Legacy building
I found this video on a Portland builder's site. It resonates. Because no matter how green or well-built you make your building, if it's not beautiful and functional, it will end up getting torn down like the rest of 'em.
Construction week 4: Argh
We ran in to a bit of a surprise during the dig. Was it buried treasure? No, no it was not. In fact, it was quite the opposite. Turns out our yellow house neighbours have a sewage pipe that extends out perpendicularly from their house and several feet on to our land — precisely where our foundation needs to go — before making its way to the street .
It needs to move before we can continue building our home. We lost some precious time last week trying to wrap our heads around the issue. Every house is supposed to have its own separate sewage connection that runs directly out to the street, and not across adjacent property. But the yellow house was the first on the block. These rules did not apply 130 years ago.
Work is starting up again this Wednesday so hopefully not too much time was lost. Doulos will be starting the road cut and servicing work.
We suffered an unfortunate knock last week. So hopefully we won’t be running in to more delays or ‘surprises’ this week. Argh feels more like F#$%.
Yep. It's a shitty pipe. That's for sure.
Soil bearing capacity test
I was expecting something more high-tech — maybe a glass box that would be filled with soil and mechanically compressed and measured for PSI. Nope. The engineer went into the hole with a hammer, scraped it in a few places, touched some dirt and said ‘yep, good to go!’. We have a report stating our dirt is comprised of glacial till, silty gravel with clay, cobbles at a bearing capacity of 100 kPa. I guess he just knows. Who knew?
Construction weeks 2 & 3
The digging started last Wednesday and by Friday, the entire hole was dug. It’s a great hole. Not too big and not too small. Juuuuust right. It was clean digging the whole way through. One larger root from the maple tree was damaged, but overall we were pleasantly surprised by how few roots we actually hit. Some of the dirt our excavators from Doulos Construction removed is still sitting on site, ready to back-fill the foundation, when the time comes…
This week, on Monday, our surveyor is coming back to pin the corners of our foundation within the hole. On Tuesday, a geotechnical engineer is coming to do a soil bearing capacity test on our soil (to be sure it can withstand the pressure of a house). And we will be laying out our ground source heat loop, which is essentially 400m of polyethylene pipe that will be used to help warm/cool the air in our house (more on this later).
Looks like our week might be a bit slower than anticipated as we are still waiting for our road cut permit from the city. This permit process is separate from our building permit. Our excavator applied for the road cut permit on our behalf, but was only able to do so after we had been given our building permit. This is the permission we need to cut the road and connect to city services. We are dealing with a newly appointed city official, which unfortunately for us means slower-than-usual response times. Argh. We were hoping to have our plumber (Nathan from Ackland Plumbing) make his sub-slab connection and start filling the hole with granular and gravel. We shall see as the days progress.
But, let’s not forget: we have a hole in the ground! Mind you, it has filled with water over the weekend…Mark assures me it will drain.
Ground breaking
By end of day we should have a hole dug. Prior to digging, we had to make sure our insurance was in place, our permit was on display, a toilet was available for use and a site fence was ready to set up (so no one falls in to the hold accidentally after hours).
Instagram for daily project progress
I've decided to use Instagram to help document the build. I'll try to post a pic every day (or so). And have decided to mark day zero as the day we received our permit. The project build timeline commences henceforth. Follow here and follow there.
Construction week 1
It’s been a whirlwind couple of days. My mind has to catch up with all that has transpired since receiving our permit. Without a moments rest we have:
- Made copies of our building permit
- Made copies of permit drawing set
- Applied with the city for a road-cut permit (to connect to water & sewage (no gas))
- Contacted our surveyor and had them stake out the corners of the house so that the excavator can come in and know where to dig
- Contacted our excavator with the news that it’s GO time. They will start the dig on Tuesday!!!
- Set up a start-up meeting for early next week with some of our key contractors. Our project is unorthodox, we want to make sure we can answer as many questions and ask as many questions up front as possible. Included will be our main carpenter crew, plumber, electrician and our excavator (I think?).
- Contacted our city building inspector who will be giving us an inspection schedule (at what stages of the build he will need to come out and inspect). And we’ve requested a meeting with him upfront so he can familiarize himself with the project (again, it’s unorthodox and he’ll likely see things in our house for the first time)
- Set up Builders Risk Insurance. Trades that come to our site still need to provide us with copies of their own insurance. Since we are GC’ing this ourselves, we need an additional layer of insurance.
- Filed a notice of project with the Ministry of Labour
- Gathered material cost estimates for the foundation and ground-source heat loop — concrete, gravel, re-bar and insulated forms.
- Ordered a porta-pottie to the site.
- Ordered job fencing to the site
- Ordered a waste bin and storage pod
Mark’s continuing to work away at our construction drawing set. I am convinced they will be THE most detailed drawing sets an architect has ever produced. He hopes to discover and solve most of our house’s potential problems on paper, on his time and dime, rather than on site, halfway through the build…
Did you catch the part where we start excavating on Tuesday??!! In the meantime, we’re taking the opportunity to unplug and unwind with friends and family in Algonquin Park.
Startup meeting
City of Ottawa development fees
All this good news and excitement came with a side of serious boooooooooooo. In order to receive our permit, we had to pay a hefty city development fee. I don’t want to be a Debbie downer here (no offence to my mother-in-law, Debbie), but I need to vent.
Building is not for the faint of heart. Mark and I are determined to build our house, and I hope this blog will inspire others to do the same. But make no mistake: it ain’t cheap and unless you’ve got money to burn, you’ve got to be incredibly resourceful. No matter how resourceful we are and how many strings we pull, however, we won’t have any control over the fees or taxes — those effing soft costs.
Here’s an interesting/depressing infographic from gohba. It shows that 23% of the cost to build a house in Ottawa goes to fees and taxes. These stats are for a developer home, where the assembly-line style of building keeps actual construction costs considerably lower then a custom home. You can easily double those construction costs for a custom house build. Then you’ll get a sense of what project costs are like. Rather discouraging isn’t it?
Image courtesy of GOHBA
When we submitted our permit last fall, our development fees were tallied up at just over $16,000. Over the course of 10 months, our development fees have skyrocketed to over $22,000 (not to mention the school-board fees which have brought our total to $25,275). That’s a jump of 37.5% in less than a year. The only thought I can muster is WTF? They claim to have raised them to help cover the costs of light rail expansion (an Ottawa project that has suffered a couple decades of viability studies and false starts). Fine. But how is a jump of this magnitude justifiable? It’s terribly prohibitive. And isn’t/shouldn’t a city be trying to encourage development and growth? Especially good development? For crying out loud, our house is going to require a mere fraction of the resources a typical house would need, and depend far much less on the city’s infrastructure. We spoke with our ward councillor Jeff Leiper briefly about this months ago. He seemed to sympathize, but acknowledged there’s nothing we can do in the short term. If we wanted to build our home, we would have to suck it up and pay, in so many words.
And so we paid. Zing.
Enough complaining. Let’s build a home.
Nasty numbers