The second railing project is ready for paintwork. With this job finished we can carry on with the final stages of the interior. Up next are rehanging the doors, trim work, and appliances.
This railing project is done. We've even got our led pot lights operating.
Many categories make up a household budget. Generally housing is largest, followed by food and transportation. Entertainment is a far lesser discretionary item. We've noted on this site in the past the crazy inflation in land value we have seen over the past 20, or even 50+ years.
The government likes to under-report inflation, this way its benefit programs that are linked to the consumer price increase don't go up as much as they should, and its debt total is eaten away by inflation without it having to be actually repaid.
So we have a society with vastly under reported inflation and artificially suppressed interest rates such that individuals borrow more than they should (in order to compete for products and services from other people who are also borrowing more than they would if rates were higher).
At some point these distortions in the economy have to show up. Home values is the big one the gets the most media attention, but concert tickets get some coverage as well, due to the sticker shock and fees.
1998, ticket price was $22.50, $5.25 service charge was a whopping 23% of ticket value...ticketmaster back then was already a public enemy
2017, Same band, ticket price is now 550% of twenty years earlier. Service fee is 'only' %14 of ticket face value. However, the gross service fee represents almost %100 of the actual ticket price from 20 years prior.
Forecasting trends is impossible with these exponential type price increases, because these figures don't seem sustainable. In another 20 years, will the same show cost $687? This is the problem with compound numbers, they can get too large to be manageable. It seem more likely to me the cost of the ticket price in 20 years would be $68.70, because the government would have to issue a 10:1 reverse split on money (if they don't, a $5 bill would have the value of a 50 cent coin).
The biggest winner in this inflation race may be the government that collects %5 gst on the total cost of $143, so it takes in $7 on every ticket (x 10,000), that is a lot of money. The other winner is the band, they make more money now in a single show than they would have on an entire 50 stop tour in 1995. With crazy ticket prices like these maybe the $800k Altadore lot isn't so bad...
We've got an even split between glass and spindle railing on the project. The spindle job is nicely progressing. Because of the stiffer spindle structure compared to the glass we can skip a middle post. It makes for a nice look.
Almost done.
With demo pretty much done with the exception of letting the brush dry out for a while so it takes less bin space we can now see the bare site.
Unfortunately the two good trees at the front of the lot had to go. Basically the conflicting city priorities led to their demise. We've apparently got to dig out a drywell and pour a concrete box to catch floodwater. Between this and needing new sewer and storm connections the trees were just in the way and likely doomed. With that info now pretty much firmed up I had to make the decision to remove them now while I had machines. We also scraped the first six inches off everything. This makes the fences site better and also makes space for loam later (far far later).
This photo doesn't due justice to the massive hedge that we removed along the north property line.
Ready for permits ! No more hedge
Experienced trades are pretty quick at what they do. This is shown by the productivity of the carpet crew. Three guys were able to finish off almost two houses in one day. With carpet complete we can move along with greater confidence to finalizing the rest of the interior.
nice hardwood carpet transitions
basement is looking very complete
stairs to basement are finished.
Carpet install at the semi detached project was moved up to the weekend due to crew availability. This was ok with me however I needed to get the vacuum work done faster than anticipated. Ideally carpet is placed in very clean floors and the subfloor is checked for lumps of drywall mud or leftover nails sticking out of the wood.
The crew planned to finish both houses this weekend which seems a little ambitious given that they didn't start until Saturday night.
The work week begins tomorrow and we have railing, possibly finishers back, appliances and more garage exterior work. If we are lucky we will also have electrical meters installed and the lights will turn on in all the rooms.
Underpad is down and this means the carpet is ready to go
We are moving slowly at the demolition site. I don't have any construction permits, nor any expectation of having them soon. Given this, I asked the excavator just to do it on the side whenever he wasn't too busy digging basements.
He has it torn down just to the concrete component. He will be segregating the concrete for recycling, and it will need to be quite uncontaminated to make sure he can get a reduced tipping rate. The basement was made of cinder block, a common technique in the old days of residential building. The block walls seem to hold up pretty well, this one could have lasted another 50 years. The house itself was in rough shape, so nobody seems sad to see it gone.
Not much left of the old house. The monster hedge will get torn out soon and left in the sun to dry, hopefully it will shrink a lot and not fill another dumpster.
We ended up installing over 1800 sq ft of sod in the front. The remainder of the week is looking hot so I will be keeping it watered. Now would be a good time to update the photos of the MLS listing we have for the side that remains for sale. The sod always makes a nice transformation from construction site to move in ready house, sort of like drywall being painted.
The sod looks so much nicer without a dandelion infestation. I'm not sure how they maintain it so well at the sod farm.
We have one of my favourite trades back on the site now. John does the railings for me, he also can build stairs but the cost to hire him to do that is more than a little frightening. I like the way he does his railings so I have used him a few times, fortunately he made some time in his schedule for the current project
The stairs in the first house are going to have glass infill panels. The finished product should have a nice minimalist look and not be too hard to keep the glass pieces clean.
Day 1 of the railing install was mostly just set up and planning, but John was able to put in a few posts in the afternoon. He may finish tomorrow, and we can move on to the next one.
The moment has definitely arrived to finish the exterior on this project. Landscaping is one of the final tasks. Our crew is back with loam and gravel so the front yard is prepped for sod and the sideyard are finished with crushed stone.
With the garage only lacking siding, soffit, fascia and trough, the rear yard is not quite ready for landscaping. We will push on and get the garage completely done in the next week or so. The remainder of the week will be a continuation of interior finishing with hardwood and railings on the schedule.
the rough grade work we did on this site was very effective and we didn't need to haul away much material at the loam stage. Sod and some gates are likely going in tomorrow.
The City often gets its share of abuse in the media, 'Silly Hall' type stories related to its overly political nature, bad choices for art pieces, bridge procurement, etc. However, in this instance it is truly justified.
The City decided to cut some cost and lay off some landfill workers. This led to a bizarre four day schedule rotation at the three main landfills. So on Monday, only one landfill is open. During the busy season (now), there is a massive amount of landfill activity. With the long daylight hours, crews get busy early, landscape crews are doing spring cleanups, and construction has noticeably picked up. All this means the landfill has been total chaos. The worst part is getting out. It can take an hour of idling in line (behind 100 trucks) to get out of the pay and scale area.
The problem here is the landfill is user pay. It costs at least $20+ dollars to even take a tiny load to the dump, a minimum charge. My last load cost $35, it was 300 kg. The City, if it manages the landfill properly, it should make a lot of money on small loads. What it can't do is take an extra hour from the day of working people to make them sit in line. When you are paying $30 to dump a little trash, you don't want to waste your day there, nor should you given how much it costs.
The problem with the landfill is you have to weigh in and weigh out in order to calculate the bill. It is very slow, and only two windows are open. The situation we have now is the two incoming scales will be closed at 5 pm, but the two outgoing scales will have 100 waiting trucks in line. I called the City complaints line and mentioned it took me almost an hour to get out of the landfill, and there was no way I can afford to waste that much time to drop of $35 worth of junk. I wont be back, I have since hired a crew with a larger truck to load and haul my waste (last load was $212, ouch). This is the ever increasing cost of business in Calgary.
To its credit, someone from the City called me back and we discussed what needs to be done. The obvious answer is to use the incoming weight scale to also be used to let users pay and get out. That could double the capacity of the payment system and likely eliminate the problem. Another answer is to just charge smaller loads by the truck rather than make them weigh in, and let those customers out another exit. That could speed up the process by another 10-20%.
These are easy solutions without cost. Can the City act quickly enough to make these changes? This is a good test of City management to see if it can act more like a business and less like a bureaucracy. Given dump rates, it owes the customers a vasty better service standard.
At this point the garage is ready for shingles and siding. We've got the garage doors and openers installed now, and the electrical meter bases installed on the sides of the garage are inspected and approved. Inside the garage we need to fire rate the middle party wall, which consists basically of insulating the stud spaces and hanging type x drywall on either side. With this work planned for tomorrow we can recall the inspector and wrap up the project. This is just in time as we need to landscape the rear of the yard, and we don't want to landscape until the garage is completely finished.
The doors are in and we can proceed with our siding and shingles. Garage building is a vastly easier task than house building. It almost seems like the garage builds itself. I wish my houses would go up as smoothly.
The temporary power pole can be taken down and the permanent power connected. This is something the enmax crew can do in about a half hour...but they aren't likely to be able to get to me for a few days. So we are back to using long extension cords, not ideal for the finishing work.
New rules came into effect recently for garage slabs. Essentially the older method of garage slabs is no longer allowed for slabs above 55 m2. I dont recall ever building a garage smaller than 55 m2, so this surely caught my attention. All manner of costly engineered solutions were introduced, some of which I reviewed and found to be utterly lacking in common sense, incorporating costly and cumbersome details that nobody in the construction industry wanted to execute. I provided some of these details to a concrete crew and was essentially told to piss off and find someone else.
During the time the City Bulletin on this matter was brought to my attention, I was browsing another builders' garage slab that was under construction. I noted that not only were none of the conditions of the bulletin met, none of the costly engineered details were being incorporated either. I have since come to realize that the builder in question had just resorted to a common technique, I call it 'engineer shopping'. What can happen is someone with a project will canvass a few engineers, and then select the one that was able to provide a detail most acceptable to the already existing practices of the builder. This would be done entirely for cost reasons.
Regardless of the ethics of this approach, the industry has become so competitive that avoiding work is possibly the only way to extract profit from a project. Adding on layers of what the builder feels is useless or unnecessary work is to be avoided.
I had a couple options, including engaging in some engineer shopping. I didnt want to do this, but I for sure could not use the engineer I already had. I interpreted the bulletin, and with assistance from my new engineer was able to incorporate the information in the bulletin and come up with a workable stamped drawing, which we've since built.
I have since encountered multiple situations where builders, who, do to being busy, or not reading their own engineering, have adopted unworkable details for the garage, or have had the detail presented to them and actually read, and rejected it. Most humorously, a builder friend, not reading his own plans, went ahead and built the slab according to commonly accepted practice, and now has to retrofit it somehow to look 'more' like his drawing. I even warned them before the work was done that they were doing it wrong, and I challenged him to show me his plan, which he did, and I noted the exact detail we were discussing earlier as the detail that led me to change engineering firms was the one he had!
The interesting thing about builders is they often don't access the industry through some white collar office work. They grind their way from a trade like stucco or framing into a position of buying land and building houses. Often they have moved from another country to Calgary and may not have training in an english language school. They make up for lack of formal education by just knowing everything they need to about construction, and have very strong work ethic, and thrive on physical work.
This anecdote shows just how out of touch some of the government actions are regarding trying to over regulate this type of business (the kind of business run by blue collar construction entrepreneurs). The government is made up of people who collect a regular paycheque without necessarily selling or delivering of anything of value, so tend to believe complex and arcane regulations will somehow improve situations, when generally they further screw it up and add a lot of cost to the victim (the builder). The regulations are introduced without ever reaching those impacted by the changes. Poor efforts are made to translate the regulations into something a person sitting in a pickup truck at a job site can find meaning in. Just read the RB14-011 document and try and understand what it says. I probably reviewed it a dozen times before I could pretend to grasp the concept.
This is how the document looks. Good luck interpreting it.
Here is my bulletin compliant garage. Note the vertical strip running up the centre the building. I have compartmentalized the garage into two, two bay garages, rather than a single four bay structure. This started with the prepping the slab properly and continues into the roof. At this point I can finish the building and carry on this information to my next few projects.
For any builders out there reviewing my comments on this topic, I am sure you may be confused. If you contact me directly I can provide a workable slab detail, framing detail, and possibly contact for an engineer should you wish to go that route of having it inspected and stamped by a professional (which is what I did). I am pretty sure if you look into my approach on this project you can save yourself multiple thousands of $, plus avoid some headaches of an unworkable slab detail.
Sometimes it does feel like the demo is the most fun stage of building. Unfortunately it comes right at the beginning. I would prefer to delay the gratification of demolition work until six hard months of logistics and challenges are overcome. But here it is, our 33 st site looking better than it has in 30 years. The neighbors are pleased.
What a relief. No more uninvited guests can move in. The abhorrent overgrown hedge will be coming down tomorrow. What a crazy size it has grown to un-pruned over the last 20 years or so. It is amazing how jungle like some of these properties can become.
Hardwood is done in the first house, and beginning in the second. Right now the push is on to get the garage and landscaping completed in the next week or so. All this seems possible and we have been blessed with a lot of nice weather.
The next step in house 1 is to get the handrails on the stairs, and move along into carpet and appliances, and the final stages of finishing such as the hardware lockout, etc. The subdivision issue is resolving itself according to the usual timeline (i.e. painfully slow), but on track for the end of the month.
A frequent visitor is giving thumbs up to the hardwood.
The manner in which our municipal government levies and collects tax is becoming increasingly detached from its responsibility to deliver service and allocate collections among the citizenry in an equitable fashion.
Right now the City seems to charge property tax in a way that bears little resemblance to the amount of services consumed by the owners. For example, if you own a high value property, you will undoubtedly pay a high tax, but perhaps you don't own a car or have children attending school. In this case you'd pay a lot of tax relative to the amount of service needed. In another case, perhaps a person rents a house, has five school aged kids, and makes dozens of daily trips up and down the most congested freeway at rush hour. This person is arguably not even paying property tax directly, yet places a heavy load on municipal services. And of course it goes without saying how much higher inner city taxes are for comparatively tiny homes vs. suburban palaces.
I would argue how property tax is charged significantly distorts behaviour in the City by encouraging undesirable behaviour such as peak time traffic congestion, and migration of young families to outer communities that lack public amenities such as schools and public transit options. Lower value properties are obviously going to be preferentially selected by a buyer who will also benefit from lower tax. Since road use isn't charged via a toll, a house shopper may significantly alter his or her behaviour to avoid tax, yet via the locational handicaps of outer communities, may require a lot of public investment in infrastructure.
Essentially I think that taxing based purely on assessed value rather than adjusting the tax for locational and behavioural patterns is subsidizing unwanted behaviour and punishing desirable behaviour.
We may be better off by lowering property tax to some basic minimum, then charging usage based fees to ensure Calgarians are paying a more equitable share of how they use public services and infrastructure.
The likelihood of this happening, despite Maxime Bernier winning the Calgary vote for the recent leadership campaign (by a landslide over the other candidates) of the conservative party is really remote. Until then, we will continue to use property tax as a blunt instrument to deal with the complex issue of financing the City.
Two of these properties are vacant, either under construction or ready to demolish. Only the last one comes with school aged children (probably should be taxed a lot more!).
The project is finally at the stage where we can get permanent electrical power. The task was complicated by my inability to get the garage pad poured during winter. Now that the garage is framed we can fasten two new meter bases on either side of the building. Conduit leads underground to the panels inside the houses. A second conduit is run back to the front of the garage from the house. This will power the garage circuit. The power company seems insistent on having the homes with detached garages and lanes where the poles are in the lane to be energized in this way. It does eliminate a lot of the risk of long above ground wires from being damaged in storms or interfering with tree growth.
Ideally in a future project I'd be able to get the garages up a little quicker and the permanent power installed. We'd then be able to disconnect the temporary power line and run more lights and plugs inside the house. I may impose a new rule on myself not to start building any houses in the winter, it is just a lot of unnecessary aggravation.
New meter base and mast is installed. The meter base is very close to the lane. Once connected the power will run underground into the basement mechanical room and we can disconnect the temporary pole we've been using for the past six months.
I think it is fair to say when working in the City you must be prepared to absorb losses from theft and illegal activity such as dumping. Those that are engaged in this type of behaviour are fearless and brazen in their daylight activities. They rely successfully on the anonymity and speed at which they do their work. The chances of being caught dumping garbage at a job site are low, so these crooks are doing it constantly.
I may be investing in some security cameras for a future project to see if I can catch some of this in the act. My plan will be to reload the unwanted couch or pile of debris that someone decides should be emptied on my site, and dump it on the guilty parties front door. I'm sure they will appreciate getting their garbage back.
Here is the remnants of someone clearing brush and cutting out old fencing. They were able to take down my fence, dump their material, and actually put the fence back up. I guess I should thank these idiots for actually putting the fence back. That is generally too much to ask for.
The stair tread install has been as difficult and time consuming as I had thought it would be. This job really takes a patient craftsman to execute. The finishing work of course takes a long time, because it involves precision and attention to detail. The final trim piece of the stair is going on now, he actually has to shave the veneer off a piece of flooring to make it look right. Here is a photo of the final process.
The second from top tread has received its final veneer trim piece on the side of the riser. This is my first experiment with finishing an old fashioned carriage style of tread in a contemporary hardwood. I may use this again in a project I am planning in Killarney.
UPDATE - I asked the City crew to take out the tree, they agreed. apparently they have a contractor working in the Shaganappi area this year, and will be taking out the dying willow.
With a new development permit application for my fourplex submitted, the city arrives to inventory any trees in the front. They put a price tag on tree damage or replacement of city owned trees. The site has two weeping willow trees, both really old. One is in good shape and valued over $8500. The other is 2/3 dead and valued over $550. I think the tree is worth negative $550 because someone is going to have to pay to deal with it.
Im going to ask the city to see if it can take down the tree. I suspect the city wants me to take it down and then bill me for it 'damaging' it. This makes no sense because I'm not allowed to operate on city property. This is the same city that observed some rutting in the alley and threatened to charge me $10000 to fix it and said I wasn't allowed to make repairs on city land. So I'm either allowed to operate on city land or I'm not. Either way the tree needs to go. We've got to get a new sewer connection into the project and it likely must pass through that location. I'm glad both trees were not valuable otherwise I'd be in a tough position, excavating a trench beside a mature tree would likely damage it beyond repair.
this is the dying willow.
still worth $565