Trying to come to terms with all this!

We go on Thursday to see the factory and talk to the salesman at Pacific Homes in Mill Bay. We are heading to Parksville for an overnight at the new Ocean Beach Club resort. Hopefully we can sort some things out.

• Where will we live once we demolish the house, we have two cats so that can be a problem and we don't want to kennel them for an extended length of time.?


• How soon do we need this accomodation?


• Do we go the salvage method of demolision or the bulldoze and truck away method?


• Can we demolish the house but leave the garage till the second build? This would help with storage issues for my husbands bare metal 38 Ford.


• Will our marriage survive all this!!!! Just joking, it will probably make it stronger.

What will we build where?

Our lots are side by side with one being a corner and the other in between a neighbour and the 1st new house. We first have to get the elevations added to our survey and this will be done within two weeks. Then we have to get house plans to fit the parameters of the land left after we figure out the set backs allowed by the Municipality. We want to remain within them so we don't have to go through the Variance Application process which takes three months.
We are also looking into getting a prefab house as that could be built quicker than stick-built and we can sell the first house to build the second. The area where we live is trying to keep it's beach-cottagey feel so we need to be mindful of that when looking at plans etc.

Demolishing a house.

Who knew what this would involve!

One has to get a demolition permit from the Municipality, this is so they know when to cut off services.

Then you hire a demolition company, you have to decide if you want to be able to have salvage taken and re-used,or if you are just going to bring in an excavator and truck it all away. This would cost upward of $12,000.

Either way a Hazardous Materials Assessment has to be done ,to the tune of $850-$1250 depending on the number of samples they may need. They test for asbestos, lead paint, mercury, radiation waste etc!!!!!

Other options

Another drain expert came and he suggested, instead of extending the 8" foundations,we could build retaining walls inside the foundation line, backfill then have a deep pit in middle of crawl space with a sump pump and all the outer drains to come in there!! That would also cost a pretty penny,
sooooooooo........We have decided to look into demolishing the house, and building a house on each of the two lots that the house straddles!!!

What to do about the water?

This is the crawlspace with the digging almost done.The soil is wet and behind the Digger there is a big puddle.
So while we are waiting for water to subside we called a drainage expert,who brought along a camera. The views showed us that any perimeter drains that might be were all plugged, broken or crushed by the municipality when they put through a sewer right of way for our neighbour!
If you look closely in the background you can also see our 8" foundations that are around the original part of the house. Unfortunately, every addition they did after they put in 4' foundations and even cemented the floor. Now we have to extend the 8" ones before we contemplate digging for perimeter drains.
This involves engineers, excavators, cement trucks and we can only undermine 8' at a time.
All this would put our renovation budget completely off the tracks.
Now What?!?!?!?

Removing the dirt pile

We have friends with a landscaping business with small earth moving equipment. They agreed to come and move it while saving as much of the existing plants, bushes, bulbs etc. Unfortunately, as the yard was a swamp, their excavator became bogged down and with great difficulty extricated it. They decided it would be best to wait till things dried out a little. With the beautiful weather we have had for the past week ther is no lowering of my crawl-space wading pool,nor the puddles in the back yard!

There is still about 3/5 of the dirt still to remove but we may need it to fix other problems!!

Phew!! Fixed picture.

The picture on my header is the house as we see it now.The drawing point for my husband was the two car garage (we have a 1938 Deluxe Ford Sedan in process of being renovated too!!).The drawing point for me was the beautiful,completely overgrown, roomy garden with many hidden gems, roses, peonies, millions of bulbs etc.
The home is 8 houses from a beach in either direction and is located on a narrow beach access road.(This will come back later and bite us as there is no way to get large equipment in our yard!)
The fact that this house straddles two legal lots was the final point that made this a "Must Buy".

Sorry for huge picture!

I will try to find out how to shrink it later, have to go for my daily walk.

Digging out the dirt

Through a friend of a friend we found a man that was willing to crawl under our house and dig by hand. He started with shovel and pick but couldn't swing either enough to remove much at a time. He had a friend that owned an electric jack hammer so used that to break up the dirt. This was happening below my feet.He also smoked so I had the lovely aroma permeating through my house until we spoke to him, then he seemed to stop digging every 10 mins for a smoke break!Using a hand made trolley he actually excavated approx. 30 square yards of clay from beneath the house. So then we now had a huge berm of the clay draped across our backyard. This caused a problem as it compromised our natural drainage as we have no perimeter drains.

We had one of the worst rainstorms last year so we ended up with a wading pool in our crawl space and our backyard was a swamp.

The purpose of this blog.

We bought this home in July 2009 with the intent of renovating it and making it our RetirementPalace! We had figured out a rough budget, doubled it as we were told by everyone and set to starting the process.
First one has to have plans drawn up and we hired a designer recommended to us by friends. He took his own sweet time getting back to us but we had them in our hands eventually.
Next on the list is finding a builder , we handed out copies of the plans to five different builders and are yet to get any prices and it's 2-3months later!! Who says there is a slow down!
So to pass the time, we figured if we were planning on moving the kitchen to where the dining room is we had better dig out the dirt that would be blocking the way for the tradespeople to actually get to the area where the kitchen was going.