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.

      

We had the world’s greatest tenant in our Gastown condo for the past year and a half.  But now she’s moving on.  So we were faced with the decision to rent it again or sell it.  After a lot talking, we decided that it would be better to sell it.  We don’t really have the time or attention to be landlords, and we were just lucky to have found a really great tenant this time.

So, if you know anyone who wants to living in a great, virtually maintenance free, gastown condo, please pass the word. 

You can find all the details at http://www.thisoldvancouverhouse.com/condo4sale.  And just for convenience sake, here are the photos and video:

GE Miller Website

Thanks to Firefox, Wordpress lost my original post.  I know the fanboys love FF, but through death by a thousand cuts, I keep learning this lesson:  Don’t use FireFox.  From poor stability with flash files, to losing my place when opening new windows, to losing Wordpress posts, FF gives me more trouble than even lousy old IE6 (which come to think of it, has never given me an ounce of trouble).  Okay, rant complete.

My dad sent me a link to home renovator G.E. Miller – too bad they’re on the Island.  Not only do I like their work, but they’ve also posted a series of pdfs with some valuable tips.  Unfortunately they need a new design firm.  This information would have been better as plain HTML, and their site is entirely built in Flash with all the usually navigation and accessibility nightmares.

To find thier tip sheets, hover over “About” and then click “Vision” from the fade-in submenu.  On the right side of the content will be links to all the pdfs. 

More renovators should publish this kind of helpful, non-advertorial content.  It certainly increases their credibilty as people who care about the work and not just making a sale.

As mentioned earlier, we had some reliability trouble with the first renovation contractor we started working with (he promised answers to questions by certain dates and then never delivered on time, which made me worried about how he would be with real work).  It took over several weeks for me to find him and I wasn’t happy about having to start again from scratch. 

Up to that point I had been using the Google, the Yellow Pages and the BBB site to find renovation contractors.  But in my desperation to fill this gap quickly, I turned to Craigslist. 

Why on earth didn’t I just start there?!?!  I found a mountain of various contractors available to do most of what I needed.  Within a couple hours I had a sizable list of contacts that I called the next day.  From start to finish it took me less than a week to find a suitable replacement.

This is annoyingly ironic, because I’m relatively sophisticated in terms of online information — I mean most of my work is related to online information in some fashion.  But for whatever reason, it didn’t occur to me to use Craigslist.  And that probably cost me 6 weeks.

The lesson here is, forget Google, forget the Yellow Pages, forget the BBB site.  Just start with Craigslist.

One of the side benefits I found with this is the folks who post there necessarily have email and know how to use it.  This makes a huge difference in speeding up conversations when you can just email plans, designs, and lists.  If they have a Gmail account, even better, because then you can collaborate over Google Docs–in real time if necessary.  Talking to someone over the phone while working together on the same live document is radically faster than the old analog way.

Another weekend spent digging. Got to take advantage of the sun while it lasts! In the past year of digging (projects that have required digging so far: creating backyard drainage; attempting to beautify ugly planters in the back; removing countless sickly Azaleas and roses; removing 6 inches of soggy wet newspapers; removing rotting raised bed planters; planting/removing new bushes; removing random debris/trash/weeds scattered throughout the yard), we have come across some funny things buried deep in the soil. An old t-shirt, airline cutlery, pottery shards, pop can tabs, candy wrappers, aluminum foil, crab claws, small jaw bone (not human!), clothing tags (Made in China of course), rubber bands…the usual flotsam and jetsam. Which makes me wonder — Did people used to just chuck things out into their yard and forget about them? Did the local raccoons drag trash everywhere? Who knows? Here’s the best of this weekend: a spent razor, electrical wire, part of an electrical cord, and a bone. All time winner so far is a small dish, perhaps from a child’s tea set? Wish I knew.

Our contractor has let another deadline slip.  After stalling for over a week to give us a start date, last week he promised to give us an answer by Sunday.  It now Tuesday and still no word.  Our plan B contractor fell through as well.  So we’re back a few steps.  Hopefully I can find a replacement before the monsoons start.

Lesson:  Ensure the contractors you plan to use are realiable.  Before you committ to anything, give them some dates and times to get back to with some sort of answer of information.  Do this a couple of times.

I have a newfound appreciation for nice yards after the past year.  The truth is, in the past I never really even noticed the “boring” plants like shrubs, groundcover and evergreens.  I certainly didn’t know much about planning a yard or landscaping project other than to know what I aesthetically liked, and even that wasn’t well-formed.  When we first moved in, I assumed that the “front yard project” would be something simple and straightforward that would require a bit of digging, moving around some of our inherited plants (mostly gangly roses and henpecked looking azaleas) and a couple of trips to the local garden center, something I could easily tackle and check off my To Do list.  Well, here it is, a year later and I’m still trying to check it off.

This past weekend was filled with digging to fix some mistakes that we’ve made in our front yard over the past year.  So I thought I’d commemorate it by sharing some valuable lessons I’ve learned:

1. Check out (and improve) your soil before doing anything.  I’m not saying you have to buy one of those fancy soil testing kits, but get to know your soil before even planning.  If the soil even remotely sucks, start improving it.  We didn’t think to do this and that’s how we ended up where we were this weekend.  As an experiment in the spring, I had improved one little shady patch’s soil and we could see that it made a dramatic difference.  Since everything else was languishing, I decided that all the original beds that I had planted (well, the plants that hadn’t died already) had to get uprooted so that I could start over.  Our soil has a lot of clay and to improve it, we added sand, some fake peat moss (the more ecofriendly coir), and some nice topsoil and mixed it all up to about a depth of a foot and a half.  If you have the time and muscles, then a two foot depth plus would be even better.

2. Acknowledge what’s realistic.  In our case, it was coming to terms with our own laziness.  There’s no way we’re ever going to remember to water our plants everyday in the dead of summer; the timer I bought for the hose had user-interface issues and never would work; and  we didn’t have time to look into drip irrigation…so all of the plants we bought are drought-tolerant (though let’s just pretend that the real driving factor is that we are incredibly environmentally sensitive and into xeriscaping!).  Likewise, I’m not really a gardening enthusiast, so I had to choose plants that were hardy and don’t need too much babying.  I just couldn’t see myself digging up plants in the fall to overwinter, or running out with tarps to protect them in January.

3. Observe the light.  Places that we thought were sunny turned out to be not that sunny, and on the flipside, shady places weren’t nearly as shady as we thought it would be.  It may pay to place a potted plant and put it in its potential home  for a couple of weeks and just see how it responds to the light before planting/investing in it (or plants with similar light condition needs).

4. Recognize that there’s a huge mismatch between landscaping/gardening books and your local gardening center/nursery.  I kept checking books out of the library and they would make all kinds of plant recommendations, and I would go to the nursery and none of them would be in stock (and forget about asking someone on a weekend, it was always a challenge to find someone to assist you).  In the end, for me the lazy/ambivalent gardener, it was easier to just go to the nursery and choose from what was actually available and in stock rather than invest too much time into planning.

5.  On the other hand, garden center staff, even when you can find them, tend not to be very knowledgable or helpful, so you may still need some books to do some basic research.  What I found was that I would do is a) go to nursery to create a shortlist of plants that might work b) go back home to read up on the plants (see if they are invasive, what conditions they like etc) and then c) go back to the nursery to buy them.  The first time we made a massive shrub purchase for hiding the retaining wall in the front yard, the guy who “helped” us recommended plants that were ill-suited for our conditions–plus he managed to sell us what were essentially invasive, ugly weeds (stupid Scotch Broom that I just recently tore out)!

6. Don’t buy your plants all at once.  I’ve found that the garden center’s inventory changes seasonally.  They tend to stock up on whatever’s just about to bloom so that it will sell well – so if you buy all of your perennials at once, you’re going to end up with something that only has color for about 2-3 weeks out of the year (yes, it happened to me – almost all of my plants in one bed now bloom in May and look pretty pathetic the rest of the year!  See #9).  If you’re not terribly knowledgable about plants like me, then it may make sense to fill your yard out incrementally so that it has multi-seasonal interest and you also don’t have to do any special plant sleuthing (or heaven forbid, mail-order!) to find anything “out of season.”

7. Don’t overlook the boring plants.  This one was hard for me to accept.  I don’t really like those ho-hum “understory” plants and bushes but without them, things just don’t look right or filled in.  Plus, they are a consistent backdrop, especially if they are evergreen - reliable and without drama.  We went with some basics like Holly, California Lilac, and Heavenly Bamboo. 

8. Buy multiples of one type of plant.  Yikes, another hard one for me to come to terms with.  I couldn’t commit and wanted one of everything and let me tell you, that looks pretty horrible when you put them all together.  Buy at least three of each kind of plant/flower, especially if it’s small.  Things look better and more professional in clumps and clusters.  And for some reason, I prefer the look of an odd number of one variety too.

9. Annuals.  I get why people buy Annuals now – it’s because they flower and flower and flower.  I’m still not doing Annuals because I’m a low-maintanence kind of person and can’t be bothered with digging all the time, but I totally understand why they are usually part of the equation.  There are some Perennials that similarly work hard, so you may want to seek them out.  Or you may just want to find those Annuals that self-seed.

10. Timing is everything.  If you’re on a right budget or just want to experiment cheaply, I would highly recommend buying all of your plants in September.  Everything is on sale, usually between 50-85% off.  Find out when the first day of the sale is and hit it up then before the selection gets too shabby (and so you can fulfill #8 – you’ll need multiples!).  It’s a good time to plant because it’s not that hot outside and in a place like Vancouver, they will still have about 1.5-2 months to get settled in before the cold really hits.

11. If you don’t know what you’re really doing (ahem, me again), don’t even try to worry about an historically styled garden or yard.  I checked out a couple of books on Bungalow and Craftsman style yards, but to be honest, it was just too overwhelming and frilly — lots of gazing balls, high-end custom made fences, and formal garden design. 

12. Oh, and those “inherited” plants that came with the house?  In the end, we gave away because they just didn’t work for us and they too were all solos.  I felt bad about sending them on their way, but am coming to terms that it’s okay to move on to something new.

Here is the story so far on trying to get my major contractor to start work:

So far it has been 2 weeks of delays and stalling… and we haven’t even signed a contract yet.  What can I expect when the work actually begins?

I do have a back up, and might need to use it soon.