Hammond Forever House

Does British Columbia need the Site C dam to generate electricity?
It will generate a projected 8% of British Columbia’s needs in the future which is pretty good.
It will cost $8.8 Billion which is not good.
One of the reasons switching to electric heat pumps and cars in BC makes environmental sense is that we generate most of it from hydro power and this would be more of that. So that’s good I guess.
It will flood a whole lot of farmland and First Nations territory etc. and that’s not good.
Hmmmm.
Let me answer with another question.
Would we need Site C if local solar and geothermal power were supported the way they should be? $8.8B would buy a lot of rebates and incentives to create locally produced power and eliminate the need for power lines by creating micro grids which are much more resilient in the face of increasingly unpredictable and extreme weather events.
Site C seems like the renewable energy option which is most like the fossil fuel model in that it is massive, remote production which is owned by a corporation, even if it is a crown corporation.
I would rather see the dispersal and democratization of renewable energy into our communities with local control, local jobs, and local economic benefits, wouldn’t you?

Friday was a big day.

I submitted three copies of our Heritage Revitalization Agreement to the City of Maple Ridge with Leanne’s and my signature on them. Adrian Kopystinski, heritage planner, met me on his lunch break and then had to run. His sweetheart was taking him out for Valentine’s.

This puts us on track for our HRA, re-zoning and tax exemption bylaw to be read for the third and final time by City Council on February 24th, 2015.

Assuming all is well, from that date forward we will be designated.

Boom.

A bunch of things will happen, including:

We will renegotiate our home insurance. Many underwriters simply do not cover heritage properties. It’s going to cost more, of course.

The clock will start ticking. We have one year to commence our renovation and five years to finish.

We will become exempt from the municipal portion of our property taxes for five years. In my last post about The Now House Project, I originally wrote a figure of $4000 for our 2014 Municipal taxes. That was our total property tax. The Municipal portion is half that or $2068.81. At that rate, a five-year exemption would save us $10344.05.

This last item sounds pretty sweet, but as I went into when I first wrote about appearing before city council, the savings in taxes is not free money. It helps, but does not balance the costs to obtaining the Heritage Agreement.

Among the costs have been an architect, lawyer, structural engineer, plumber, excavator, electric company and city engineering crew. Not all of these would be incurred by a simpler HRA, and some of them are the result of wanting to do it right–short-term cost for long-term payoff.

The freshest unavoidable cost is the $16248 I paid on Friday after Adrian left for his lunch date (but I’m not bitter.)

That’s right: $16K

Engineering requires us to connect to the storm sewer so that excess water, especially in extreme weather events (and we can expect more of those), has a place to go. If you look at our plans you will see that we are deepening the basement into a more useable space. We will certainly be updating the perimiter drain that collects water around the base of the foundation. There is nothing for it; we have to agree to a storm sewer.

The money I paid on Friday is a security against the work. It is a condition in the HRA so we had to pay it before we could go forward with our final date with council. We are waiting for a more precise estimate for the work which may be higher yet.

It is incredible to Leanne and I that it costs $16K to dig a trench in a road and lay a pipe. We had a theory that some of that money must go to general engineering work. However, I have been assured that is simply how much the work costs. It includes things like traffic management, re-paving, an inspection chamber, etc.

What it doesn’t include is anything on our property. The perimiter drain around the house and pipe to the property line  where our $16K connection is waiting for us is a future cost we can look forward to.

So you can understand when I say that Friday was one of mixed emotions. It was momentous to sign a final document but it was painful to watch $16 248 disappear to pay for something we didn’t ask for. I would love to see a simplified process whereby single-family heritage homes can protect their homes without going through the same process a developer does when subdividing a large heritage lot. Anyone?

I’m changing up the blog a little.

I wanted to give a play by play of the project, but it hasn’t been possible. Most recently, the goal of getting into the house by Christmas made me abandon writing altogether.

The next deadline is renting out the Little Yellow House again. That means moving everything out of it and making room for all of it in the big house. That, in turn, means finishing the upstairs rooms and basement.

On top of all that are the simple but essential needs to rest, re-learn how to live in the (unfinished) house, and re-connect with my family after so many months of renovation stress.

My posts need to be shorter and snappier. My habit of writing lengthy and detailed essays must end. You don’t have time to read them and I don’t have time to write them.

So once I get the photos somewhere that I can use them, check in regularly and I’ll paint you a complete picture, one piece at a time.

Thanks for visiting Hammond Forever House

[UPDATE MARCH 2016: since this post was written, Leanne and I have entered into a contract dispute with Ridgewater Homes. For more details, click here.]

Last Sunday we had a work party. Our dear friends Jeff and Carole came out and put in some serious hours. Our neighbours came to visit and Ron helped out again along with my in-laws.

Shingles were on the menu. Our contractor, Ridgewater, brought in a skiff, assuming we would have a lot of garbage from clearing out the basement, taking off the shingles, etc. from the lower portion of the house. I took that as a challenge to put as little as possible in the thing.

We decided we couldn’t recycle, reuse or burn the shingles because they likely have lead paint on them under a few layers. Chuck from Ridgewater said he was going to have the garbage bin replaced with one just for rock and concrete on Monday. That lit a fire under our butts to get all the shingles off and into the skiff. It was a good thing Monday turned to Tuesday and finally Wednesday before we said goodbye to our giant garbage bin because it took some time getting those shingles off.

For a while there I was wondering what we could put in the bin. We’ll have some drywall soon. We have some chunks of mortar from taking the chimneys apart. Can that stuff go in? Apparently, however, drywall is more expensive to dump (there is a different rate for drywall) and you pay by the tonne at the landfill so heavy stuff like rock (and mortar) is a bad idea–that’s what a rock bin is for.

So what does go in at a typical construction site? My guess is wood. We tossed in shingles because of the lead paint and the tar paper under them, too, but there is also a lot of wood from deconstructing the walls that is difficult to reuse and has a lot of nails in it. The time it takes to cut it for burning, remove the nails to reuse it, or simply find a place to store it makes it cheaper to toss it in the landfill.

It’s going to take some care and hard work from Leanne and I if we’re going to buck the trend, but we’re doing ok so far.

Jeff and I started on the northeast corner where the septic tank still waits for me to empty it. Here is a slideshow of how that went:

Then we moved on to the left side of the front. The plan is to completely remove the porch and support the roof of the porch by the pillars. Sounds dicey…

For a closer look…

There’s a lot less to those columns than meets the eye!

By this time we were roasting in the sun so we took a break in the coolness of the basement…and removed the concrete sink!

It was the next day that I returned to stripping shingles. It was a cooler day so I started on the south side where all the wires come into the house: BC Hydro, Shaw and Telus.

I discovered various nooks and holes just under the surface that make me feel glad we are re-building these walls and insulating them properly. We think the hole below, roughly filled with a piece of styrofoam was where the old electric meter came through the wall. You can see how resourceful people in general, but Carl Whitehead in particular, were; the sides of the hole are made from an apple box.

Later, our remaining cat (“the cat who lived”), Odette, couldn’t resist exploring the hole. Leanne had to rescue her since she couldn’t get out but not before taking a photo or two.

Then I moved on to the front right side. You’ll tell me if these slideshows aren’t working for you, won’t you?

I had to take a break from the front of the house when a hornet got into my glove and stung my hand. I hate those things, they are such jerks! Apparently I had disturbed the nest at the bottom of the banister which had never bothered anyone before. There had been several wasp nests around the porch, but they were all dead. Two years ago I killed the largest one which was revealed in all its dead glory when we stripped the right pillar. It was huge, take a look!

While I waited for dusk so I could kill the new hornet’s nest, I finished up on the southeast corner. This section is under the walled-in back porch. There is a crawl space underneath and our neighbour Brad did a great job a few years ago of pouring a foundation wall to support it. This is also the corner where I went berserk on the carpenter ants and hacked apart a beam that was riddled with them. I’ll have to tell you about that sometime.

 

You can see the sawdust left behind by the nest-building carpenter ants and the beam Dave-the-father-in-law and I had to reinforce. It will feel good to get all of that replaced!

When I returned to the hornet’s nest, I thought it would be exciting to photograph my revenge. Instead, I got this sequence.

Yawn! I guess that’s what you want when foaming a nest: no excitement, just hornet death. The foam worked as advertised. Fantastic. I waited until the next morning to finish removing the shingles and get a look at the nest.

The banisters had obviously been replaced about 20 years ago because the shingles were nailed to sheathing of particle board which was disintegrating. Compare that to the ship-lap boards in the rest of the walls which has lasted almost 100 years!

With all the shingles removed and in the bin, I could sleep easy. The next morning, Wednesday, the truck showed up bright and early and removed it. I watched it sleepily from the window of the Little Yellow House.
Suddenly I realized I had not taken a photo of the final result! How would anyone reading the Hammond Forever House story believe that we hadn’t filled the thing with wood and household garbage! Fortunately, the driver put it down in the street so he could move the rock bin into the yard.

I threw some clothes on, opened the skiff and took this shot. See? Nothing but shingles and tar paper (ok and a couple of garbage bags and a piece of wallboard that has rat pee on it–you gotta forgive me for that one it was disgusting!).

So on Tuesday we’re getting ourselves ready for the work day and the kids ready for their school day when a truck pulls up with an excavator on a trailer.

Uh-oh. Chuck wasn’t kidding when he said he would dig today.

Right now we are waiting on a Heritage Alteration Permit (which in our case is mostly a formality) until we can apply for a building permit. However, the engineering department won’t let a Building Permit be issued until we get done what we promised we would: install a new storm sewer connection. We have put the money in already, now the city crews have to do their thing on the City side of the property line (we will connect to it after the new foundation is done). Only they can’t do their thing until we tell them how deep and where exactly we would like the connection to be. Are you with me?

That is why, even though we will not be ready for at least another 6 weeks to start work, there was an excavator at our house on Tuesday. We need to give the city a depth so we need to know if there is anything we’re going to run into when we dig the basement deeper.

While I was at work the excavator dug at three corners of the house. In the front yard he found where the perimeter drain connects to the existing storm drain. Daryl said it was blocked. I didn’t think the perimeter drain connected to anything and I’m not surprised it was blocked.

At the opposite corner of the house–the corner that started all the trouble, the one beside the bathroom– the excavator found a buried treasure. A concrete box. Chuck was pretty sure it was a septic tank. They stopped digging. He said we should probably empty it before they dig any more. I don’t blame him.

When I got home I found three corners chewed up and some tracks leading around the house.

 

And I found the mystery box.

I had never seen one, so I had no idea what I would find when I started digging.

We have no record of a septic tank anywhere, but it makes sense there was one. When Leanne’s grandfather built the house in 1923 they used a well for water and, presumably, an outhouse. When running water became available, the shed addition was built on with a back porch, a kitchen pantry and a bathroom. There was no municipal sewer yet, however, so they needed a septic tank.

And this is definitely a septic tank–probably about 80 years old.

But don’t worry, that poop is very very old and not smelly at all. Really! The reddish colour comes from the rust of all the tin cans that were in the larger tank. Other treasures I found were various glass vessels. It was like an archeological dig!

Dave the father-in-law said that the roof of the septic tank would have been wood, which explains the chunks of old wood I found. The tanks were clearly filled in with dirt and other stuff that was lying around–a time-capsule of sorts–and then disconnected.

It was fun discovering the various pipes, not knowing how a septic tank works, and guessing where they lead.

The thin pipe entering the tank from the top of the frame is probably a drain pipe from the gutter above. I thought it would lead to the house but it turned upward and stopped.

I dug under the wall and was reminded just how crazy it is that the wall hangs out over the concrete foundation wall. This is one of the issues we wanted to solve when we started talking about renovating the bathroom.

The diagram of a typical septic tank tells me that the big pipe entering the big tank on the right is the in pipe where the “black water” enters and the one on the left leads to the septic field. That seems weird to me, but I didn’t have the time or energy for more digging that day.

Maybe I can wait until there is an excavator on site.

The sewer pipe that is crossing horizontally above the tank in the photo was a bit of a mystery, until I looked inside the house. Here is the basement door and the other side of that wall after I covered up the holes I dug.
Here is the concrete wall and the wall that hangs next to it, (completely unsupported).
Follow that wall to where the main part of the basement opens up and you will find this concrete sink. It is high to allow it to drain down into the septic field(?). Leanne’s grandmother, Anna, was short however, so there was a high wooden platform placed under the sink when we moved in so that she could reach the taps. I don’t know where it is now.
We always wondered where the water from that sink drained! Now we know a little more at least.

There is a book I want for Christmas. Scarcity: Why Having Too Little Means So Much. By Sendhil Mullainathan and Eldar Shafir.

Apparently when people are stressed about money, they make bad decisions.

Well, that makes sense, doesn’t it?

It makes me think about Leanne’s boots analogy. If you go shopping for winter boots and you are worried about having enough money to pay rent at the end of the month, you will probably buy the cheapest boots in the store knowing full well they are not waterproof and may fall apart in a month. Your next-door-neighbour who is not stressed will probably go to MEC and get a better deal.

I want to quote an article about the book that appeared in The Economist. “There is a distinctive psychology of scarcity, argues Mr Mullainathan and Eldar Shafir, a psychologist at Princeton University. People’s minds work differently when they feel they lack something. And it does not greatly matter what that something is. Anyone who feels strapped for money, friends, time or calories is likely to succumb to a similar “scarcity mindset”.

The article continues, “this mindset brings two benefits. It concentrates the mind on pressing needs. It also gives people a keener sense of the value of a dollar, minute, calorie or smile.” However, “This scarcity mindset can also be debilitating. It shortens a person’s horizons and narrows his perspective, creating a dangerous tunnel vision…Feeling poor lowers a person’s IQ by as much as a night without sleep.”

I heard on the CBC this morning that SUV and pick-up truck sales in 2014 have driven automobile sales to a new high. Why are we buying so many gas-guzzling vehicles? Combine that with the fact that the income gap between the rich and the middle class in Canada is getting wider and wider and I can’t help thinking that the poverty mindset is at play here. That tunnel vision (short term needs outweighing long-term wisdom) makes those low-monthly payments awfully attractive, doesn’t it?

And doesn’t this scarcity fly in the face of the fact that Canada is an abundant society? In Hammond, a theme of abundance has developed. Free community libraries are multiplying, people give away stuff they don’t need, and neighbours help each other out. Maybe Annie Leonard  is right when she says in The Story of Stuff that it is  television advertising that makes us feel that we suck so badly we need to go and buy something to feel better about ourselves which means we have to work harder to buy the stuff and it goes on in a cycle. Maybe we could just stop.

I think this scarcity mindset is a big factor in our inertia in addressing climate change. All the climate scientists tell us clearly that the earth is warming, the climate is changing, more extreme weather is happening and our overproduction of greenhouse gases is the cause. We know what we have to do so why don’t we do it?

Because we are too busy–our time and money are too scarce–to think about some new-fangled solar panels, wind turbines,  heat pumps, or rain barrels. That’s just more stuff someone is trying to guilt us into buying that we just don’t have time for.

Surely this mindset comes into all our spending decisions, but especially when we choose between the ‘green’ and the ‘regular’ product.

100% recycled paper is more expensive and so is organic food.

Electric cars are more expensive than similar-sized gas cars.

Energy efficient appliances are more expensive than standard ones.

At least it seems that way. If we take the time to think and get out of our crisis mindset, all of these things, along with changes to our lifestyle, will make our lives better and even save us money.

It’s true that the money saved on my heating bill will not equal the initial price of the solar panels for years. If I buy them, however, I will have an incentive to live in my house longer (to realise the savings) and I will put down some roots in the neighbourhood, save on all the costs of moving, and feel darn good about myself. They will be worth the initial cost.

Our governments lately have been catering to our worst short-term thinking. We are offered $100 cash per month instead of quality, affordable childcare. We are promised immediate jobs, jobs, jobs and economic prosperity if we get our fossil fuels out of the ground as fast as possible. We are told that this is all justified because the world economy is a disaster and we must tighten our belts. On the other hand, Canada is doing great and we expect a nice fat surplus. But don’t relax, we will need to continue those oil industry subsidies a little longer. Wait, what?

Can we break out and think big picture and long term? When our boots wear out it is going to cost us more than just another pair.

Stephen Harper dissolved our National Roundtable on the Environment and the Economy in 2011 but not before they could estimate that climate change will cost Canadians an annual $5 billion by 2020 and go way up from there, depending on how we respond to the challenge. Maybe he thought that Canadians, experiencing more and more financial stress, won’t be thinking clearly anyway, so information from the NRTEE is not necessary. Too cynical?

Lord Stern of World Bank fame has just followed-up his landmark 2006 review reaffirming that, as the Guardian puts it, “Halting the rise of carbon emissions is possible – not only possible, but achievable at a modest cost that will be more than outweighed by the manifest benefits. We spend a little more now, to recoup in the next few decades in the form of breathable air, drinkable water and an atmosphere that doesn’t cook us.”

Finally, the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change released a Synthesis Report a few weeks ago which said the same thing: tackling climate change now will not cost us as much as we think and the costs of inaction are huge.

Thank you very much for taking the time out of your busy day to read this.

I wish you all the time you need and enough money to release yourself from the hold of the scarcity mindset. I wish this for you because I am a nice guy, but also because I want you to be able to think clearly so we can get ourselves out of this mess.

Peace.

I just heard we are “on the docket for August” with Nickel Bros., the house lifters–assuming the building permit comes through from the City of Maple Ridge, that is.

We need to clear everything that is left out of the basement and that includes old steel pipes that go nowhere. In this case, it is the pipe that carried cold water to the exterior tap near the front of the house. We disconnected it and ran a  modern pipe to that tap several years ago.

I unfastened the heavy steel pipe from the beams, but how can I get it out of the basement? It doesn’t bend and the joints are rusted together.

Clearly, this is an opportunity for a Dad to get out his power tools! In this case, Mr. Reciprocating Saw.

Here we go!

The problem with steel pipe is that it rusts inside. Eventually there is a smaller and smaller space for the water to get through. Modern plastic pipe is definitely an improvement, but isn’t plastic made from oil and isn’t oil a fossil fuel and aren’t fossil fuels causing average global temperatures to rise and weather patterns to shift causing extreme weather like our current dry spell in BC which resulted in 200 wildfires?

Well, yes.

We need to act on the best information we have. We have known for decades about the greenhouse effect and the big role that fossil fuels have played in warming the planet. We need to be able to act on that information without throwing the baby out with the bath water.

The biggest contributors to greenhouse gas emissions are transportation, buildings and industry, right? So let’s tackle those first, OK?

While we’re talking about pipes, though. It’s not particularly sustainable to manufacture and install a bunch of steel pipe which will have to be replaced later, is it? I’ve heard that copper pipe is better, but of course it has to be manufactured, too. Plastic pipe can last for decades and right now is cheaper to produce and purchase. It may be the most sustainable choice right now.

Anyone have a better solution?

My wife Leanne works for the Ridge Meadows Recycling Society heading up the Community Engagement department. This amazing organization is the one of the only independent, not-for-profit recyclers in British Columbia.

Their vision is: “a waste free, socially responsible society.” Notice how their vision does NOT include “making as much money as possible by selling recovered materials to the highest bidder, regardless of whether that company is local or abroad, sustainable or not.”

Notice also that implicit in their vision is an active search to find local markets for material that is currently “non-recycleable” so that our society can truly become “waste free”.

In Maple Ridge, recycling started 40 years ago under the banner of SPEC, The Society Promoting Environmental Conservation. The point was to reduce waste, so revenue generated was put back into improving the operation.

Leanne’s parents were founding members of the recycling program in Maple Ridge, and they have been inspirational to both Leanne and I.

Here they are direct from the Our Founders page of the RMRS website.

Julie Koehn served the recycling effort in Maple Ridge continuously for almost 40 years until her daughter, Leanne, was hired in the education/outreach department at RMRS. Says Julie, “I remember when Bob Cordoni came back from the Earth Day conference with the idea of starting a local recycling depot. He inspired us. I went to Belkin Paperboard, with my baby in tow, to establish our first paper market.” An old shed on the Koehn property in Hammond was the first paper recycling depot. It was eventually replaced by a donated building sited at the Cottonwood landfill. The group had proposed the municipality fund their efforts, a proposal that was considered grandiose at the time. Says Julie, “Today, we are partners with the municipality. I think it’s wonderful. We’ve built amazing credibility and support.”

Dave Koehn was an early member of the local SPEC group and became the first president of the Ridge Meadows Recycling Society. Together with a group of dedicated volunteers, Dave helped find creative and innovative ways to improve recycling.” Dave was the volunteer depot manager at the Cottonwood site and started the first curbside collection. “We had an old cube van that barely ran. We received a grant and I hired our first truck drivers. I look around now and we have a fleet of trucks. I think ‘Wow! Right on!’” Dave has tremendous pride in the current recycling programs. “The faith we had in our ideas has come to fruition. Recycling is now looked at as a business. We’ve proven that it can work.”

 

There’s also a very different feeling when you know you’re near the end of your credit to when you reach the end of your credit.

It’s a constricting feeling. When you cook at home instead of ordering in you feel less proud about your penny-pinching and more bitter that you don’t have a choice.

We budgeted our renovation based on what we thought was a fixed quote from our first contractor. That didn’t turn out so well.

On the positive side, there’s nothing like running out of money to make you look under the furniture for lost change. Our financial squeeze reminded us that our credit card rewards program lets you use points toward paying down debt. We took a look and it turned out we could use our points to pay $1090 towards our credit card!

Woo-hoo! (As you know, carrying a balance on your credit card at 19.5% interest is no fun at all.)

We’ve still got a balance and we’ve had to make arrangements to pay for plumbing and electrical work by installments, but it’s little boosts like Credit Card Rewards that can help you see the light at the end of the tunnel.