A year later: Permission to build

Apologies for the (extremely long) hiatus. After blowing our June deadline last year (that's when we had optimistically thought we could submit our plans for our permit) we decided to put it off until the next spring (otherwise, if you start building too late in the summer, you end up with snow falling on your house before you have the roof on). The delay was a good idea. Stef got a job on a crew building someone else's house from the ground up, which means he got actual experience in putting in foundations, framing, and everything else, before doing it 'for real'. So that was good. And it gave us time to hash out the final details on the plan.

To be honest, I have had very little to do with it all for a while now. I've left the nitty gritty details in Stef's hands, and since I don't really know what an I-beam is or how trusses work, it's just frustrating for everyone involved if Stef tries to explain it to me. But this is good. Stef has a full time job working it all out, and I can avoid the stress by just avoiding it entirely. Eventually this is bound to catch up with us (like when I realize that the plans have changed and the house is missing a room, or something, and it's too late to pipe up.) But for now it seems to work.

So come March (2011) Stef had the plans all finalized, and submitted to the city for permission to build. Then I jetted off to Tanzania for 2 weeks on my own (work bought the ticket) leaving Stef to do some soapstone carving (he's amazingly talented at this - I reckon it's our gravy train) and fret about starting the build. Just when I got back the permit arrived (on Tuesday, 19 April, for the record). And immediately (the very next day) the blasters arrived to start blowing back the rock, so Stef can put in a driveway and the foundations. How exciting!

Stef has bought a wildlife camera - a digital camera, fed by a pack of AAs, that can be strapped to a tree and has a camoflagued, locked casing, and which can be programmed to take pictures either when it senses movement or, in our case, every 5 minutes or so (we thought about this one and this one, but got this one). In this way we'll get a stop-frame photo montage of the house being built! I argued for one picture an hour, but Stef convinced me that more is better. If this takes 18 months, we'll have about 80,000 photos to contend with. Golly.

But there's plenty to do in the meantime. Though we have a building permit from the city, we still don't technically have permission from the people who own the development, who need to approve our design for general issues of style and taste. We don't anticipate this will be a problem. But they're asking us what colour we want it to be (apparently 'green' wasn't specific enough. We've settled now on 'cushing green', which my computer screen shows as grey, but really it's green). Not sure what colour the roof, windows, doors and garage will be... but do they really, really care? Amazing.

Over Easter weekend we went ski touring - the Spearhead traverse, from Blackcomb to Whistler in 3 days - which was a great way to forget about the build for a bit (no time to think, at all, during the grueling uphill hikes, sun-baked glacial views, and general exhaustion!). Between that, the arrival of spring (including frogs at night and hummingbirds by day), my recent African safari and the Big Build, I can't decide what to think about in any given moment. My brain flits from one adventure to the next, and I definitely can't keep my mind on work...

Do-it-yourself for less?

I've just realized why I find the whole concept of being able to make money building a house so confusing... When I was a kid, you could save money by making your own Halloween costume, or your own Christmas tree ornaments, or whatever. But these days, it's not only easier to buy a bat-man costume from Walmart than it is to construct your own, it's also cheaper. Weird. Of course it's China that's to thank/blame. So if homes were habitually constructed in China and shipped over here, then I guess you couldn't make money by doing that yourself anymore either. Thankfully it seems there's still a bit of a profit margin to be had (hopefully we'll be able to make a house that's worth at least $200,000 more than we pay for it, though of course it'll take 2 years of Stef's time so you have to subtract his missed salary from the equation somewhere along the line. Still, it's a good deal).

I just did a google search to see if, in fact, you can ship homes to Canada from China, and of course you can - Dalian Quacent is pushing some cheap-looking prefab houses that come flat-packed. They look about as nice as a Walmart bat-man outfit.

You can also get the made-in-Canada prefab option that sort of comes from China... If we do run out of money, then this is always an option :)

Grand designs

There has been much head-scratching, dreaming and searching of web-based house designs, but Stef has come up with a home exterior we like, and I have roughed in where the rooms should go. Suddenly, after weeks of “no, not like that, um, no not like that either” we have miraculously what seems to be a workable design of the right shape and size and number of rooms. This is astounding. Designing a house is truly more difficult than you think it will be. You start thinking “well, I’ll start with the footprint I want, so that the house gets the best views and sun exposure and we still have a good-sized garden, and I’ll work up”. Then you get to the top and find it’s impossible to put a sensible roofline on the thing that doesn’t funnel all the snow at your front door or block half of the upstairs rooms with roof or come to a valley in the middle that will only leak. So you think, “okay, I’ll start with the roof and work my way down!”, only to find that the only bit big enough for a garage is at the back of the house on the other side from the driveway, and there’s nowhere to put the stairs. We want this thing to be green. But do you design the house and then adapt it to be eco-friendly? Or do you need to know about eco-friendly modifications before you design it?

So we now have a somewhat workable design but still lots of questions about whether it’s actually buildable. Stef has been banging his head against a bit of software for house design that is in equal parts amazing and useless (SketchUp, which he downloaded off the Google ‘even more’ page, does very fancy things, but somehow never does exactly what you want it to do). After an extensive period of time doing this (which we won’t admit to), we have given up and admitted that we need help (which we should have done from the beginning). Stef has found a designer (via yellow pages) called James Hall whose stuff we like, who comes pretty cheap, and who is available. Most of all Stef gets along with him… seems to me the most important thing in a designer is that you can talk to each other, understand each other, and basically get along. Onwards, ever onwards.

We own land!

The clock hands tick past some invisible magic moment and we are, have become, officially land owners. It felt more real on the 17th, with all the paperwork, but we decide to celebrate this invisible landmark too. We grab a bottle of champagne that has been waiting in our fridge, pack some bags, grab our skiis, and set out for a moonlit tour to a remote cabin in the woods. After a 3-hour ski, my legs jelly, we arrive to find 20 other people already packed into a sleeps-15 hut that we had expected to be empty (apparently it’s spring break for some nearby universities or something), and make a fabulous dinner of Kraft cheese and mac (with veggies, so it’s pretty special) on the camp stove. We scrape burnt bits off the bottom of the pot and pop open the bottle of champagne (feeling slightly self conscious… being packed shoulder to shoulder with 20 other people and not quite having enough to go around). We own land!

Signed and sealed

Having done nothing seemingly nothing for a few weeks, today we drive in to Whistler (25 minutes away) to spend the big bucks and sign our names to the final papers. The bank mysteriously allows us to shuffle $200,000 from our accounts into the seller’s account WITHOUT SEEING ANY ID. Isn’t that weird? I mean we had to enter our PIN into the bank machine in order to complete the transaction, but still. We didn’t even have to sign anything I don’t think (or did I? It's a blurr). I snap a photo of the bank teller. She loves Pemberton, she says – we’ll have to invite her to our first BBQ.

Then it’s on to see Peter at his offices. He is strangely chatty for a lawyer, asking us about our wedding (we didn’t have one) and other oddly personal questions, till the penny drops – he wants our business for immigration (don’t need one; my British hubby is legally a permanent resident thanks to my love for him, oh and our filling in a gazillion forms, getting police clearances, fingerprinting, medical exams, and holding our breath for a year), and – yipes - for wills. Seems premature. How dangerous IS building a house? He reminds us to take out insurance – if someone trips on a rock on that property they could technically sue us now.

SOLD

It was easy. We put down our deposit without a hitch. The lawyer, (Peter Shrimpton of mountain conveyancing) is fascinated by Stef’s accent and loves to chat with him. The title search is clean, though bizarrely the CBC has expressed interest in the land at some point, presumably because of a communications tower further up the hill. I had a small panic attack upon seeing a bit buried in the middle of the contract saying we had to build the house in 12 months, but an email to Lisa set me straight – there’s an amendment at the end of it all upping that to 18 (needed) months. Phew. So we laid down our $15,000, and they gave us a 'sold' sticker. :)

Offer accepted

The bid for the blasting came in at about $30,000. So we downgraded our initial offer from 205,000 to 200,000 (it’s listed at 245,000) and signed the papers on 18 Feb. Last time we started at 205, they counter-offered 217, we shot back with 211 and they accepted. We’re expecting a similar dance this time around. But for some reason – the owners are on holiday in Hawaii, so they are in a good mood or can’t be bothered with bartering? The Olympics are on, so there’s goodwill in the air? They need the cash, because other development projects aren’t panning out? Or, more ominously, there’s something about the lot we don’t know? – they simply accept. Done! Stef calls to tell me (I’m in Vancouver for work) and I’m standing in front of my parents when he gives me the good news. ‘That’s great,’ I say in a subdued tone of voice… I call him back later to explain that on the inside I was jumping for joy, but on the outside I wanted to stay calm… I don’t want my parents to go on this emotional roller coaster with me again, if it turns out to be a roller coaster. But this time we’re more prepared than last – we have seen the boundary pegs, consulted proper official peoples and understand the extent of the undertaking (we think) so there’s nothing really to be done except a legal ‘title search’, whereby our lawyer checks to see that the person we’re buying from actually owns the lot and there’s no funny claims on it by anyone else. But that’s it. Should be easy!