Time for another discussion on construction - is it fate or coincidence. This is a tale of an identical homes built in drastically different Calgary locations. I’ve now done enough deals that the original bungalows are blurring together into a maze of bad carpet and nasty bathrooms, but one recent series of bungalow deals stands out. Last year we renovated a 1960s bungalow in the southeast, it was in original condition. We got to know that bungalow really well because we took out some walls and re did the basement from scratch. The end result was a decrepit tear down revitalized into a bright and clean open concept bungalow ready for another generation of home owners to enjoy. The land value and neighbourhood was not particularly valuable so the renovation made a lot of sense, we even had a grand scheme to do a garage lane house, but never actually went through with it (too much time and cost to justify it). Recently we bought another identical bungalow, it was very strange to walk through it (was like a time machine) and to see how it had been renovated and modified (hardly at all) over the decades. In contrast to the major renovation project we did, this was all land value and saving the house never entered the equation. This was unfortunate because we knew exactly what to do to rebuild that floorplan, essentially it would have been the least risky renovation ever because we’d already largely perfected it the first time around. This goes to demonstrate that you can never gain too much knowledge in this industry because you can’t predict what will happen and what kind of deal will present itself to you. In this instance the renovation knowledge we gained will not be used, but the semi detached building knowledge will be instrumental. We can use the same designs, the same schedule and budget, and so on. This reduces a lot of the risk and increases my confidence in the eventual outcome. We also get to tweak the plans, so we can go from k35 version 1.0 to version 2.0 quite quickly, and efficiently. The experience of building 1.0 is really fresh in my mind so the tweaks will be really powerful to just make it a little better here and there. This is an advantage the tract home builders have over me, they can do the same house 50x, end result is a near perfect and efficient home to replicate. I have been doing custom after custom, and the one-offs don’t lend themselves to any sort of scale or reduced stress for the builder.

So we had an interesting experience with bungalow dejavu, and in the near future hopefully a sense of semi detached dejavu as we tear down and rebuild k35 into p35.