Financing a renovation

It can be a lot of fun to dream about renovating a house and come up with ideas.  But then comes the question of financing.  In the beginning I had no idea how much it would cost to do a major renovation. Financing a big project like that was another total mystery.  So in this post I'll write about renovation financing.

To start off with, you can get some idea of renovation costs by searching online, but the information will probably not be very reliable. Costs vary a lot from one place to another, and building costs in your city might be a lot different than somewhere else. The best way to get an idea of renovation costs is to talk to some local builders or architects and ask them what a building costs in your city are.  They will probably tell you a price range per square foot.  Here in Ottawa, a ballpark building cost is around $250 per square foot.  A big suburban developer building town homes might be able to build for much less, like $150/sf, because they're building a whole bunch of similar houses at the same time.  And a high end custom builder could be much higher, like $350/sf.  A lot depends upon what you want to build. If it contains a lot of steel work, high end custom millwork and finishes, high-end windows, and cutting edge features you can easily blow past that ballpark figure.

I haven't calculated the final square foot cost of our renovation. I'm actually a bit scared and would almost rather not know. But $250/sf is definitely not an overstatement. I think it's quite a bit more than that, and really more than it should have been since we had a lot of problems with the first contractor and had to replace him with a different one.

You might think that if $250/sf is the cost to build something new, it should be a lot cheaper to renovate an existing building. That's not really true.  If all you're doing is repainting the walls and replacing some fixtures then sure, it'll be much less. But if it's a serious renovation where you're planning to go in and bring everything up to modern day standards and a like-new condition, renovation can actually end up costing more.  Depending on how extensive the renovation is, you might want to seriously consider a complete demolition and new build. Once you start taking walls down you can find a lot of surprises.  One of our surprises was that the entire house was built out of cinderblocks, including all the exterior walls.  The architect, engineer, and contractor all failed to identify this when they were inspecting and coming up with the initial plans and estimates. Then my neighbor told me "you know all these houses are cinderblock walls, right?"  This caused a change of plans that ended up costing several thousand dollars, extra time, and certain weird details on the resulting floorplan.

Once you have an idea of building costs in your city, the question is how to pay for a big renovation.  In my case, I bought our house more than ten years ago in a little neighbourhood that somewhat of a hidden gem near downtown, but tucked away in a quiet corner near lots of green space. There were a lot of smaller, older houses in area so despite being a great location, it wasn't considered a ritzy neighbourhood.  After a while though, a developer came along and bought up a few ramshackle houses on the street, renovated them and sold them for a lot of money (or tried to).  Many of the other houses had been renovated already in the 80's and 90's, but one by one the remaining older houses started to get renovated too, and some very nice modern homes started to pop up. Someone said to me that our quiet little neighbourhood "had been discovered".  So property values started to go up by a lot.  I was surprised to find out that my property was worth much more than I had bought it for.

I got a professional appraiser to come and do a valuation on the house. The was worth almost double what I had paid for it.  I knew that if I sold the house, the next owner would renovate it.  Instead of letting someone else renovate it, I wanted to take the increased value of my property, and use that money to renovate it.  If you buy a house for 100k, and 10 years later it is worth 200k, you can talk to a bank and say look, I owe about 50k on my mortgage, but my house is now worth 200k, so I would like to refinance and borrow against the new value.  So you get a new mortgage for, say, 200k, pay off 50k you still owe, and then you have 150k left over to renovate with.  That is roughly how it works anyway.

Once the basic plan was in place and we had started working with an architect to come up with a plan, and started talking to finance people about paying for everything, the house next door to me started to get renovated.  And it was a huge renovation with a very high price. I knew how much the developer had paid to buy the old place that was there.  It was as much as my house was worth. And then he tore it down. So I went back to the appraiser and said look, someone just bought the place next door for this much money, just to tear it down. And now they're building a big mansion on it. So that means property values around here are worth more, just for the land without a house on it even.  And I paid him again to re-appraise it. Based on what was happening next door -- the sale of the old place for land value and the mansion they were putting up -- my land, without the house even, turned out to be worth even more than what they had appraised to whole package at previously.  This was good, because by that time we had already started some demolition work on our house and we knew the renovation costs were going to be higher than we originally thought.

Now for the final bit of important info.  You do not want to go to a mortgage broker to talk about renovation financing.  Mortgage brokers are well and good if you're just looking for a typical, run-of-the-mill mortgage at a good rate.  But mortgage brokers generally are not in the construction financing business. The mortgage broker I spoke to, who had been very helpful before, nearly ruined us. He tried to steer us into a loan from a third party lender that had very, very high interest rates. Now, he said we didn't need to worry about it at all, because the bulk of the borrowing would happen right at the very end, so we'd only be paying high interest for a very short period. He sounded very positive about the whole thing, probably because he was going to get a big fat commission from it. But it would have ruined us when we hit problems with our contractor with long delays and cost over-runs.  Fortunately, the way events transpired, there were hold ups and delays in getting the paperwork sorted out, and while we were waiting for it all to come together, we were introduced to a Construction Financing specialist from one of the major Canadian banks.  I didn't know this, but it turns out that banks like CIBC do have construction mortgage specialists on staff, and if you can get in contact with them, they are the people to talk to.  The bank's interest rates on construction loans are higher than a regular mortgage, but still much, much lower than the 3rd party lender that the mortgage broker was trying to hook us up with.  The banks are "prime lenders" and for a construction mortgage you'll be much better off with one of them. I would avoid using any financing outside of one of the main banks, at all costs. Even if it meant not doing the renovation. Now, I know people who have done it both ways and come out ok, but the construction financing specialist at CIBC told me quite frankly, "We see people all the time that have gotten stuck with one of these 3rd party lenders and they come to us in a total panic trying to get out of it. It's really unfortunate."

Typically what will happen is the bank will agree to give you a deposit to start the renovation project that is worth a certain percentage of your land value.  That should be enough to get going. The total amount of the construction mortgage will be based on what they think the final value of your house will be once the renovation is all complete.  This will probably be a conservative estimate, but they want to make sure that once your house is done, it'll be worth what it cost to renovate.  The bank, and the independent appraiser that they use, will have a certain amount of money allocated for each major component of the build.  You can ask them for the breakdown. You are expected to use the initial deposit money to get the first phase of the project done which is typically to have the structural and framing work done. At that point you can apply for a draw against the construction loan. The inspector will come out and see how much you've gotten done. Based on the amount of work completed the bank will release funds to you, and then you can carry on with the next phase.  If you have a good builder, they will complete work quickly and have a month before their own bills are due on the work.  They should also have accounts with building suppliers that allow them to carry a balance for 30 days.  A good builder can get a lot done in 30 days, invoice you, and leave enough time for the city inspector and bank inspector, and possibly the architect and engineer, to inspect things, approve the draw on your construction loan, and get the funds sent to your contractor.

You'll generally need to work with a lawyer who specializes in construction financing too. The bank will probably recommend one.  Your lawyer will approve the draws and release the funds.  You can have your lawyer release the funds to you directly, and then you pay the contractor, or you can have your lawyer send funds to the contractor's lawyer.  I would suggest the latter... have your lawyer issue funds to the contractor's lawyer.  This means less running around for you personally and a better paper trail.  A lawyer also has a bit more clout and will do things "by the book".  If you establish this early on, you can avoid bad situations like the one I found myself in, where the contractor started pressuring me to give him money directly, outside of the normal schedule of bank draws.

Next time I'll post a rough breakdown of costs that was used by the appraiser showing what percentage of the finances are allocated to each portion of the build.  This can be useful in estimating how much various sub-contracted jobs like foundations, drywall, painting etc. cost in proportion to the rest of the build.

Interior / Exterior Palettes

I've been wanting to get back to writing about our renovation to finish parts of the story and keep a records of some things I learned along the way. It will soon be 3 years since we finished the reno; the dust has settled and I've had time to reflect. Also, it gets dark earlier now, so instead of pottering around in the garden outside, I'm behind the computer in the office, listening to the rain.

One thing that was really helpful for our renovation was to have a good idea of the palette of colours, materials and textures that I wanted. Basically, anything you can decide that you want ahead of time is going to save you a lot of stress later on. Fortunately I knew what I wanted for interior / exterior colours and materials from early on. I shared this with our architect, too, and got a "looks great!" in response, so I figured we were on the right track. I guess the architect must have forgotten or just chose to ignore my preferences though because later on when we needed to make some final decisions they proposed something really different.

Here’s a link to the final materials palettes on Pinterest: https://pin.it/iktj63hilbdjmo

Here's the exterior palette I started out with.

This is basically cedar with a typical transparent "natural cedar" type of stain, an almost-black charcoal grey that's still a bit warm, some dark brown (actually charred) wood, and glass. From this starting point I ended up simplifying things a bit, going with cedar siding, black aluminum trim, and grey stucco.

The actual materials are Maibec "Algonquin Amber" siding, Adex stucco in a shade called W-206-5E and black aluminum on the window frames, fascia, soffits and flashing. We have quite a lot of large windows too which makes glass a fairly prominent material in the exterior palette as well.

I was seeing these particular colours being used in quite a few new builds, both residential and commercial, and I was a bit concerned that this would be a "fad" that would fall out of style fairly quickly. But I actually have liked this particular colour combination for a really long time, and there are buildings that have been around for a long time that use similar materials, and they still look great to me. This is a nice looking scheme that has a timeless quality in my opinion. The grey stucco is a nod to concrete or stone, the wood siding gives it a nice natural feel, and the black trim gives it an architectural touch. I think a lot of people stay away from black because it's just so... black.  A few years ago lots of people were using "commercial brown" for their windows and trim. I was never a big fan of it. I say if you want dark trim, go with straight black. It looks really sharp.

A useful tool for nailing down the materials palette was houzz.com - I saved a bunch of photos of houses I saw on there that had colours and materials that resonated with me. Here's one I used as a main reference.

Photo by SDG Architecture, Inc. - Browse exterior home photos

I think this house is from 2013 or earlier, and somewhere on the California coastal area. The mix of modern & asian influences and west-coast vibe here were the perfect example of what I was going for. I think this cedar / grey stucco / black trim look has made its way from the west coast and can be found pretty much everywhere now. But this is a look that I know I can be happy with for a really long time.

Here's a link to my "ideabook" on Houzz for exterior materials. I think it can be viewed by anybody.
https://www.houzz.com/ideabooks/1417243/list/houzzerd-s-exterior

The interior color palette took a little longer to figure out but I knew that I wanted to contrast the darker shades of the exterior palette with a much lighter interior.  Also, since our house is actually quite small by modern standards, I wanted lighter colours to make the space feel more open. We ended up going with an interior palette like this:

Basically it's white, light wood, charcoal, and grey (especially concrete). Since we completed our renovation I've started to see this particular combination more and more. It's gotten really popular. Again, when you pick a style and suddenly everyone seems to be doing it, you have to wonder if you just got swept up in a trend that will soon pass. But I really like this mix of materials, and have for a long time.  This is white oak, a white paint called "Chantilly Lace" (which was one of the only material recommendations our architect gave us; the other was a light), a very dark but warm grey called "Iron Ore" (it's actually a very dark shade of greenish grey) and a concrete-look tile called Ragno Sound Smoke if I recall correctly.  There are a couple of other touches, such as the natural slate tile we have in our entrance, but basically the whole interior of the house sticks to this same palette, and it works great because our house is very open concept without a lot of doors. The spaces flow together and the unified palette makes it feel more spacious. It's very zen-like.

You really don't have to look far to see lots of examples of this kind of colour scheme. Even the latest IKEA catalogue was featuring this kind of look. But the way I decided on this combination was by looking through a large stack of Japanese architecture books that I hauled with me back from Himeji on one of our trips there several years ago.  Basically, light wood and white dominated nearly every single featured interior. There were one or two houses with darker wood, mostly larger places, but  there was a really clear dedication to the natural beauty of wood (lots of it) against a clean, airy backdrop of white.  

My interest in concrete probably also started there, in particular by looking at a design called "Dual House" by Kenichi Komura, which you can see here:

Even though this is an exterior view I really liked the monolithic concrete they used for all the hardscaping. This house has got to be one of my all time favourites. It must have been super expensive, because the whole thing is pretty incredible both inside and out, and located in one of the most expensive cities in the world too. Anyway it got me thinking about concrete.  Then I saw pictures of a concrete backsplash in a kitchen, which I thought was pretty cool. We eventually found a local craftsman who does concrete backsplashes and were glad to have his work in our kitchen and main bathroom.

I got to like the idea of charcoal black accents as I started to consume more books, magazine and online posts about modern architecture. Black seems to lend an architectural quality to a house because, I think, architects draw with black ink.  I've always like pen and ink sketches, especially architectural renderings.  One of my favourite books as a teenager was "Rendering with Pen and Ink", which I still have. The black seems to give certain elements like window frames, trim, hardware, etc. a "drawn" quality that harkens back to something a draftsman would sketch. I think having black frames on the windows inside allows the outside views to really take centre stage, creating a crisp border between the white walls and the outdoor scenery. The charcoal black is actually that "Iron Ore" shade I mentioned earlier. When I first saw the windows installed in our house, I was actually a little disappointed because I was thought we were getting more of a neutral of bluish slate grey. Quite harshly modern. But I have to say the subtly warm tone of the Iron Ore has really grown on me.  It's black, but with just a hint of warmth that works really well with the white oak floors and concrete tiles.

Here's a picture of a house with windows from the same manufacturer we used, and the same colour of window frames. I think this was the picture that when I saw it I was 100% convinced that black windows were the way I wanted to go.

Along with the window decisions we chose to not have the windows trimmed out in the traditional way. Instead we have drywall returns, so the drywall just wraps around to meet the window frames and there's no moulding around the windows at all. It definitely gives things a very clean and simple, modern look. I would have gotten rid of the baseboard trim too, if I could have, but it turns out that not having baseboards is a lot more expensive, if you want to do it right. So instead we have a simple, flat 3" baseboard without any contours or fluting.

There's a neat YouTube channel called the 30 x 40 Workshop where an architect named Eric Reinholdt talks about topics like window trim, materials, design and all sorts of architectural things. I got quite a few ideas from watching that as well, even though I think our renovation was mostly done by the time I got into watching it. Here's a link to his website with the videos:

https://thirtybyforty.com/architecture-video-tutorials

All of the materials we ended up using are slightly "warmer" than what I originally thought I wanted. But now as I look back I think the stark neutral colours you often see in modern design would have been a little too harsh.  The slightly warmer greys, blacks and wood tones have a very modern feel without being austere. They're very warm and welcoming. 

People who've come to our place have commented that it feels so peaceful. It's a zen-like quality that pervades the whole house, and I'm pretty happy about that. It came about intentionally, but at the end of the day it's really just about sticking to a limited palette of lighter, natural materials. Against this backdrop we have a lot of possibilities for placing a few accents here and there which can really stand out and refine the space.  One of those is the indoor garden, or "tsuboniwa" that I'll write about maybe in the next post.

I realize this is a long ramble about probably boring stuff, but I wanted to write this all down anyhow, even if it's just for myself to go back and reminisce about in a few years' time.

The Top of the Slope

After a year-long hiatus I've been wanting to get back to this blog because a lot has happened in the meantime, and a lot of interesting stuff that did happen throughout our project hasn't been written about yet.

I recently watched a Youtube video where some people started a renovation and the host of the program remarked that they were on a "slippery slope".  I think this is the way a lot of renovations seem to go; you end up dealing with a lot more than you bargained for in terms of time, money and stress. It also seems like a common thread that people get the idea that they want to do a renovation and they start out being very ambitious and really stretching themselves to the breaking point.  Everybody has their own story for how they got onto the slippery slope, I guess.  For me it was this Dwell magazine from February 2010.

Yep, way back in 2010 is when the seed of what would become this crazy renovation saga was planted.  This magazine cover really jumped out at me, and believe it or not I think the reason is because of that green car on the cover, which I've since learned is a '63 Thunderbird.  I'm not a car enthusiast, at all, but for some reason that car really grabbed my attention and I think it's because when I was very, very little, I had a tiny green matchbox car that looked like that green mist '63 T-bird. It turns out the house in the picture is in Michigan, where my grandparents were originally from, and which I visited once as a very small child, and it has a kind of eastern US mid-century modern vibe that must have triggered the neural remnants of some deeply buried childhood impressions. Plus it's a damn cool house.

 So my girlfriend at the time, who is my wife now, said "Why don't you get it if you like it?". So I did.  And flipping through the pages I began this journey into all things housey and designery and architecty.

Truth is before I became an engineer, I always wanted to be an architect.  I like drawing, and I drew a lot of buildings as a kid. I also bought the house I was living in with the idea that one day I would renovate it, and add a second storey on it, like many of the houses in our neighborhood have done over the years.  So the idea to renovate was already there but this magazine kind of kick-started my interest in it for real.  One of the ads in this magazine was for the Turkel Dwell Homes Collection which is manufactured by Lindal Cedar Homes. One of the pictures really stood out as a nice design for a narrow city lot.

I thought this house was really cool. Turkel is a west-coast firm from California so it probably resonated with my west-coast roots.  I got a little obsessed about finding out all the details of this plan and managed to track down some layouts for this and other Turkel-designed Lindal homes.  I found the efficiency of the designs incredibly interesting. Architecture is such a cool blend of practical and efficient use of space, mixed with artistic concessions, kind of like a tension-release interplay between hard-cold science and creative, emotional art.

Around this time I stumbled across some pictures by Toronto firm SuperKul who did this amazing house there called the Crescent Road House.

This also kind of resonated because the lot size is and layout is pretty similar to ours. The house isn't much wider than ours, and although this was obviously a really high-end build (it has an elevator inside) I thought this could be a pretty good source of inspiration. I contacted Superkul to see if they could do a project where we live, but then I started thinking it would be hard to work on a custom design with somebody so far away. I like this house enough that I tried building a 3D model of the layout.

It turns out that this house, as well as the Dwell-Turkel-Lindal house were both too big for us to be able to build, because I found out there are restrictions on how big of a house you can build on the lots in my neighborhood, since they are close to the 100-year flood plain. So I started messing around in Sketchup.  Just tonight, I stumbled across a few of the old Sketchup models that I started making back then to try and come up with ideas for a second-story addition and extension on our house.  Here are a couple of them.

I know these are not very good, but they were kind of fun and more importantly, I started to realize that unless you are building something pretty standard, it's hard to come up with a good design where all the details fall into place. Take the carport for example. Way too high for one thing, owing to the fact that our house was originally constructed as a "storey and a half" bungalow with the basement half sticking up out of the ground.

After messing around with Sketchup I realized that even though it was fun it was not really a good way to approach designing a floor plan. This is what architects call "the program" I guess. You have to start by figuring out what rooms go where.  You do that before going all crazy in Sketchup.  So I found an website called Floorplanner, which was really cool.  You can design your floor plan and even put little pieces of furniture in it, and then click a button to see what it will look like in 3D.  This is kind of like playing with legos or a doll house, but for grown ups.

It turns out that the designs I was playing with in Floorplanner are still there, and it looks like they were made back in 2011. So this was well before we started our renovation.  You can only do one "project" on the free version of Floorplanner.com so I ended up making a few different storeys with a few different designs for each one, until I filled up my quota of possible layouts on the free tier. Here's what some of those looked like.

This was the first attempt and it was pretty boring.  It also moved the stairs to the right side of the house and I realized that keeping the stairs in the same location where the existing basement stairs were, was probably a better option.

The next one I liked a little better. It re-used exactly the same original footprint of the house without any extensions to the foundation anywhere. When you think that the original house fit in a 24' x 28' footprint and had two bedrooms, a bathroom, a living room, entry with closet, a dine-in kitchen, as well as stairs to the basement and a linen closet in the hall, that's pretty amazing. They were small rooms for sure, but they sure packed a lot into a small space.

I kind of liked this layout because there was a fish tank embedded into the wall between the entry and the tatami room. How cool would that be?  Also instead of a full tatami room I tried making half of the room with raised tatami mats. The table would sit in the middle, half over the raised tatami mats and half over the regular floor. That way you could either sit on the tatami mats, like a bench, or on a chair if you prefer.

Next I tried switching up the kitchen and the tatami room, and here's what that looked like:

This was the last iteration of the floorplan I came up with and the one I think I liked the best, based on trial and error from my previous attempts. This layout basically took the kitchen in the existing house from the front left and pushed it to the back right of the house, replaced the bathroom and one of the bedrooms with a japanese-style tatami room, pushed the front door to the right, and used up the space where the kitchen used to be, for a living room. Even looking back on this now, it's quite an efficient layout. The only downside was that the front door would have been separated from the driveway on the opposite side. This can mean a lot of snow shovelling in winter to get from your front door to your car.

Coming up with a good layout for the second storey addition must have been hard, because I don't have any designs saved on floorplanner for that. I just remember spending hours and hours messing around with this site, trying to come up with something modest yet beautiful, and ultimately getting kind of frustrated and finding it can be a lot harder than it looks, and thinking that this is why people hire architects, to solve these kind of problems and come up with the right "program".

In hindsight, I'm not sure we were terribly far off from having a workable layout. If I'd come up with a good plan for the 2nd storey, that last iteration could've worked pretty well despite the door and driveway on opposite sides.  What's a little snow shovelling?!  It would have been a way more affordable build, too, because it required no new foundation work, and we would not have had overhangs on the 2nd storey either.  I doubt that we could have given it the same beautiful aesthetic on the exterior if we'd designed it all ourselves, and no doubt a structural engineer would have required some changes, but it's interesting to see how far I actually got with this back in 2011 before we started looking for an architect who could refine our goals into a workable plan with a mix of Japanese and modern Canadian features.

The Walkout: floods and forms

This is a post about the walkout basement at our house, which has been a kind of ongoing source of drama even since I moved here. The picture below is one I found after rooting around in the Photos app for about 20 minutes. It doesn't show the full walkout, but you can see the part of the basement door, retaining wall and sunken entrance. I took this photo from the top of the five steps going down to the basement door.

The walkout basement was a pretty nice feature of the house and I kept my music stuff there - a lot of keyboards including, for a while, a beautiful Hammond B3. From the basement, you could look out the french doors to an unobstructed view of the back yard.  There was a big lilac tree growing right outside the door, which you can see in the photo, and a pear tree, and it was a really nice place to be in the summer especially.

The problem was that about once a year in the late summer we would get a really heavy rainfall, and it would rain for two or three days and things would get so waterlogged that the sunken entrance of the walkout would start to fill up with water. It never got to the point of flooding the basement, but there were at least a couple of times that the water came right up to the bottom of the door. The basement had a hardwood floor, but it was raised up on sleepers, so although I expect there was some seepage from time to time, things were mostly ok, as long as when the massive rain storms hit I had a plan and was prepared.

I knew that this could be a potential problem, so the first time we had a big rain storm I had a couple of buckets and spent a couple of hours in the middle of the night bailing water out of the walkout. The next day I went and got a submersible electric pump, and connected a garden hose to that, and it emptied out all the water in a matter of seconds. After that it was pretty easy to get water out of the walkout, but it usually meant furkelling around with a pump and hose at 2 o'clock in the morning, which for some reason is when the rain seemed to peak.

Anyway, the rainwater getting into the walkout was a pain, so one of the main objectives for renovating the house was to excavate around the whole foundation, waterproof it, install weeping tile, and build a better concrete retaining wall around the walkout so that rainwater wouldn't get into the walkout stairwell.

For quite a while during the construction we had an open pit at the back of the house where the excavator had exposed the foundation but had not backfilled it yet. More excavation was needed to finish the walkout but our first builder, Bramel Developments, had run into some issues with the excavator, Ken Brown, who had put a lien on our house after not getting paid what he thought he was owed.  If you know how construction financing works, you can't have liens on your house or the lending institution will stop lending you money for the work.  I did a little research and found out that Ken Brown has been in the business for a long time and he doesn't screw around.  A couple of the cheques he'd gotten from Bramel had bounced, and in hindsight I can see that our builder was trying to cut a lot of corners and held off on doing the full walkout excavation.  He billed us the full price for excavation, and promised that Ken Brown would be back to finish the walkout in the spring, but that never happened, and who knows where the money went.

So we had a big pit behind our house for a long time. During the summer, this was ok. But as we got toward fall, and into the rainy season, I started to get pretty apprehensive that we might get a real deluge and that without any retaining wall whatsoever, the pit could fill up with water and flood the basement, which we had just finished drywalling.

Sure enough, right near the end of August we had a rainstorm to beat all rainstorms. It poured all day and then at night it started dumping buckets, and I knew I needed to go check on the house. It was a Friday night, and our new contractor, Michanie, had finished up that afternoon and was away for the weekend.  When I got to the house it was dark and raining hard and thundering. Sure enough water was filling up the pit behind our house and rising fast.  The little pump that I had used in the past had been broken by Bramel's crew so I couldn't use that. Instead I found a bucket and started bailing.  It was a frantic effort. At first I seemed to be making some progress but as the minutes went by it started raining harder and harder. I bailed as fast as I could, almost in a panic, trying to keep the water from reaching the bottom of the basement door and flooding in, but it was no use.

I made a frantic call to Michanie and got Chantal on the line, who suggested that I could go to Home Depot and rent a pump to get the water out. She kindly phoned one of the nearby stores and confirmed they had a pump available. As we talked, rain got in my phone and it quit working.

I would have loved to get a pump from Home Depot but it was a full on state of emergency. The water kept rising and I could see it gushing and streaming from beside the house straight down into the pit.  I also noticed, for the first time, that our neighbor had the downspout of his gutters leading into a hidden drain pipe which went under a gravel path and emptied straight into our property. The water was shooting out of his gutter drains straight into our walk-out pit!

At this point I just said "&^%$ it!". I could see that my efforts were futile, I was completely soaked to the skin, and the water just kept coming. I left everything, got in the car and raced off to Home Depot, got there 5 minutes before closing, rented a big pump and hose, and raced back home.  The pit was alarmingly full of water by the time I got back, but by that point I was past the point of panicking, just sort of morbidly resigned to dealing with the mess and doing whatever damage control was needed after.

Setting up the pump was easy enough, but getting electricity was another matter. There were extension cords on site, but none of the outlets were live, except on in the basement, so to get power to the pump I needed to crack open the sliding patio door to the basement and feed the extension cord through.  The water was already above the base of the door by that time, but I had no choice, so I just opened the door and let the water pour in onto the concrete floor while I fed the extension cord out and got the pump plugged in as quickly as I could. Now, when you're dripping wet and it's raining like a typhoon and you're standing in 18 inches of water, plugging in an electrical device is a little unnerving. There wasn't much I could do about it. Fortunately I didn't electrocute myself, the pump went on, and the 4 inch hose went completely solid as water started shooting out the far end like a jet. The pump was a thing of wonder. Within just a minute or two it had completely emptied the pit and was gurgling away in the mud.

With the pit now empty of water, I disconnected power to the pump and turned my attention to the neighbors gutter system that was draining straight into the walkout.  I grabbed a bunch of rocks and an old tshirt and whatever else I could find, and tried building up a little barrier wall to divert water from beside the house and from the neighbors gutters, and channel it towards the backyard. Then I found a big sheet of plastic and tried to attach it to various points at the back of the house, where there was some scaffolding, so that it might keep out some of the rain.  Then I ran a couple of extension cords from the basement live outlet up to the main floor and out the main-floor back door, so that I could close and lock the basement patio door.  The pump I'd rented can actually be left running dry for a few hours without burning it out, but I unplugged it and went home.

It was probably close to midnight by the time I got home, but shortly after that I got a message from Chantal at Michanie that they'd been by the house to check and there didn't seem to be any damage. They'd been at a family event, but came all the way back into Ottawa after midnight to check on things. It goes to show how much they cared and were willing to go out of their way to help. The next morning when I got back to the house, I saw that they had set up two huge blowers in the basement and a commercial dehumidifier.  These machines move a massive amount of air, and are used mainly by commercial drywallers. It seemed like these machines had gotten the basement floor almost completely dry overnight.

Following this near disaster I spent most of the rest of the weekend rigging up a better tarp over the walkout, building up a better temporary retaining wall and channel to drain water away from the pit, and getting a sump pump with a flotation valve to put in the pit in case water filled it up again.

Setting up the sump pump was an adventure in itself that involved a few trips to Home Depot.  And to make matters even more interesting, through all of this battle with the rain water, my neighbor who had been secretly diverting his run-off through a hidden underground pipe onto my property for the past 15 years decided that the water infiltration he experienced through his 50-year old, non-waterproofed foundation wall, was somehow my fault, and he got very, very nasty about the whole situation. His wife said he was so infuriated that he was threatening to get a lawyer involved. So I said I'd love to show the photos of their drain shooting water into my yard and all the clean-up we had to do as a result. After that I didn't hear much more except for a couple of nasty emails, which I ignored.

Finally the excavation of the walkout got done, not by Ken Brown, but by Michanie's people. As a commercial builder, they have all the equipment and people to do this sort of thing. Here's a picture of the excavator having dug out the area for the new retaining wall. They got right down the water table so in a couple of the low spots you could see water flowing. If you look closely, you can see an orange bucket behind the excavator, down in the mud, where I put the sump pump, and a hose for the pump going up out of the pit.

The base of the footings was supposed to be insulated, so there were a couple of layers of high density foam insulation that were put down first.  Then they installed the form-work for the footings.

A lot of rebar then got put into the space.  As I watched this thing take shape and compared it to the simple stacked-block retaining wall that used to be there, this all seemed a bit over-engineered. But I'm pretty sure that Michanie was doing all this concrete work for us for practically no profit margin on this part of the job. And that's probably because they originally proposed to build the retaining wall from blocks, but got push back from the architect and engineer who said it had to be poured concrete in order to satisfy the permit requirements.

The footings for the retaining wall were incredibly wide. Evidently this is because they need to hold back quite a bit of weight of the dirt behind them. In the picture below you can see just how wide the footings are, and the rebar where the wall itself will get poured.

After the footings were set up for a couple days the formwork for the walls went up. Again there was a lot of rebar that went into the walls. This is one solid walk out retaining wall.

The wall got poured, the top looked very smooth. When I saw the concrete work that was done by Michanie compared to the concrete work that had been done by Bramel, the difference was like night and day.  Michanie's work seemed to be very solid and precise. The texture of the finish was always very clean and smooth with Michanie.

After the retaining wall was set up for a couple of days they removed the form work, then came and patched up any small pockets and air bubbles by hand.

The outside of the retaining wall also got insulated, and then back-filled with sand.

The base of the walkout got a few inches of clear aggregate. This is the view we could see looking out of the back of our kitchen, for a while.

We were already living in the house by this time, and every morning at 7 or 7:30 we would see Sylvain and often another carpenter working at the back of the house. At this point the fencing was down and most of the construction debris clean up. We had sand and dirt for our front and back yard and these tractors were parked there for a few days.  It was really a good feeling to have the signs of activity and daily progress that were evident while Michanie was completing our renovation. The neighbors who used to hesitantly comment that things seemed to be taking a long time and that our first failed builder, Bramel, was almost never on site, now commented on how nice things were looking and how impressed they were with the professionalism and dedication of the workers.

September review

Note: This post was written last last year and continues the story of our renovation through the fall of 2016.

We're now at the end of October and a recap of September's progress is overdue, before covering everything that went on this month. Work has stretched out into the Fall, mainly due to the installation of the siding which took at least two or three weeks longer than expected. They did a nearly perfect job of installing it though. Lots of furring out crooked walls and squaring up corners. With the previous builder I don't think I saw a level or a square on the job site even once. Even though it is an older foundation to start with, the walls which were built brand new even weren't square and true. They just didn't care. But fortunately the new builder and his subs did care and they made sure everything lined up. If you look at the corners of the house, for example, all the joints of the boards line up perfectly on both walls.

Michanie had a gentleman named Patrice come and do the front deck. A retired auto body mechanic who has been working as a carpenter as a retirement "hobby". His work on the deck was beautiful.

On the interior, final trim work and painting has been mostly completed. Michanie did quite a bit of drywall patching and paint touch ups to correct a variety of issues left behind by the original contractor.

Installation of the modest kitchen had a few hiccups, but they were quickly resolved. I got to help a bit one evening to install a panels and trim boards.  The countertops, ordered through IKEA and installed by Uniform Custom Countertops, were unfortunately not shimmed to the correct height and therefore the gas range trim was sitting proud of the countertop.  Sylvain, the foreman and main carpenter who did the majority of work on our house, didn't hesitate to get right in and jack up the base cabinets to bring everything to a proper height. It required a bit of creativity with a drill and screwdriver where the cabinets attach to the walls, not pretty, but it works and you can't see those attachments anyway. We had some adjustment of the hinges and rails to get all the doors square and even. Fortunately the IKEA cabinet hinges are pretty easy to adjust.

The space in front of the kitchen is intended as a small living room / relax area. It's not really big enough for a large sofa but it could accommodate two or three lounge chairs.



The original house had a similar window configuration here: the small side window and a large front window, which is now a (narrow) patio door. The morning sun streams into the house here, filling it with light. It's a beautiful quality of light, too. Hard to describe, but one of the things we really like about this place, and people who visit frequently comment on it. By opening up this space, the entire area has become full of light.



One of my weekend projects in September was to stain this barn door. It's a simple, off-the-shelf product from Home Depot, and a little incongruous to hang a rustic, country-style barn door on a modern stainless rail, but it actually turned out ok, since the color of it is pretty close to the color of the wood-grained tiles in the master bath, which you can see through the open door in the photo below.



Here's a closer look at the tiles in the master bath. I though the tile installer did a very good job. I was pretty impressed with the workmanship. No complaints on the tile.



We used the same simple white 8x16" tiles in the "Japanese bath" (which is called a wet-room configuration here in North America).  The main difference is that there's a second tub filler below the shower. This is a Grohe Geotherm 2000 system that's normally used in a bathtub. We have it over the shower pan, with a separate tub filler for the tub itself, because with the Japanese bath you would use the faucet outside the tub to fill a wash basin for lathering up and rinsing before entering the hot bath.  I'll post more on the Japanese bath later on.



The siding on the house took a very long time to complete, again mainly because none of the walls were square, but I'm glad they took the time to do a good job. There is unfortunately a bit of "caning" visible on the wide fascia in a couple of spots, if the light hits it right. There is a bit of corner trim left to install.



Originally the porch roof was meant to extent across the entire front of the house. The engineer, however, said this wasn't feasible due to load bearing issues on the overhanging portion (we get a lot of snow in winter here). So the plan switch to make a pergola (open trellis) over the steps -- and then maybe install some plexiglass over that, once the final inspections were done.



Finally, near the end of October, we rented a truck, got our friends Yves, Michael, Lillian and Jared to help us out, loaded up our stuff, and moved back to our house!  They offered to do another load to pick up some of the smaller stuff, and I said don't worry.  Later on, after making about 2 dozen trips back to the rental condo to get moving boxes full of stuff, I wished that I had taken them up on the offer.



Work continues to complete the rear walk-out basement retaining wall, footings and deck, and to finish a bit of exterior trim and porch detail at the front. I'll post details of the rear basement walk-out and deck in another post.

Being back home has been such a relief. Before we found a good builder to rescue us, we were living in a nightmare. Even afterwards the costs and many problems discovered as we worked to complete things were very stressful on already frayed nerves.  But since we moved back into the house we really feel like the nightmare is nearly over.  And while the ending is not exactly as we had hoped, we have our house and our lives back and we can now deal with settling in and fitting out the interior of the house as time permits.

August update

Despite the long radio silence a lot has been happening in the house. Michanie has continued to find many problems but they have not hesitated to keep moving ahead and fixing things.

Trim was installed.

Appliances delivered.

Basement stairs installed. 

Siding work progressed.

Pocket doors installed. We tried a whitewash pickling stain and it made the doors pink! So we tried a medium brown stain over that and ended up with more or less of a teak color. At this point I said, whatever, good enough.

Insulation and resilient channel on the basement ceiling for soundproofing.

Badly placed light switches relocated and drywall patches made.

Basement drywall completed.

Wood siding started.

Vanities installed.

Stairs installed.

Disaster averted - a severe rain storm hit us and the neighbor was diverting all his gutter runoff into the excavated walk out pit behind our house... Water quickly rose and filled the pit. I spent tense hours and worked into the night bailing, digging and installing a pump to evacuate the water. The next day I returned to install a tarp and shore up the sides of the pit where the neighbors runoff had been pouring in.

Basement subfloor in the bathroom area.

Electrical work done.

And the work continues...