Hazardous Materials Testing - A

So - just got back from the haz-mat testing at the new place. It was not the best thing ever. We used Alara Environmental Health and Safety - who gave us the best quote in the end (or so it seemed). That said, Steven Seewald (the president) was actually the one who did the testing and he was really pleasant and despite the extra costs, think that he did what he had to. It wasn't him, so much as the owners who created this monstrosity of a mish-mash of materials (that and probably overly zealous rules by the Workers Compensation Board)


The testing ran $900 over. Ugh. Give your thanks to small Italian men who like to patch over shit over, and over, and over again...resulting in a zillion samples. The original quote from Alara was for $595 (including 7 samples) + $45/sample + HST. I started to grow a bit concerned when he started taking samples like they were going out of style. I'm guessing the final bill will be close to $1500. Ouch.

The bad news:

A) $900 extra (~25 samples, vs. an estimated 7. The guy explained it - it's largely due to WCB. Understandable (and the guy was really nice about it), but frustrating.

B) Lots of possible asbestos (linoleum shit EVERYWHERE...and so freakin' random...e.g., part of the living room has it?!)

C) Sounds like demolition is going to be even more expensive than I'd guessed...but I guess we'll wait and see.

The "good" news:
A) I think the flooring "might" be able to be refinished...which at least saves us a bit of money.

B) There are no issues in the basement (hallelujah!).

C) We got a Home Depot gift card (amount unknown) in the mail from the RBC mortgage broker - who didn't even issue our mortgage...how odd... (so make that $880 over)

D) We got a city of Vancouver survey worth $10 in the mail as well (now down to $870!!!)

E) The guy saved us another $100 by opting out of two tests that he felt pretty confident on. 

F) I don't have to pay for more testing...well...except for the energy audit...

G) I realized that I can circumvent the fact that nobody takes credit cards by using credit card cheques...

Welcome to the world of house ownership. And now I'm off to drink.

Design inspirations

A quick update (read little amounts of text) and a bunch of pictures - because they're more fun than my words.

So - updates
1) Have booked the hazmat testing, which happens tomorrow. Guessing it will cost us about $800 all in...let's just hope that there's as little asbestos as possible (fingers crossed everyone!). Should have the results back in about a week or two.
2) Have also booked a household energy audit/assessment. This is a requirement before you start into any kind of renovation in order to be eligible for the fed/prov ecoENERGY rebate program. The bad news is that it costs more, the good news being that it's subsidized ($150 off, so will cost $168 in total), and should make us eligible for a bunch of savings (I'm guessing a few thousand dollars).
3) We managed to score our neighbours old tub, which I'm pretty excited about. It's a nice jacuzzi-style tub (see below) and saves us a few hundred bucks. It will likely go in the upstairs bathroom.

Our new jacuzzi tub! Note - think we might need to change the faucet...

Also scored the following from our neighbour (current, but soon moving), Susan.

Fancy (ok, not so fancy) red wheelbarrow!

A pretty cool bench for the garden (yup, some refinishing required)

And another little cabinet that might turn out nicely with some love.

4) We've now sent over our initial ideas to Ian, so he and Bruce (our architects for those of you who can't keep the cast straight) will be drafting up initial schematic designs (3 options), as well as a schedule for us to have a look at a week from now (October 18th). With our ideas, we sent over a bunch of pictures to help provide a sense of the sort of style/look/feel that we're aiming for. You can laugh when the house is completed as to whether we were in la-la land. So...enjoy the pics.

 I love the use of reclaimed windows here to create a bank of windows.

If Kris and I could replicate these cabinets, we would...sadly, we won't be able to afford such luxuries.

Nice general look/feel - built in book shelves and neat use of space.

An accessible bathroom is something we're shooting for - along with frosted glass. Not sure about the sunken tub!

Cool corner window, simple but elegant/modern kitchen...all our kind of things

And lastly, some clerestory windows, and a walk-out back area (not the best image to show the latter)

Back from a Solar Decathalon...a what???

Wow - how time flies when you're busy. So, apologies for the lack of postings over the past week - I was down in Washington DC for work and so the house was on the back burner. First, a few observations about DC:

1) I'm loathe to admit it, but I think DC may, in fact, be the most cycling-friendly city. I don't mean the car drivers (they're mean, nasty beasts nearly everywhere on the planet) but rather the cycling infrastructure. In addition to a pretty big (and popular!) bike share program, there are a zillion bike lanes and tons of dedicated trails throughout not just "the District" (as the locals call it), but the surrounding Greater DC area. It's impressive...and so I packed my folding bike (my beloved Brompton - there will be a full dedicated blog on that at some point, including love poetry).
2) DC is more fun that I ever used to give it credit for. I can't say I like the weather (sticky is an understatement in the summer), but I do like its left-leaning vibe, the copious amounts of Ethiopian restaurants, a generally young, intelligent and informed populace, and the international flavour it has (despite being pretty whitewashed overall). While I'm not a big fan of the racial divide that clearly exists (all servers, cab drivers, wage-earners are either black, latino, or from MENA - yes, I'm acronymizing you). Other pluses are the cherry blossoms in the spring (though we've got that one covered here in VCBC - my friend Tim's term for Vancouver - which he seems convinced will earn him a mint one day...perhaps not now that I've published his genius online), the free museums (the Smithsonian...which goes by a singular, but in fact is a range of museums, zoos, etc. - confusing eh?)
3) As an example of the above, this past weekend had a "Solar house" theme to it. In addition to there being a city tour of "solar houses" - which was really just code for "green homes" - they also had this thing on down at by the Mall (the giant strip of grass in front of the White house that lines up all of the various monuments) called a "Solar Decathalon" (who comes up with these names???!). This time, however, there was a decent reason - these houses, which were entries from about 20 different universities throughout the world (Canada's entry was from the University of Calgary), were indeed "solar powered" and had to meet ten different requirements (ergo "decathalon" I'm assuming). It was a pretty cool event, and I toured about 7 or so of the houses on Friday when I had a couple of hours I could squeeze out of my week. Some neat designs - lots of heat exchange systems, massive insulation, air tight houses, passive solar orientation, and a few fancy bells and whistles to boot. I could go on (I'll fill in the details on the pics below later), but its getting late and I want to post about the other significant house happenings this past week.

While I had been away, Target Land Surveying had visited the place and done a formal site survey. This $1200 piece of magic provides you with the formal dimensions of your lot, house, neighbours place, etc. including elevations (again, both the site and the house itself). Basically it tells you how much contaminated junk you truly own (ok, well in our case that's what it tells us). But, it's an input required by the architects to start designing. So, with that completed on Friday (as I was busy decathaloning), we were ready for meetings this week. Drum roll....and here's what they look like:

So once I returned home to Kris and pup, we had our first "official" meeting with our architect, Ian. We sat down with our fancy new drawing and talked about what we wanted in our new place. We looked through some pictures that Ian had pulled out, and told him what we liked about them, and what we hated. In general, there are a few things that are emerging about what we want: lots of light, lots of storage (bikes, gear, books, booze - you know, the good things in life that are also clutter when not put away), lots of green features, universal design (accessibility), future-proofing (thinking about its use when we have parents, guests, dogs, kids, etc.), and a combination of modern and old design.

Tonight we went over the architect's contract (no we haven't actually signed it yet...but that's a formality really), which requires a few points of clarification. On Wednesday, I'll be sitting down with Brett, Ian and Bruce to go over some scheduling questions along with communications and a few other odds and ends.

And in my spare time, I'll book the hazardous material assessment, which I'm guessing will set me back another $650 or so. That's going to be a heart in throat moment when those details come back as it will be the difference between a pretty dreamy house, versus a bare bones thing.

It's 10:30pm though, Kris has been in bed for over an hour, and while she's up at 5am, I'll be up at 7am, so time to head to bed.

Supernatural and supercontaminated

Popped over to the place this week to get a bunch of things kicked off ranging from having the architects create an initial floor plan, to getting the asbestos-removal estimates set up. Yes, the house is likely filled with asbestos - awesome, eh? I honestly think the house is actually worth negative money, but the problem is, is that even if you want to bulldoze it, you still need to get rid of the hazardous stuff.

In classic form, I had called a few companies that do asbestos removal to give me a quote, and sure enough when the second one arrived (the first one never showed), he said "where's the hazardous material test report?" To which I was like "ughhh...what report? I need a report?". And so, the testing goes on. Now I have to have the flooring, walls, ceiling, attic, etc. tested before I can get quotes on removal. Yes, logical, but not intuitive...plus it would have helped if ONE of the three companies I called asked me if I had the testing done BEFORE they came on site for a quote.

Hazardous material testing: $700
Hazardous material removal: $5000+
Having a non-hazardous house in the end: Not exactly priceless, but certainly desirable.

In other news, apparently the new hood is also the set for Supernatural (which was new to me, but it's hard to keep up with the constant emergence of new shows especially when you haven't owned a TV in years). So, you might even see my supernaturally hazardous house in this season's episodes.

Off to DC next week, so will be managing things from afar in terms of getting the scheduling set up between us, the architects and Brett (our general contractor). For everyone's amusement (or amazement), I'll put down the timeline right here and now to see how we do in the end:
- Conceptual design, surveys, assessments: September - October
- Detailed construction design, hazardous material removal, some demolition: November - January
- City Hall permits: January - February
- Lift: February
- Exterior: March
- Interior: May - September

12 months is our guess right now...but we'll see how it all plays out! With that, time to get to work on a Saturday morning.

Order of operations and costs

First of my blog postings related to costs. WARNING: This might be boring to lots of you, but conversely, enlightening to others. Consider yourself warned.

I want to track and post all of this stuff for the benefit of others - not so much because I want you to share our pain. There are a lot of lessons learned in this sort of an endeavour, and why not let others benefit from our mishaps, right?

So - lessons so far:

1) Housing purchase: Location matters (most), as do systems (plumbing/electrical/etc.), roofing, and foundations (and soils). Those are the big-ticket items, so if you're considering buying, make sure they're in order. We went through a bunch of needless (in retrospect) home inspections because I was turning a semi-blind eye to those things. They translate into tens of thousands of dollars each to fix. NOTE: Order of operations goes: A) troll realtor.ca and fantasize; B) discussion with partner/parents/self about the insanity of it all; C) find/interview/sign up for a real estate agent, D) have said real estate agent set you up with some sort of autolisting service that gives you additional (gory) details on the properties; E) Perv on listings and play the coulda/shoulda game with yourself; F) Get your financing sorted and approved (note: C, D, E, F can all happen simultaneously) - negotiate/use a broker and go for variable if interest rates are low/economy sucks and looks to suck indefinitely / go for fixed if interest rates/inflation is rising/economy is heating up; G) Find a property you like, tour it, and get an offer in - conditional on a home inspection (if in Vancouver, most other places, you're probably fine...it's just we live in the land of crackshacks and mansions - seriously, check out the website); H) Get the bank to sort out an appraisal (bitch and shrug your shoulders when they decline it for some stupid, unknown reason...not that this happened to us...); H) Negotiate the price as low as you can. Key consideration is your alternative if they don't agree to your price - the walkaway. Consider: how long the place is on the market, what the general market situation is like, how close you are to offering price, anything you've noticed about the place, how likely another person is to offer/multiple offers, and a few other things. If they're in your favour, break them. If they're not, grudgingly accept a fair price; I) With an accepted offer, get it off to the financing entity to finalize (and sort the appraisal...stupid appraisers...) and line up your lawyer - I'd suggest the cheapest one available; J) Sign and finalize; K) Celebrate/cry.

2) Closing costs: I think a decent general estimate is to budget 2.5% of purchase to closing costs (or at least that's what it was for us). I know land transfer costs vary by province, but then there are the following: home inspection ($650), lawyer's fees ($800), bank appraisal ($275), other city fees (don't ask - but about $300), and then other things if you need them like geotechnical assessments (which are usually $2000 plus). If you want to become rich, become one of the following: real estate agent, home inspector, a lawyer that specializes in real estate closing. It's crazy the amount of cash that goes back and forth for real estate transactions.

3) Opening costs: Yes, the closing is just the beginning. Next up are some of the following:
- Site survey: $1500-$2500. Don't ask me what you get for the extra $1000...we won't know since we're going to go for the $1500 version. NOTE: You might as well get started on the site survey as soon as you realize you're going to be doing a renovation.
- Architect: A decent ballpark number here is probably about 15-18% of your hard construction costs (the money you put into actual building materials and labour for the construction). Oh, and on a side note, here's what an architect does (in relatively plain English): A) Sketches your ideas into a rough design; B) Refines said design based on your input; C) converts it into fancy graphics program so you can imagine it all; D) Provides measurements and specific details on materials to the contractor; E) helps you estimate budgets and hire contractors; F) gets approval from City Hall for your building permits; G) Checks in to see that the trades are actually building what the architect designed and asked them to build; H) Signs off and says "looks good" at the end.
- General contractor: Not sure, but guessing about 15-18% again of hard construction costs for a renovation. Yep - those %'s add up, eh?! The general contractor is the one who: A) Helps you hire trades; B) Oversees those trades; C) Curses and swears on your behalf when those trades show up drunk (hopefully not); D) Translates the architects vision into reality via trades; E) Keeps your project on schedule/budget (if they're decent); F) Tells the architect he's got measurements wrong; G) And other things I'll figure out in time.

4) Timelines: So, when you start this kind of thing, you think to yourself: it's not like we're building a house from scratch, how long can this thing take!? Then you realize the bureaucracy (aka, City Hall). The estimates right now are as follows: 4 weeks for conceptual design (mid-Sept to mid-Oct), 10 weeks for detailed design/construction information (mid-Oct to end of December), 1 day for lifting the house (yeah - super fast),  6-8 months of construction (lord knows why it takes that long = June to August), before move-in. HOWEVER, I've also been told that between the point of getting a design submitted to City Hall for permission, it can take up to THREE MONTHS for them to approve it. SO, that could mean November of next year if things don't go smoothly. And that's not even really accounting for mishaps along the way.

So - there you have a dull, but information-filled post.

Meeting with the architect tomorrow, so perhaps more then.

The decision (or at least one of the first big decisions) and free sh*t

So, for all of you who were waiting up for the past few nights to hear about our decision re: architects, you can now get your fix and enjoy a peaceful night of rest. We opted in the end to go with Bruce Carscadden Architect.  We'll be working primarily with Ian McDonald, who is the brother of one of my old colleagues from WWF. He's been super helpful since day one (he was in fact the one that recommended us to many of the other firms), plus he wears a lot of Fluevog, so heck, we KNOW he's got good taste. (NOTE: should introduce him to Zeha Berlin...which, while crazy expensive, are crazy comfortable and classic-ly stylish to boot, no pun intended). You can see the playful element of his (and Bruce's) work in some of these examples of their projects. They seem to be particularly adept at doing fun things with stick men. While Ian's an Ontario boy, Bruce has also spent his fair share of time in the big smog, and in fact came recommended from another architect I know of in Toronto - Levitt Goodman - whose house I actually toured in Toronto during Doors Open one year. Kris and I went and had drinks over at Bruce's house on Friday which, I think, reassured both of us of the fact that architects can do design on a budget as well (vs. the $10 million dollar scale which seems to be what most projects are).

So, with architect chosen, general contractor (or "GC" as the cool kids say), its on to surveying, demolition, and gathering of stuff. And the miracle that is craigslist/freecycle.

In case you were wondering, yes, it IS possible to outfit an entire house in old Ikea furniture in a matter of days for free. It's quite impressive actually. The amount of ivar, malm, ektorp and other sverge-termed stuff out there is truly amazing. Who knew particle board and laminates could endure for so long and be so ubiquitous!?

But yes, between free online things, and the generousity of our next door neighbour (who also happens to be moving/doing a renovation), we've managed to pick up doors, mirrors, cabinets - go Malm line!, bookshelves, a stove, a dishwasher, a vanity/sink, and a really nice soaker tub - kinda like this one, plus all sorts of other things (an awesome danish milk jug - in turquoise, a retro Swingline Cub stapler, some potted bamboo, and a vice to name but a few - older looking version of this). And we've got two other things that we may yet get - two modern chairs, and a desk unit (not for free, but great price). In fact, we've realized that we're going to have to start to be pretty picky about what we get because in one week we've almost managed to get more than we can handle. The real challenge will be in tracking down a decent murphy bed for less than $500. That and beginning to find building  materials. Thrilling eh?

Ok. That will do it for now - a more interesting blog soon when we actually get into the guts of this work.

A few more pics of this thing...

Now that I've sent people an email about this place, I figured I ought to post some shots of the mess that is our new chunk of turf in Vancouver (located at 1815 East 6th Ave., Vancouver - go for it in Google...it's the one hidden by the tree). Enjoy the shots...there will be more in the future.

Shot of the backyard. The good: backs onto a park! The bad: it has some weird concrete foundations in  it...any guesses as to what used to be there???

Shot of the back of the house: The good: it can be fixed. The bad: it needs to be fixed.

Shot of the living room. The good: south-facing onto a great street. The bad: faux-wood paneling covering asbestos-ridden plaster...ugh.

Shot of the basement. The good: well...it soon won't look anything like this. The bad: it does currently.

Shot of the kitchen. The good: it's got a 1970s retro-chic element to it and I've entered it into a kitchen makeover contest on House and Home. The bad: the drapes? the faux brick? the everything?

Shot of kitchen with Kris and Gina. The good: light coming in, and some working appliances! The bad: they removed those working appliances and sent them to the dump (except the fridge, which was returned, along with some compensation for their faux pas).

Kitchen shot #2. The good: I dunno...nothing really. The bad:  honestly, it's horrific. The good: it won't be.