With windows and shingles on site ready for install we are nearly at lockup stage. Getting the building snow proof is a huge plus. Shoveling the inside of the project last year was a lot of work and a waste of effort.
Ready to go. Some nice and large windows need to be installed soon.
We ordered two sets of the integrated landing stairs from a really good carpenter. Not surprisingly they went in well and look great. It pays to have the guy who installs the railings make the stairs as well. This way he’s compelled to make the stairs in such a way that the railing job will be easier later. Overall accuracy is improved and the treads and riser dimension will be identical.
Now that I have returned from a poorly timed vacation, there is substantial work to tackle. A lot of progress was made on the semi detached site while I was gone, basically it was fully framed and the basement slabs prepped for the pour. Thanks to my new manager Cornell for dealing with stuff while I was away. I've got the schedule revised and a lot of deposits and payments made for the next stages of work. We are ready to pour the slabs, frame the basements, install the upper stairs, install the windows and load the shingles. The plumber is on notice to start and the HVAC crew is attending the site to prep it. That is a lot of stuff for Novemer. My fourplex DP was irrevocably approved, and my rowhouse basement has started excavation. So the construction business is looking good.
Leaving Calgary is a chance to look at best practices, or just different stuff from other places. Here is a favourite from Maui. I'd like to build houses in a place that is always summer. That'd sure beat the Calgary winter. Pouring a garage pad in January would make projects here a lot cheaper and more predictable...
Really neat strip mall development near the airport. Not the mall, the siding. Where can I get this material? Fortunately my suppliers in Calgary sell something similar.
Jeep interior after two weeks of abuse, not the washable floor kind of Jeep either. The trunk was worse but more easily cleaned out. Kids found it to be hilarious that they made this much sand mess...
My shaganappi fourplex project has been approved and no appeal was registered. This is a significant step forward in proving the viability of the project.
The design work encountered a major hurdle thanks to some irrational exmax requirement for a huge rear setback. We were feeling squeezed between attempting to be contextual with the 60 year old neighbourhood frontal setback and then we were told the alley had a large setback as well. Without moving the building forward we’d have been left with little buildable footprint. That worst case scenario would be a distaster for a two building fourplex on a56 x 110 ft lot.
Fortunately the planning staff came through with some very progressive thinking and we relaxed the front setback. I also met with the neighbours to gain support for the relaxation and this actually worked out better than I had hoped. This all unfolded over a year long process. It could have been quicker but for reasons I’m going to forget about we needed all this time to get to the finish line. One of my builder friends describes this process as a form of brain damage. I’ve heard the process described elsewhere similarly (and it is much worse in Portland Oregon, a jurisdiction I find endlessly amusing for its hideous infill policies). This fourplex was much less brain damaging than other similar processes I’ve endured. For example the row house process was vastly worse. I’m still recovering from the row house project brain damage. I’ve yet to determine if the brain damage accumulates or dissipates over time.
This ends my development permitting for 2017 and possibly next year too. I’m currently too broke to be buying more land. Ideally I will take a huge break from permitting once this fourplex has a bp and of course the dssp remains. This is going to be another storm water adventure as I struggle to contain the costs. This project is on the back burner for now, I’ve got to get some building done and a few houses sold before I start a new one.
No appeal on the fourplex. What a relief.
The framers are getting the roof installed, this allows us to plan some of the next trades. Windows, shingles, and basement slab pour will get us to the lockup stage.
The basement plumbing passed and the plumber returned to install the network of pipes on the insulation. Once finished, the circulation of hot water inside the slab will make for a very warm and comfortable basement living area. finishing the radiant heating system in the basement remains a costly endeavour. It is a supplementary system to the forced air furnace, thus is totally optional to do. Like many other materials that go into the job, cost has give up. It will be interesting to compare the price of these systems with the one I did on my house in 2014.
The semi detached framing project is proceeding nicely. If the roof can go on next week we will be nearing the lockup stage. Shoveling inside the house is never fun so ideally we won’t need to (again).
Second floor walls are almost up.
In my experience these bankers are all alike. It is so hard to get any money from them and recently the risk threshold of the banks has ratcheted lower. They constantly ask for more and documentation, personal guarantees, and drag out an application process that is doomed to fail. This is making it nearly impossible to finance excellent projects (like mine). My projects that get rejected would actually be successful and lead to repayment. However, due to the scale and fees involved, the bankers are suckers for the bigger operators. The banks would prefer to make one 100 million dollar loan rather than 100 one million dollar loans. The route of this seems to be the banking system is lazy and smaller businesses are frowned upon by internal policies.
Every once in a while these big loans go sour. Today’s jackass award goes to royal bank. Let’s hope they lose their shirt on this massive loan and maybe reconsider making some smaller loans to small builders ( that’d actually be paid back rather than defaulted on).
how much of the 64 million dollars will royal bank get back? Hopefully they lose enough to maybe consider offering small builders loans.
the province finally got around to its latest confiscation scheme - builder licensing. This useless and wasteful program will be yet another anti business program put in place to take money and offer nothing in return except a false sense of security that the government is going to take care of you.
Here is the latest salvo in its relentless scope and fee creeping scheme to extract more money from the productive minority of society and transfer it to those with defined benefit pensions.
One of the advantages of house building is the control the owner may experience over the build schedule. This allows the builder to skip town at any time for any reason. Of course what really happens is the vacation is booked months in advance and once the departure is imminent, project delays that were totally unpredictable render the timing to be terrible. This is how I find myself starting five houses and leaving anyway.
While some work can’t proceed without the builder to supervise, a lot can. Let’s hope we see some meaningful progress at the semi and the row house is excavated when I return.
It is always a relief when the DSSP related work is done on site. Now the unfortunate task begins of tallying up the final ‘score’. It is hard to attribute the cost as any kind of a victory, despite how difficult it has been and how much time and attention has been lavished on the work. In terms of construction expenditure vs. value of work done, the DSSP costs are a real loser compared to other tasks like say, installing a kitchen. I am publishing my final costs here, normally I would not do this but I’m so aggravated by dssp wastage that I don’t mind posting some of the uglier numbers.
Design - engineering related cost is approximately $4500
Fees - the various fees here added up to about $8000, much of it for asphalt degradation on the Killarney roads (storm component only), plus the DSSP review fees and the frontage fee for storm water. The offsite levy for downstream infrastructure is not included here because it is for water treatment that is needed on every job. So I haven’t included $9000 of other fees.
Indirect or intangible cost - while this is harder to quantify, I had to redesign the roof such that the storm water could be managed in a realistic fashion by having all the water shed from the roof into the sideyard. This has other implications for building the structure, all negative. I'm sort of guessing here that the changes will cost about $10,000 vs the preferable roof design I had originally budgeted.
Install - this is an easy number to calculate, the storm component was about $26000, the remainder of the cost was the regular sewer and water install that all projects require, these days that other part is $20000. So the regular cost isn’t part of the dssp final total.
Surveying - more specialty work here to locate the components of the project. $1750.
Delays caused by DSSP complexity - the DSSP was designed promptly and massaged through the various City checkpoints early and well by my civil engineering contractor. The delay was caused by my inability to commit to the site work until I had the development permit approved, and the BP at least in progress enough that I could commit to starting work. This added about three months of very aggravating waiting that burnt up much of the summer and fall building seasons. While no number can be placed on this delay, the time value is more than $10000. The delay of losing the summer season and the difficulty in doing the concrete work is a major cost I have not factored in.
Management - we are going to apply a value of $0 for the management and financing of the project, mainly because the company owner works very very cheaply, and has bags of low cost money to spend on these DSSP installs, and vast amounts of free time to invest in overseeing the engineering and contracting of civil works.
So, adding it all up, we get to $60250 to create about 10 m3 of stormwater storage and interconnect it into the City system, pay everyone involved and send a bunch of money to the City to be carefully spent by the administration on wages and pensions.
There is a lot of financial waste in building, so that often it seems like you are just burning money in order to comply with the various rules and policies that are in place. Our city isn’t known for assessing the cost benefit ratio of policies that are hard to comply with. I’m finding the dssp is an example of high cost for little societal value. I’m convinced that $6000 for a cubic metre of storm water capture is crazy.
With backfill complete and a load of lumber dropped off, the framers were able to come by and begin the process of installing the main floor subfloor. This is a fast crew and I have wanted to try them since I observed them working for a few other builders. The house should be framed in about 4 weeks. I've made this bold statement in the past a few times, so we will soon find out if my prediction is accurate. Working on the semi-d is a welcome relief from all the underground work underway at the row house project. The nice feature of these two projects is they are in the same community and only about seven blocks apart making for easy commuting.
Framing is off to a nice start at the semi-d, next week we could see some walls.
Final install day contained some challenges. First the trench for the pipe connecting the third manhole to the second manhole was not easy to dig due to space constraints, and the new machine malfunctioned, necessitating the delivery of another machine. Fortunately the contractor has this much capability that swapping out six figure machines is routine for them.
Here we have the final manhole in place right on the side property line, and connected in a bed of gravel downstream too the middle manhole. Then we have the broken machine getting repaired and the new machine arriving which cost much of the afternoon to be lost while the repair guy attempted to fix the problem. Fortunately the work is now complete and we can move on to the next stage of the project.
The onsite work has now really begun. This stage is an interconnection of manholes within the front yard, and down the entire sideyard to a third manhole. All of this adds a lot of unnecessary cost and waste given the amount of storage that is created (next to nil), yet complying with the drawing is essential so we must carry on.
This manhole shows the 12 inch line entering from the street. The 3 inch pipe is for sump water that is collected in the basement. I am still puzzled as to why this is allowed to enter the City system unimpeded after the flow restrictor which is in the manhole.
The second manhole is installed in the background. The pipe connecting the manholes crosses over the water and sewer lines that were installed earlier.
Tomorrow the project is due to be completed and we can fill it all back in and get ready to dig up the rest of the lot where the basement goes. This is going to be a challenge now that the formerly empty site is somewhat loaded with storm catchment equipment.
With the sewer and water component largely wrapped up and the trench backfilled, the crew has moved onto the storm water connection. This is the element of the project that has been so difficult to manage, primarily because the shallowness of the city main. Imagine a concrete storm sewer below the road, and it is filled by surface water from gravity drainage. Now, with a City requirement to actually store the rainwater on your property, you would naturally want to stick a big manhole into the ground, and connect it to the main. This requires some slope, and some depth. Both of which we don't have here.
The storm water main is about the depth of a shovel from the road surface. This is causing a lot of storage issues upstream.
The 12 inch plastic pipe is the connection to the City storm main. Coring through this really old hardened concrete was exceptionally difficult. The outside diameter of the pipe is very large and the bit needed to cut concrete is undoubtedly very costly. I never saw it done or would have taken a photo.
The truck with the concrete vessels arrives on site. Now we see the implication of the shallow City connection. We have to also use really shallow and short manholes. In order to gravity drain, the bottom of our storage has to be higher than the storm main, plus some slope for the pipe.
Everything on the truck is used for storing rain water from the building so that it does not overload the City infrastructure with water in a flood event. The idea is the water backs up into the concrete vessels and pipes connecting them, and even into the landscaped areas and slowly trickles out.
The problem with this idea, of storing water on site so it slowly releases downstream (eventually into the Bow River), is the cost benefit analysis hasn't been done. The cost of these tiny installs on each project is inefficient, due to the custom nature, engineering requirement for the design, the City fees for reviews and change, the inspections, etc. It doesnt make any sense to do it this way because the volume of actual storage created per cubic meter is so low vs the cost per cubic meter of installing it. Of course the City doesnt care about these issues because it has no concern for the well-being of small business owners like home builders. Every time the City changes the rules on these DSSP installs, it increases storage requirement and decreases outlet flow rate. Eventually the install becomes impossible, or so onerous, when combined with unworkable elements like shallow mains, that the cost will be enough to wipe out the project economics. Again, the City doesn't know or care about these realities. When the City does projects of its own, it has no budget constraints for DSSP, and it will just pay whatever it takes to solve a compliance challenge. Builders tend to have a lot less budget for compliance matters that customers don't appreciate than the City departments.
Work has now begun on the dssp component of the row house. We’ve elected to install the water sewer and storm before construction begins, mainly for ease of access.
As the install proceeds over the next few days I will post some progress shots.
This is the east trench. It contains the water and sewer only. We will be running this under the storm pipe that cross perpendicular. These deep services are the easier part of this install.
I have encountered some very strange requirements related to the fire code. This has been most 'alarming' related to a garage wall detail. The garage wall, particularly the one that faces the neighbours garage, in this case about 10 ft separated across the property line, is somehow now considered to be such a fire hazard that extreme measures are required to build it.
The City has requested a completely non combustible design. This means the wall itself cannot be wood, and it has to be wrapped in many layers of fire resistant material below the siding. Each added layer of fire protection is not only costly, it is getting very hard to do. I have shown here a clip of the wall detail we are proposing on this garage.
The implications of this garage wall detail is really dismal for actually building the garage. Around a man door, the jamb is left with such bizarre dimension, something like 8 inches thick. Garage door jambs are not designed to be 8 inch thick compatible, especially not the fire rated doors that are required. Generally a garage door jamb is preferred to be made for 4 or 6 inch wood framing. It remains to be seen what this will actually look like once built. I am hypothesizing it will look like garbage, or may not even be possible to install a 6 inch jamb on an 8 inch wall. No doubt some crazy farmer fix will be needed to make this work.
I also wonder who had this great idea to impose these conditions on a garage. The idea must be that the garage can completely burn to the ground but the metal walls will remain standing after the roof has collapsed. I'd guess that by the time the garage is consumed in flame the fire truck will have arrived to put it out. I wonder if the next code change will require fences to be made of metal so that they can't catch fire and burn down your neighbours noncombustible garage.
This wall features 4 layers of type X style gypsum board inside and outside the wall.
With the concrete still drying the cribbers send over the stripping crew to peel off the forms before they stay on there too long and are much more difficult to remove. Once removed the forms and bracing lumber goes back on the trailer and is hauled to the next location.
Interesting additional cost of business is the basement company now has a permit on his trailer that cost $3000 per year to hold. This allows him to park on any side street during any week day without being hooked up to a truck. That is a huge cost to pay for being able to park a trailer, but at least he isn't subject to parking tickets.
The outer forms are off and loaded back on the trailer. Note the $3000 per year parking pass equipped trailer is in the front street.
Damp proofing crew arrived and did the foundation coat. Next up is weeping tile and gravel.
This is what the Realtor suggests you build in his description. Rather skinny?
Realtors continue to be my pet peeve of this industry. Or one of my peeves. Or maybe just the peeve that most deserves to be picked on with such irresistable frequency. It is no secret that I consider the average realtor knowledge regarding redevelopment in the inner city to be bordering on 'childlike' in either its innocent lack of expertise, or negligent in its flagrant misinterpretation of site potential. Sometimes both?
Despite best efforts to the contrary, Realtors continue to be successful thus have little incentive to learn anything about important topics, such as the houses they are trusted to market on behalf of their clients.
Today we have a winner, listing a newly redesignated RCG lot in Shaganappi (part of the mainstreets initiative). Since multi family now means mega money and mega comissions, the listing is blessedly optimistic in its description. It also contains some well placed weasel word, because, you know, possibly, the Realtor could be wrong about everything.
Let us examine the facts in somewhat greater detail. The '9000 sq ft lot could fit 6 units (subject to city approval). Great ROI in a hot central neighbourhood.' Ok, so what will these 6 units look like? Take the 60 ft width, minus 8 ft for the side setbacks, leaving you with 52 ft, divided into 6, and this is what you get (yes, math is hard for our Realtor friends) = 8.6 ft.
Ignoring that there are minimum widths for homes in the RCG zone, does anyone actually think that 8.6 ft wide homes are a viable option for the builder? The home built to this size would be among the skinniest form of human habitation possible, not unlike a jail cell.
Imagine that wonderful ROI if you go ahead and build 6 row houses that are 8.6 ft wide. That'd be an amazing economic opportunity.
That $1600/month rent is sure going to be helpful once you buy this lot for nearly $900k.
Ward 7 is a collection of many great communities in the NW inner city plus the U of C and SAIT. It has a real need to redevelop around the schools in such a way that reflects the need for student accommodation (I don't think it does at all in many communities near the U of C in particular). Of all the likely places that new home buyers would like to be, the most prized locations in all of the NW tend to be found in Ward 7. Some of the communities (such as Hillhurst/Sunnyside) have experienced considerable condo development pressure. This ward is the home of the north hill area redevelopment plan for Banff Trail and Capitol Hill (the two communities immediately north of SAIT), a plan many years in the making and a big change from 1980's urban design ideas in Calgary. This new ARP is bringing a lot of investment into those communities, and a lot of objection from longtime residents that want to prevent such growth as the ARP allows.
The area has been represented by Councillor Druh Farrell for many years (16 and counting, making her a poster child for Council term limits). She's been a strong advocate for urban redevelopment and opposed to sprawl subsidies and also receives a lot of vitriol in the media.
She is running again for re-election, along with many other challengers in the election next week. Despite the ugly name calling, I think her record on redevelopment is sound. She does not suffer from the political hypocrisy of her opponents on redevelopment strategies such as row house construction (the inner city bogeyman of 2017).
Ward 7 political fiction - aspiring politicians cry wolf about the need to cut taxes and disallow densification in 'our' communities. The existing community residents (including highly anti-development biased Mount Pleasant) should control redevelopment - which largely means redevelopment should not be driven by market conditions, instead it should be based on the intangible concepts of character and quaintness and exercising control over others' property rights.
Ward 7 political fact - the easiest tax base growth option is row house or multifamily residential redevelopment in the Ward 7 communities (tax per lot could grow from $4000 annually to $16000 annually with very limited expense to the City in infrastructure or amenities), this is a net tax base increase of $12000 every year per project, permanently. Given the City is desperate for money, significant redevelopment needs to take place or tax rates will only continue to rise.
