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.

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:

1. Made copies of our building permit
2. Made copies of permit drawing set
3. Applied with the city for a road-cut permit (to connect to water & sewage (no gas))
4. 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
5. Contacted our excavator with the news that it’s GO time. They will start the dig on Tuesday!!!
6. 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?).
7. 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)
8. 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.
9. Filed a notice of project with the Ministry of Labour
10. Gathered material cost estimates for the foundation and ground-source heat loop — concrete, gravel, re-bar and insulated forms.
11. Ordered a porta-pottie to the site.
12. Ordered job fencing to the site
13. 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? 

View fullsize

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

Banner cutting: work begins

I am proud to announce that work has begun! I've been waiting a long time to be able to say that. I'm feeling pretty good today. Our top-notch tree team, Ottawa Tree Surgeons, cleared the lot this morning. Quelle difference! I cannot believe how gigantic our silver maple looks now. And the lot!

Mark met our tree team and our excavators yesterday morning on the lot. The excavators are on-deck, so we wanted to ensure expectations were clear and the lot would be ready for them. Before they begin their work, we need to fence off a drip-zone around the silver maple — an orange fence that will remain for the duration of the build to protect the root zone of the tree.

Our city plans examiner took five days to respond to Mark's feedback only to say she needs a hardcopy and has since left on vacation. Argh. She'll be back tomorrow. And we're hoping the can turn around a permit for us right away so the dig can start next week. Wouldn't that be nice? Want to keep this momentum moving forwards. 

Trees and doors (and a whole lot more)

The jungle

We have yet to break ground and shrubbery is quickly taking over. Our windows and doors are already on the shipping container, headed over from Euro-ville. When we ordered them, we thought we’d be waiting for them to arrive and not the other way around. Cut us a break would ya??!! It’s our first time building a house…

My grandmother would always tell us kids, as we impatiently asked about dinner, “good things come to those who wait”. Argh. It killed me then and it’s killing me now. I keep channelling Granny as things keep getting delayed. It will be worth it. 

I’m beginning to realize that there is a direct correlation between my blog writing and my emotional and mental state. When I’m excited, and progress is being made, there’s an influx of posts. When the opposite is true, things remain somewhat stagnant. It is my full intent to write as frequently as possible, reporting on all house happenings, and not just when I ‘feel’ like it. There’s just not a whole lot to report yet.

Last week, Mark prepped more drawings (electrical and plumbing) and distributed them to multiple trades for estimates. He accidentally wrote 145 Bayswater on the plans (instead of 105) and has caused some confusion. Our neighbours at 145 have just started building a house on an adjacent empty lot as well. Imagine the surprise of the excavator trade showing up at 145 to see there was already a hole in the ground. Our neighbour texted me to say someone was there scratching his head about the drawings the architect sent him. Du-oh! 

I have been consulting with several tree service teams so we can get the lot cleared and ready to build on. It’s always more complicated than at first thought. There are some trees at the front (closer to the sidewalk) that we have to get permission from the city to cut. And there are some growing over the electrical lines on the alley that we have to get Ottawa Hydro to cut. Then we bring the tree team in. 

Our wonderful orange house neighbours have gone ahead and started some of the clear cutting for us. The large apple tree is down! They want to burn some of the wood in their fireplace. I have requested that they leave some of the larger diameter portions as I would like to mill it and turn it in to something for the house. What that something is, remains to be seen. A powder room counter top? A stair landing in the dining room? TBD. It’s beautiful old-growth apple tree and was in the centre of our lot for 100+ years. It’s a part of the land and needs to be a part of the house.

El stump'o

Good news on the silver maple front: it’s healthy! There is a bit of a concern that we’ll do some damage to the root system when we excavate. The house is far enough back, though, that any damage will be kept to a minimum (we hope!). We’ll probably just do some deep root fertilization to help it get through the year, and look at cosmetic trimming in the future. The canopy is good as-is. No need to unnecessarily add stress to the tree at this stage.

What else? We are meeting someone from Ottawa Hydro at the lot tomorrow morning to discuss how we will connect to the main line. And we are making some big decisions on the backend that we hope to share soon enough. Oh, and did I mention we ordered blue doors? Reflex blue. The bluest of the blues. Couldn’t expect us to go entirely neutral with neighbours as colourful as ours, could you?

That's blue baby! 

Pre-fab no more

We’ve thrown the towel in with our pre-fab builder. The red flags have been flying for a while now. We’ve finally decided that we would feel more comfortable building the good old fashioned way — with site framing. 

Despite this setback, we're feeling much more comfortable with where the build is headed. With tried and tested techniques and builders. We’ve got several enthusiastic and experienced builders anxious to join our team. Mark has had to redesign our wall panels so that they can now be built on site (rather than the factory), using updated modern framing methods. His new wall system is pretty exciting. One in which he might actually like even more than before! He will write a post about it, because it’s worth writing about. Something new that can open up the doors for blah blah blah… (I say blah, but it’s very fascinating. Blah is because I’m not sure how to explain it.)

Now the ball is back in our court. We’ve got structural engineer looking at the new wall system. He should be giving us his feedback and stamp this week so we can finally get the city all of the drawings it needs to issue our permit. Quelle relief that will be.