Well, six months have come and gone, and it has been a busy time for us indeed.  Updates coming soon.

In the meantime, laneway housing continues to progress.  Attended the “information session” (really, more like a bunch of posters flanking the walls, with people milling about reading them, while holding coffee and gulping down cookies) yesterday at the Italian Centre.  The public hearing is set for July 21st (here are the report and minutes).  For a 33′ lot like ours, we’re talking a max of 500 sq feet (1 or 1.5 stories).  One or two parking spaces may be required too — still TBD.

It looks like another company specializing in laneway housing, Vancouver Laneway Housing,  has come into play.  The spokesperson mentioned that there will be two options — either you can go with a custom design or choose from several predesign floorplan “models”  to keep costs down (this option starts in the ~$150/sq ft ballpark).

For the full scoop on the laneway housing proposal, see the official website.

All of our dawdling on the garage/carport meant that we have spent the fall and winter scraping or squeegee’ing our car’s windows on a daily basis, getting soggy unloading groceries, and suffering from nasties like destroying a tire (thanks to running over the metal bracket remaining from one of the carport’s beams).  But on the upside, our procrastination means that Laneway Housing is now in a pilot phase.  Sure, that kind of renders our exorbitant carport permit kind of useless, but imagining a wee house in place of our ramshackle garage and concrete monostrosity of a parking pad seems a lot more…desirable.  Media stories have been quoting $150k as the estimated figure for replacing/converting a garage into 600 sq.ft. living quarters, which sounds rather ridiculous (one can only hope that was the pre-”the economy is falling!” quote).  Zoning changes apparently TBD, and the info available about permits seems to be rather sparse for the time being.

So, we’ll probably continue to procrastinate…err, strategically wait.

More laneway info here.

I’ve been having a problem with my Flickr Photo Album plugin–when selecting photos with the plugin to appear in a post it seems some are replaced with a “This Photo is Currently Unavailable” error image.  This would happen even though the photos are available.

After much research I learned that this error happens when you update a photo because Flickr plays some tricks with its urls making the plugin think that the photo isn’t there, even though it is.

Its nice to have a diagnosis, but what’s the treatment?  Well, Google wasn’t much help.  But, stumbling around the plug I did manage to find a way to fix the problem.

So, after you have updated a photo flickr…

View your full photo album in Wordpress.  You can do this either by

• going to http://your_blog_root_url/photo-album/

Or

• Open your Wordpress admin
• Select “Settings”
• Select “Photo Album”
• Click the link /photo-album/ next to the “Photo Album Syndication” label

Then all you need to do is click the “Refresh Photos” button.  But, that will only refresh the photos displayed on that screen.  Some of your albums might have more screens.  If so there will be a  “Next Page” link.  Click it, and click the “Refresh Photos” button again.

Repeat till all those error images are gone.

I’m sure there’s a better, faster way to do it, but this is the only way I’ve been able to figure out

So after months of stuggling to find one decent contractor to work with, I think we’ve found two.  And overall, they seem equally good–which makes choosing a very difficult task. 

In case you’re wondering who they are (listed in alphabetical order)…

• DiMan Develoments, Emanuel Giassemis, 604-990-1671, diman@telus.net
• Variant Home Services, Dragan Markovic, 604-724-4535, varianthomeservices@shaw.ca

Maybe I should just flip a coin.

Here are some resources you might find useful:

• http://www.cbc.ca/marketplace/2007/01/contractors.html
  The full episode of Marketplace with Mike Holmes trying to help you avoid getting stuck with an unscrupulous renovator
• http://www.hiringacontractor.com/
  A site from the Canadian Home Builders Association about what and how to get things in writing in order to protect yourself
• http://www.gvhba.org/cons_reno_renomark.aspx
  A few points from the Greater Vancouver Home Builders Association about what renovators agree to provide in order to get thier RenoMark seal of approval.  You may not necessarily looks for this seal, but it might be helpful to ask your potential contractors about each of the points to get thier reaction

Over the past 4 months I’ve contacted about 40 contractors ranging from generals to individual trades and handymen.  The responses have varied from having my voice mail ignored, to only speaking over the phone, to someone coming out to the house, to someone actually responding with some form of quote.  Overall, I’ve received quotes from less than 40% of the contractors I’ve contacted.

This may seem like an awful lot of quotes.  It isn’t really.  If you want 2 or 3 quotes and you’re speaking with generals and individual trades (electrician, plumber, tile, drywall, floor), that adds up to around 15 quotes. 

Of the total number of quotes I got, I’d say about half were clustered reasonably close together in terms of the dollar estimate.  The others were much higher.  I didn’t get any that were lower than the cluster.

So from these 8 or so quotes we rejected 2 because of poor references and poor pre-sales responsiveness.  And then there were 6.

These got chopped down to 2 becuase we decided to go with a general rather than manage all the trades ourselves.  Speaking with the trades however was still valuable because it helped us better contetualize the estimate line items from the generals.  We are now down to just 2 contenders.

The actual search experience didn’t quite flow this smoothly.  On 2 prior occasions we thought we had found the contractor we wanted to work with only for him to reveal a giant red flag that scared us off.  These false starts has added about 10 weeks to the project.

I had one contractor try to berate me for collecting quotes (nice sales technique).  He said I was wasting my time and the time of all contractors. I thanked him for helping to narrow my search and then told him to get out.  Do not let them try to push you around.  You are about to spend a huge amount of money, and take on an emormous amount of risk (they can get away with just about any form of fraud, and there virtually nothing you can do about it).  Talk to whom ever you need to in order to feel comfortable with your ultimate decision.

So This should give you some idea of just how much time and leg work you should expect to do before you’ll find 2 solid contractors (and we haven’t started work yet, so things could still fall apart as they have twice already).

What resources did we use to find contractors?

We’ve used the yellow page, the BBB site, Google, Craigslist, referrals from other contractors, and referrals from friends and complete strangers.  Of our two finalists we found one through word of mouth and the other through Craigslist. 

We did not find any partiuclar resource more or less helpful — they’re all mostly useless.

Here are some other lessons we learned:

• Cast a very wide net, because time combined with pure luck is a big factor in find a good contractor
• If you want 3 quotes, be prepared to contact 8 people
• Don’t be surprised if it take 3 times as long to find your contractor as it does to do the work
• Be ruthless in your vetting process, absolutely call all references
• Do not work with anyone who tries to give you the hard sell — kick them out rudely and immediately
• Negotiate hard to pay only a minimum deposit because your risk burden is much bigger than theirs — these guys can put a lien on your house if you break a contract, but you have virtually no options if they do or if they run off with your money.

 Several months ago we settled on a basic kitchen design. Since the carport permits pushed out the start time out, and I was sent a few inspirational photos, I took another crack at some design options. Here are the 3 design options we’re looking at:

1. Original
   

2. Stove on the Side Wall
   

3. Fridge on the Side Wall
   

Now here is the important question:

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Just in case anyone is interested in seeing the kinds of plans the City needs to see in order to get a building permit, here they are (it took me about 3 days of solid work to understand the requirements, survey the property and use CorelDraw to create the plans):

A question that I keep getting asked is will I be getting a permit for Job XYZ.  I always thought that was odd.  Why wouldn’t I get a permit?

Well, now I know. 

I applied to City Hall a few weeks back for a building permit to replace my badly weather damaged carport roof.  Today I got the permit.  And it cost me about 20% of the entire job cost.  That’s right people, $2500 to rebuild the roof and $500 for the permit.

City Hall gets $500, BC gets $175 in sales tax and Ottawa gets $125.  So I have to pay government 1/3 the cost of the carport roof just to be allowed to rebuild the thing.

Now I know why people avoid permits.

Several weeks ago I was pretty psyched about finding a couple great old doors and a fantastic old double hung window for a tiny fraction of what they would have cost new.

The honeymoon is long since over. I’ve spent weeks with chemicals and heat guns stripping the several layers or latex and oil and whatever paint from all the fine grooves–and both the doors and the windows are really nothing but fine grooves.

Here are some of the lessons:

• Call around to paint supply stores (not Home Depot, but places that only supply paint) to find a lead paint test kit.  Here in Vancouver the General Paint store on Venebles is just about the only place you’ll find these kits.
• A heat gun is better than chemicals on long flat runs of wood, and if timed just right can get multiple layers up just as quickly and easily as a single layer of paint.
• You have to be very careful not to burn the wood with a heat gun.  You won’t start a fire, but it will blacken the wood, which is almost as bad as a fire if you’re planning to stain rather than repaint.
• Chemicals are better for stripping the paint from the details — and the harsher the chemical the better.  With multiple layers of paint the amount of time water-based strippers take would have stretched this ostensibly simple project out by months (seriously).
• Here is most of the stuff you will need:
  • At least 2 saw-horses or stands. If you have more, then you can strip more objects at the same time.
  • Any old half-inch paint brush
  • Largest tin of PolyStrippa you can get. Poly seems to be slightly better than Circa 1850.
  • A 1″ or 2″ putty knife
  • A heavy paint stripping knife
  • A small and large plastic paint stripping knife
  • Some 220 grit sand paper
  • A couple different sized wood blocks to wrap the sandpaper around. Make sure you have at least one thin wood strip, which will help you sand those fine crevices.
  • Some steel wool.
  • A pair of leather work gloves to help avoid getting slivers as you sand.
  • Lots of rags or newspapers to wipe tools and the last bits of paint. Careful with the newspaper as the ink might run.
  • A metal container about the size of a pop can for the chemical stripper. I ended up lining a small plant pot with tin foil.
  • A heat gun with an extension cord.
• Add to your total cost many meals because you simply won’t have time to make anything yourself.
• Add to your total cost a ruined pair of pants and shirts, because you’ll drip the chemicals and softened paint all over yourself.
• Be careful with the heat gun on the glass — the heat might crack it.
• It will take you about 5 times longer than you first expect.
• And lastly: Do not, unless you really, really need a period original window, undertake this task.  Just get a brand new window made.  The price, whatever it is, will be worth it.