Interior finishing stage underway k35

While we’ve made good use of the unseasonable weather outside we’ve also progressed right through the drywall stage on the inside. So with boarding, taping, sanding, texture and now priming done we have started the interior finishing stage. The process to get to finishing took about two work weeks with some lost days for crew changes, deliveries and routine double booked trades that weren’t always available immediately. In between we got the furnaces fired up and the permanent electrical connected and a few lights and plugs turned on. The first finishing crew does the door hanging, casing, baseboard where possible and also the closets and shelves. This is a good deal of work and depending on the crew size (2-3) will usually be 3-4 days. In this build we have the kitchen supplier producing the mudroom and master closet cabinetry in their shop. This is another large amount of work but will increase the consistency and precision of the end product by having it all produced in a shop and site painted.
Progress to date has been good on the k35 build, at the three month stage of the process we have interior doors hung and it really starts to take its final form inside and out.

The interior work is much more detailed and slower than the earlier stages but also warmer so a better place to be in the winter. It looks like we can have this project finished inside by the end of February even factoring in some seasonal shutdowns. My preference is not to finish builds around Christmas because it isn’t a great time to sell them. Unfortunately the way our seasons work if you start in the spring which is ideal for pouring basements and framing houses you inevitable finish by Christmas. We started in August and we’ve missed out finishing 100% of the exterior and even landscaping it by a few weeks. I need to start my next builds a little earlier in the year because seasonal delays are costly and frustrating.

Mid November stucco

Another Chinook and we are able to use every day available to us to finish a major stage of the exterior, the scratch coat. The current plan is to wrap up the stucco this weekend and then demobilize the scaffolds and return the rental fencing. At this stage of the project the rental fencing is just a huge hassle to deal with. The rental fencing is basically universally hated as a useless obstruction. It somehow became necessary to use due to concerns about safety. My view is that anyone who trespasses into a jobsite can suffer the consequence of their travels. And anyone who intends to trespass into a job site can open a fence. The situation is just another ridiculous cost applied to inner city building.

And the scratch coat is done as of mid November. I think it is the latest I’ve ever been able to do stucco. Heating and tarping the entire building is possible but that is a lot of work and expense we’d rather avoid. We do have the issue of the acrylic finish coat to do and that may wait for spring.

Exterior progress - k35

We’ve managed to get a reasonable amount of progress made on the k35 front exterior. Note the large load of sand in the yard where the dump trailer normally sits. That is a sure sign we will have the stucco scratch coat starting next week. The windows and some exterior detailing has been a bit of extra juggling and planning but is coming together nicely. Once we get the stucco done that is our last exterior work until spring.
Note the functional gable vents on the top of both walls near the roof line. These vents are cut well above the insulation in the attic and greatly contribute to venting any humidity trapped in the cavity in winter.

Siding is looking good and scaffold is up

Market discipline - so painfully slow - how to lose $180,000 in three years.

As an observer of the typical real estate related mistakes that people (me too!) make there has just been such constant fodder recently. The slow motion debacle of these misguided valuation ideas is so cringeworthy to me that I cant help myself but feature it on this page. Today has an interesting case study, one I have watched unfold over three years, and now there is a new chapter in this sordid affair (property is now on the market, finally).

The property in question sold exactly three years ago, for $850k. I was shocked at the price at the time, and angry that it sold at that inflated value. I was interested in buying it at perhaps $100k but preferably $150k less. That would have been something I could work with. But at $850 it was just such a terrible deal, there was no way based on my math (recall that math is hard, but this math wasn’t that hard at all), that this business prospect could ever pencil out as anything but a disaster.

To make the scenario even worse the buyer then later approaches my realtor and informed him of his grand ambitions. My realtor then gave an educated market value estimate based on real data, like any good realtor should do (and while he’s a polite dude, the message was not good at all). Of course, the realtor who was actually the one taking the commission on the land deal was nowhere to be found. He’d taken the cash and was of no further use, likely didn’t know the first thing about infill development. This is one of the many dangers of using terrible realtors when making critical purchasing decisions. The client will get terrible advice and act on it, and the realtor walks away with no liability to the disaster left in his wake.

But this post wasn’t intended to be a diatribe against my favourite topic, bad realtor behaviour in land deals. It is supposed to highlight the danger of infill development. Nobody discusses the failures, but you will see plenty of success stories featured prominently. Well here is a huge loser to report on! And the story isn’t over so we cannot tally the losses definitively (but we sure can make a detailed estimate).

Here is some dates provided by Honest Door.com, an interesting and free resource for real estate investors. It shows the last sale, data from the land titles office, and the current assessed value and the ‘honest door algorithm’ price. They have it curiously down at 738400. This could be accurate. The other interesting feature of this property is the old house was demolished. So many buyers can no longer buy this lot and it cannot be financed easily by conventional means. This could drive the price down even more - do you have $734k in the bank ready to go and want to put that full sum into this property? I sure dont…

here is the title from the old sale. Ouch. At 850 they have now paid property taxes for 3 years, that is about $15k. Then they lost the time value of the money, at 5% per annum, that is $42.5k/year x 3, that is $127.5k, plus the cost of the demolition, so lets call that another $10k. Losses are now already at $152.5k and counting…plus realtor fees to sell it, current list price is 795k, if it sell at that price less commission, that is another $28k in commissions. Total loss is now at $180k on this purchase. That really hurts

Another unknown here is this land investment may even have been financed, if so, the losses are further magnified by interest charges. the loss of investment opportunity to the owner are harder to quantify. If this lot was bought in cash, the return that could have been otherwise earned on the stock market or another investment is tremendous and impossible to measure. The losses could easily be more than the $180k that I’ve estimated here, a lot more. Many buyers don’t consider the time value of the funds misallocated to real estate as a loss. They’ve been lucky to buy into up markets where the money factor involved is negated by increases in values. This hasn’t happened in years in Calgary. Buyer beware!

Back to garage building

I rarely break out the cost of garage building as much of the labour blends into the larger project. Items like stucco, drywall, electrical and others are not necessarily broken out from whole house contracts. Despite that I’ve got a pretty good idea on the cost of a four bay garage that you can do in a cost advantageous manner when blending it in with the rest of the build.

More garage progress. Almost done.

Drywall details - joint reduction

The same crew hanging the board also tapes it. We are using a four man crew, and they are skilled at both tasks. Because they also need to finish the board they hang, it is in their interest to make it as nice as possible and minimize the joints. This resulted in selecting the 54 inch drywall vs using two rows of 48 inch board and a middle strip on the 9 ft walls. When you see a boarded room you can see not only how few joints there are to tape, but also how few screws are needed on the partition walls, as they get the studs glued before hanging. So not only do we get a finish with less visible joint risk we should also get less screw pops too. Seems like a win win for the builder and the subcontractor.

Preboard summary - K35

As we’ve reached the drywall stage of the project, it is a great time to review how far we’ve come since we started the demolition and excavation in early august. We have enjoyed a lot of cooperation from the trades and even the autumn weather. This project was among the most carefully managed I’ve been involved with to date, with lots of staging and orchestration gymnastics to run multiple crews, usually 6 days a week and sometimes even 7. With footing pour on August 9th, and drywall hanging underway September 25th, that is only 11 weeks from an empty hole in the ground to a structure complete enough inside and out to cover it with drywall and start the finishing work.

Of that 11 weeks, or 77 days, we’ve had a bunch of rain storms and blizzards, holiday long weekends, waits for material and equipment, and scheduling conflict among various subtrades. The construction has certainly been a whirlwind of activity each day, and required a lot of management time to keep on track, and on budget.

The green sticker means permanent power

With the garage wiring done and the permanent power service installed, we had our inspection today and this means new meters will be installed. Once connected by Enmax we will have power and lights installed plus the all important furnace connected.

Winged rats strike back

These flying rats are calling out for extermination. With just one open spot in the building they found it and are preparing for a nice evenings roost. I’m going to look for my slingshot.

Exterior progress

Paper and wire progressing nicely at the k35 project.

Spray foam stage

Lots of large cantilever at the k35 project so they’ve received a nice coat of 2 pound spray foam. Next up is insulation of the rest of the house walls and stucco prep. Drywall delivery is early this week so we’ll be making a lot of interior progress soon.

Permanent electrical service underway

Typical procedure in the inner city build of a laned parcel. Get the house up and the sewer installed into the street. Get the gas company to trench and pipe gas to the house from the alley. And then struggle to get the garage built so that a mast and submeter can go on the garage and then a trench and line fed to the main panel in the basement. Once complete, the builder can do two items of considerable importance. Energize the panel for lights and turn on the furnace. After we get to drywall no further work can be done without heat inside. And the heat needs to be consistent and humidity managed all winter, a real challenge to accomplish.

Ground plate is dug in 6 inches deeper than the trench. Lots of digging is done and more to come. But the project is on the cusp of being fully serviced, always a real accomplishment and project milestone.

Where to locate the shower niche

We’ve installed a shower inside a corner with two exterior walls. Not exactly ideal for the shower niche. Only one spot remains and that is below the shower mixing valves. I think this will turn out ok once we get the tile selected and the shower walls prepped.

The niche will be installed below the shower controls. Better here than inside the insulation of an exterior wall.

Construction randoms - protecting finished materials from the onslaught of stucco

Long time without a post. We’ve been out of town for a week and pushing on through the non photogenic stage of prepping for the all important preboard inspection.
A good construction practice is applying the vinyl decking before the stucco so it can wrap up the wall. The stucco is then flashed over top the membrane. This is great but this means active stucco work with sharp object, pipe scaffold, mud, wire and boots possibly destroying your finished deck vinyl. We must go to extreme lengths to manage this problem and covering the deck is the only viable option.

Vinyl decking is all covered with osb material to offer at least some protection for the valuable finished product below.

Navigating the complex world of encroachment and real property report compliance

Sometimes as a builder you also need to become a negotiator to try and extricate yourself from potentially alarming and usually costly interactions with the local authority. In the recent case, upon successful creation of a utility corridor easement (for over head power lines), the builder justifiably thought he had done the right thing. The power company had come to a fair agreement that allowed us to comply with our approved DP, and build what we needed to do to make a marketable project. When the time came to create a new RPR, we just went ahead as always, the new easement was shown on the map, and all parties were happy. And then it was time to get the City to stamp compliance on the RPR. Instead we were notified of an encroachment advisory stamped on the RPR, as if you can encroach while everything you built was contained within property you own. The slightly overzealous nature of the receiving clerk at the City end certainly wasn’t helpful. We were then advised of a lengthy (yes this is the City) process to have the encroachment reviewed and a likely agreement made to accept the building that we did inside of our lot (the building that is required to do inside the DP).

The happy ending here was I was able to get the direct line of the encroachment desk, and the staff there was agreeable and immediately sent me back the RPR with the encroachment voided. It was a pleasant surprise to have that turnaround within the hour and the docs were shipped off to the surveyor and lawyer. Another lesson learned about the compliance process and how to navigate within the rules of the City. Even better was the avoided fee of two encroachment agreements, that can really add up!

What a relief to have the City void this encroachment into the utility corridor that the power company (City owned entity) created. Saves so much time and cost for the builder to get this granted.

Construction random updates

Significant progress again to report at the K35 semi-detached, currently receiving the vast proportion of my attention and energy. A productive week with good weather again for the outside work, and we also had the long awaited precast window wells installed. This was interesting because I ordered the largest size they make, it requires quite a good sized hold to be dug to contain them.

A lot of juggling of equipment, schedules and materials was done to get the precast in on a comparatively tiny site with lots of other work ongoing. The HVAC crew started and basically finished the first unit, the plumber completed the drainage plumbing, and the framers were back to work on the second basement and lots of back framing work. The stairs arrived for one of the units, and install was well underway this evening. With 3-4 crews involved on one site over the week, much logistics and communication is done to keep everyone happy, with space to work, and with plenty of material.

As the builder, my job at this hectic stage has been reduced to the cleaner of mud off the street, and bringer of materials when shortfalls are identified, with the sporadic rain we’ve had, the mud has been awful, and with so much progress occurring, shortages of material is regular. Aggravating daily hardware store runs are now proving necessary as unexpected materials are needed. Once again, attentive site management (time consuming and inefficient) pushes everyone else forward, leaves no crew with a reason not to work (even if they may be wanting a reason), and greatly increases the pace that the crews can work toward stage completion.

Prepossession touchups

With the sales of the Richmond project moving along we were able to move out the furniture and address a bunch of drywall deficiencies. The house will be looking vastly better and we can conduct a walk through with the clients.

Touchups underway. Unfortunately screw pops and drywall joint issues are unavoidable when building in a place with such temperature and humidity fluctuation.

Garage building

The mild fall conditions have been very nice for the builders so far as we get near the end of September. The crew I usually use to do concrete work gets very busy with a late season push to pour flatwork before the ground gets cold. Immediately after gas line install we had them lined up to do all the sidewalks, patios and garages. A noisy and messy affair but we can try and get the garage built next week.

Pads and patios done. Next up is the garage framing with lumber and trusses booked for next week. Once the garage is framed we can hook up the electrical system to permanent meters from the temporary pole. That will energize the plugs and lights inside the house. For trade convenience

K35 - 1 month update

Lots of progress to report at the k35 semi detached project as we have just passed the one month milestone from the day we poured the footing to early this week. We finished the first full construction month with the shingles on and the basement slabs poured. The plumber is partway through the drainage network, and can now get down into the basement to do the network under the main floor. Decent weather and a good framing crew has enabled all the other associated activity. We are now going to get the garage started and move into Hvac and electrical as we approach the end of September. Overall a really good start to the project.

By mid morning the slabs are both poured. The bulk of the day will be spent by a portion of the crew that sticks around to hand trowel, and later power trowel the finished surface.

The temporary stairs in place have allowed access from the very start of the project where we installed the drainage plumbing, and later the Styrofoam and hydronic rough-in tied to the rebar grid. Getting these in place makes it much easier for the trades to access, and especially the inspector who wont do the inspection unless safe access is available.

Roof re-do

After truss assembly it was clear we had a problem. The roof peak was offset somehow to the centre of window. It didn’t look terrible but was one of those items that once you’ve seen it, you can’t unsee it. Rather than bungling around attempting to fix it on site I called the supplier. They agreed to replace the affected area and rushed it out in a couple days. The framers pulled off the offending area and reinstalled the repaired new truss pack. Overall a small but significant problem overcome with a lot of cooperation. The rain caused more delay than the wait for the new trusses.

Roof peak is noticeably offset

It all came down as one assembly thanks to the power of the machine

Always sad to see work get undone

And the new trusses are installed and we are back in action with the shingles loaded and roofers hard at work all day

Roof peak is good to shingle now. Old trusses cut up and in the bin. Lots of teamwork on site with pro crews that move quick.