews, although I was warned when I submitted that City staff are slammed.
The day I actually submitted in early March was already my second attempt. I had been turned away by an initial scan in mid-February that revealed a few obvious inconsistencies with how the City wants things presented. So the permit process actually began for us nearly 4 months ago.
After officially submitting, City staff took 30 business days to review. So 6 weeks in real life. Every application wends its way from pile to pile and desk to desk. Engineering looks at it, parks looks at it, plumbing looks at it, and so on; each person adding their comments. Reviewers in two departments- Building Inspection and Plumbing Inspection- asked for a few changes, which took us 6 business days to turn around. The City then took another 24 business days to review those changes, our application once again passing across every desk. All told, it took 54 days of City review time to get our Building Permit, and 3 1/2 months in total time, including revisions on our end, since our first attempt to submit.
We do have to appreciate that the current level of construction activity in our fair city is unprecedented. Those who have worked in the industry here for decades say they’ve never seen it this busy. All you have to do is look around at all the cranes and holes in the ground to sympathize. City staff are working really hard with a daunting workload.
Still, it’s hard to not get frustrated by all the little details that have slowed things down and ultimately cost us money (our first construction loan advance is charging interest as I type!).
Here is one of the main details leading to the request to resubmit:
Our new neighbourhood plan specifically calls out ‘duplexes with suites’ as a desirable building form, meaning that the two main halves of the duplex can be titled separately, but the suite will always be a rental within one half. However, this building form does not exist in a code official’s mind because the building code does not specifically address it. As a result, while we intentionally designed it as a duplex + suite, the permit folks felt compelled to reclassify it as a “triplex”. This then required us to remove reference to certain parts of the building code, add extra fire separations, and change a few other details on our drawings. It is also likely to mean all manner of headache around shared ventilation and hot water systems further down the road – i.e. more cost to us.
Which leads us to…
The real asterisk dampening our ‘hooray’ moment is how much it cost to get our permit. We’re now pretty used to everything taking longer than hoped or expected. I suppose we’ve now also reached a point where we might as well get used to everything costing more than hoped or expected.
I had anticipated $10k for the permit itself (1.4% of construction cost, less plumbing and electrical, which are separate permits), plus ~$7,500 for a landscape deposit. This deposit is to ensure we actually do the landscaping work we promised as part of our Development Permit application. I’m not thrilled about this deposit, but it is described on the City’s website, so I’ve had a couple of months to get over it.
So how the heck did I end up writing a check for $50,784?!
There were two surprises that cha-chinged us up to this unpleasant total:
I’m frankly a little enraged about that one. Are we getting paid back with interest? Don’t know. And because there is no paperwork beyond a line item on my receipt, I fear we will have to fight to get our deposit back.
So there you have it:
I can see why some developers raise the white flag and go to Langford where you can get a building permit in 48 hours for a fraction the cost!
Hey, I have an idea! How about permit rebates or waived deposits for people building ultra low energy projects? We are helping the City meet its climate goals after all, and leapfrogging all the way to the 2030 end of our new BC Energy Step Code. And so far, we’re just another folder on a pile of endless, helpless applications.
Alright, enough complaining.
I’ll close out today’s post with a puzzle. Spot what’s different about our house in these two photos. Winner gets a pile of early 20th century bricks!
As we line up final details to get construction underway, Matt has blasted through several house prep tasks that will save us time and money once our builder is on-site. Matt’s work reminds me what a good team we are. I am the planner and executor of the mostly invisible things that have made our project happen. Matt is a master planner and executor of the visible stuff. I continue to be amazed at how efficiently and thoroughly he gets this type of work done.
While I wrestled with insurance providers, equipment suppliers, banks and schedules, here is what Matt accomplished over 5 days spread over the past couple of weeks:
He pulled up about 1000 square feet of fir floor in 4 rooms, which we intend to re-lay in the downstairs suite. This job took a solid three days of bending over, prying and pulling. The great news is that we have mostly room length pieces for relaying. The challenge will be finding a place to store it and keep it stable until we’re ready for it.
Then Matt cleared out the front hedge using an electric saw. The front landscaping needs to be clear to make space for the house lift equipment (our next big step after interior hazardous material removal).
post- hedge removal
Then he pulled up the weird deck thing (which appears to have been built to cover up a bunch of broken concrete and other junk) and chopped down the two cherry trees in the back yard, where the workshop will go. He borrowed a bigger chainsaw for this job, and did his requisite youtube research to be sure he did it safely. He’ll save the bigger pieces of cherry wood for future wood-working projects. The smaller pieces were scooped up from the curb nearly as fast as we were able to type the words FREE on UsedVictoria. On that note, drop us a line if you are interested in any salvaged materials (wood, cedar siding, old wood windows, bricks from chimneys etc) and we’ll keep you posted as they become available. Will consider trades for labour and truck use!
back yard view pre-tree removal
back yard view post-tree removal
our littlest helper
front view
On Monday we finally heard the news we were hoping for: our financing is approved (!), nearly four months after we initiated our application (read the whole story). Then on Wednesday, I successfully submitted for our Building Permit (our second attempt after being turned away on a number of formatting technicalities).
It’s beginning to sink in that our vision may actually be realized in bricks and mortar – or, in our case, mostly wood and insulation. It will become even more real when construction starts within the next month.
2 years and 8 months after we closed on our property, it feels really good to have arrived at this moment. There are many things that could hinder us from finishing construction, but there is now nothing that will prevent us from starting. And as we’ve grown accustomed to overcoming challenges every step of the way – from losing out three times before finally landing the winning bid on our house, to facing combative neighbours, to being denied financing (to name a few!) – I’m feeling confident that we will be able to resolve the ones to come as well.
In the spirit of pretending we’ve just won a big award, I’d like to take this opportunity to thank the many wonderful friends and co-conspirators who have helped us get this far: our many supportive friends and neighbours; our creative design team (Mark, Kate, Jonathan, Ian), our enthusiastic and flexible builder, Russ; helpful city staff and a progressive City Council; our friends in the mortgage business pointing us in the right direction, and our dogged mortgage specialist (thanks Paul!) who was willing to keep working with us despite our early setbacks. Thank you thank you thank you!
To mark this moment before steeling ourselves for what’s to come, I thought I’d shared some last photos of our house in its current form. Thanks to my friend and co-worker Chris George for snapping these beauties.
rear view
front corner view
what’s to come
Matt and I outside Council Chambers post-public hearing
In my preparation for our public hearing, I replayed the cautionary voices of others who have done this before: ‘There is always someone who hates your project no matter what you do!‘ Or: ‘Sometimes you’ll go into the public hearing thinking you have community support only to be blindsided by a mutiny!’
My best case mental visualization of the event was that we would have enough positive voices to ring out over the negative ones. I sent invitations to everyone who had expressed support or interest throughout the process. A couple of neighbours said they would come, and a couple of others said they would write a letter. Otherwise, it felt (strangely?) quiet on our block in the days leading up to the hearing.
Here’s how it went down:
We were 3rd on the agenda of rezoning/development permit applications, and somewhere around 10th on the overall agenda, which meant we were called up at 8:45, over 2 hours into the evening’s proceedings. The public area of Council Chambers was full of people early on, and with each item that was ticked off the list, more and more people filtered out. A small group of our neighbours and friends were still among us, along with some people who were waiting for the agenda items after ours.
A member of City staff introduced the project and what was being proposed for Council consideration. I was then called up to the podium with a (strictly enforced!) maximum 15-minute window to present whatever we thought relevant to Council and the public. Using a pre-loaded presentation, I introduced our project goals and talked about our design choices, materials, and rationale. I described how the project fit into the Official Community Plan and the Gonzales Neighbourhood Plan. I summarized the consultation process and how it influenced the design. I concluded by expressing our appreciation for everyone who provided engaged input and ultimately made our project better.
Council then asked a couple of clarifying questions, then opened the floor to anyone who wished to speak for a (strictly enforced!) maximum of 5 minutes. Five neighbours spoke in support and none spoke against.
Every neighbour spoke so eloquently about their personal stories as they related to our project. One spoke about how the character of our community is not just about what the houses look like, but about the individuals who live here and make it their own. Another spoke about having lived on the block since he was 5. Another about how they’d originally lived in the townhouses next to us and then bought a house a few doors down so they could stay on the block as their family grew. This was by far my favourite part of the evening – each neighbour sharing their personal histories and experiences on the block, and their own reasons for supporting our project.
After everyone spoke, the public hearing portion closed. Council then asked a few more questions before offering their opinions on whether and why they supported prior to the final vote. All who spoke were emphatically in favour and the vote to approve our application carried unanimously.
Never have I witnessed so much smiling and excitement at a public hearing! If you want to see it for yourself, you can watch it here (Nov 9, about 2h:45 in).
We owe thanks to City staff for their work moving this forward. Thank you to the City Councillors for their words of support and encouragement. And most of all, thank you to our neighbours and friends who have listened and made suggestions, shared their opinions and ultimately offered their support. We feel so fortunate to be part of such a strong, supportive, and forward-looking community.
We have some more work to do now to finalize the design prior to submitting for Building Permit. With a little luck, we will begin construction early in 2018. Thanks for reading and stay tuned!
Dear Readers, Friends, Neighbours,
Well here we are, finally approaching the moment when City Council will vote yes or no to our rezoning application. The rezoning is what will change the use of our property from single family to two-family + suite. If we get through this, all that is left in terms of the City’s process is to apply for the building permit to begin construction.
First: We want to thank each of you who shared ideas for making our project better, for offering support, and even just for showing interest in what we are doing. Our project is better because of you! We have made many friends through this process and continue to be amazed by this incredible community we call home.
Second: We officially invite you all to join us at our public hearing next Thursday, November 9 at City Hall! The meeting starts at 6:30 and we are third on the agenda. The format is that we present for 10 to 15 minutes and then Council hears comments from any member of the public who wishes to speak.
If you can’t make the hearing, or speaking in public isn’t your thing, feel free to send a letter or email. These do get read and considered. Here are the City’s instructions for doing this:
For those who are unable to attend, your input can be via mail, an email to publichearings@victoria.ca, or you can drop off your written feedback at Victoria City Hall to the City Hall Ambassador located to the left of the main entrance. Correspondence should be received by 11 a.m. the day before the Council meeting.
Please note that all correspondence submitted will form part of the public record and will be published in the meeting agenda. Your address is relevant to Council’s consideration of this matter and will be included as part of the public record. If you choose to share your phone number and email address with us and wish that it not be disclosed, please let us know and we will ensure it remains confidential.
Thank you again and see you out there!
We were in Portland, OR last week, amidst the haze of wildfires and 39 degree C heat, where I snapped a few photos of some interesting row house and small multi-family projects. Most of these buildings are in the Vancouver/Williams Street corridor in northeast Portland. I love the palpable creativity of this city, and find that the mix of old and new adds richness to the city’s character and history.
Older walk-up apartment
Newer interpretations of the row house
Newer interpretations of the row house
Old meets new
ekoLiving‘s sweet Couve rental apartment building
Interesting example of an interior facing row house
Love these guys
And hello, what’s this?
It’s the 3-unit North House by William Kaven Architecture. I love this too.
