Continuing where I left off with my Foundation post, we had more work to do with concrete. We had a few foundation walls, and our entryway that needed to be completed. Since our property was on a North/South slope, we have a 6 ft wall on the southern side of the lot, and a smaller 4 ft wall on the northern side between the driveway and city’s sewer easement.

Back in April 2018 they started to build out the forms for the footings, for the walls and entryway. They moved pretty quickly and they poured the concrete in early May. I remember, for some silly reason, that it seemed early for them to be doing this work already.  I am not quite sure why I felt this way, but I just thought that there was a lot of work to be done on the interior of the house, and it seemed like focusing on the house itself was a higher priority. At the time, in April, the house was mostly a skeleton with clothes on; All of the interior walls were open and we had most of the siding completed. We were waiting for the plumbers and electricians to finish their rough-ins so that we could move on to the next phase and finally work on the finishes.

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At the end of July we began talking to our stone guy, Vitaly, who said that he would be finishing up his current job at the end of August, and would be available to start working on the stone for the front of our house after July 4th. We didn’t originally want stone on the walls around the house, but damage from one of Joe’s workers, Javier, caused us to have to cover the concrete with something.

Back when our foundation was poured, they had to remove the snap cones (nails basically) from the outside of the house so that they could apply the dimple-mat and waterproof the foundation. Javier didn’t seem to know that these snap-cones were meant to be twisted off and ended up using a Sawzall to cut them, damaging the wall, and making it impossible to remove the piece of metal inside. Typically the snap-cones have a weak spot deep within the hole, and when you twist them off, they leave a really nice and clean hole, as seen below.

So since we had to hide the damage with some sort of veneer, we decided that we’d continue the stone from the house and cover all of these walls in the front of the house with the same stone. The image to the right was something I drew up when I was trying to figure out how much stone to order for the initial stone setting. I knew we would end up needing more for the entryway, but this bare minimum should cover what was needed till the stairs were poured and completed.

Vitaly ended up taking a bit longer than planned to start working on our job and showed up towards the latter half of July. I remember it being extremely hot around this time since I was on paternity leave and I had to find a cool places to feed Matilda. I also remember Vitaly suffering in the heat. He spent a lot of his day sitting in his truck with the A/C on, smoking constantly, and took a very very long time to get much done. It was understandable since it was very very hot, but I could tell that he really didn’t want to be there.

There were many excuses over the course of the summer why he wasn’t available to come back and finish the job. Initially he said that it was too hot to work outside, which was understandable, and then he ended up taking another job that was paying him double, which also was understandable since I wasn’t paying him double, and then there was a game where he would tell me a date that he’d be there only to miss it. He did finally show up again to finish things, but that happened to be on the day that they were delivering the drywall and he understandably didn’t want to be working under tons material moved overhead. After all of this, it finally came down to him (and Joe) wanting to wait for the rest of the concrete to be poured so that he could do everything in one go.

So after the long-winded story about how difficult it had been to get Vitaly to install the stone, we were basically waiting for Lamb Concrete again to finish building and pouring those foundation walls. Every time I asked them directly, or through Joe, we kept getting told that it would be about a week or two out, and this kept going back and forth for most of the summer. They did finally showed up again in September, almost 4 months after those footings were poured to continue building the walls. Unfortunately the weather had changed a bit and we had water issues to deal with now.

Weather did eventually clear up and they were able to finish the walls, however, we did hit another snag. When they finally poured the concrete on September 26th, one of the form walls busted, splitting the 1-1/8″ plywood clean down the middle, spewing mud everywhere. Half of the wall had collapsed and they were scrambling to get the wet concrete away from the house and the foundation.

The lead guy, Steve, who had been in the concrete business for over 30 years, said that he had never seen something like this happen before. He had never seen one of those plywood forms bust and commented how the forms they use are the best ones money can buy, and lamented how some of the forms they were using had lasted over 20 years. The forms they used for this particular wall were basically brand new, acquired recently because of how much extra work they were having, and they had used it for this particular wall because I had asked to have this be a “show wall” with an Architectural finish, and I basically wanted it to look nice without having to spend more money by covering it with stone or stucco.

The bad luck with the wall collapsing was frustrating, but I can’t really blame anybody for that happening and they did a mostly-good job at fixing the situation; It was just bad luck. It was very annoying having to wait almost a month again for them to pour the rest of that wall. It wasn’t completed till about a week ago on November 1st.

So here we are in the month of November and are still waiting to backfill, still waiting for utilities to be hooked up, still waiting for Vitaly to finish the stone on the garage and those walls. I can’t believe I thought starting this in April seemed early, I was so very wrong. The interior of the house is actually moving along really nicely at this point in time, and I actually wouldn’t be surprised to see that done by the end of the year, or January sometime at the latest. The rest of this exterior stuff is really holding things up now and think that it’s likely to extend well in to spring next year.

I really hope that I don’t have more stories to share with concrete, since we do have a few more things to do: Those stairs and the driveway. Wish us luck!

I never realized how many delays we could possibly have with concrete. This is just the beginning..

When we went to Lake Chelan in July 2017 for vacation, most of the site work was already complete; Eco-blocks were in place and the ground was flat. We were told that they would be starting the foundation the week we were gone, and we were really looking forward to seeing things move to the next phase when the house would begin to take shape.

When we returned from vacation, however, nothing had been done. We were then told that Lamb Concrete (the company who was hired to do this) was doing another job before ours, and stated that our job was a much bigger, and they wanted to get the smaller one out of the way first. At the time we said that we understood as it was supposed to set us back only a couple of weeks, and basically we waited for our turn. We knew that the construction industry in Kirkland was crazy busy, so we patiently waited for it to be our turn.

Turns out that the Teamsters local 174 were threatening to strike for most of the month of August and that caused quite a few delays. All of the concrete trucks in King County were driven by these union members, and whenever there was talk of striking, which seemed to be 1-2 times per week, none of the suppliers in the area were delivering concrete. This caused a huge backlog of delays, so getting concrete to any jobs took much much longer. So instead of the other job taking a couple of weeks to complete, it ended up taking a month, essentially pushing us back further.

So in mid-August they started to work on the forms that would be our footings. Was very nice to see the outlines of the house forming on the ground. I remember thinking how small the footprint of the house seemed. I knew it was a giant hole that we had dug for the house, but I couldn’t help but think how small everything seemed. It made me seriously question whether I would have enough space in the garage or workshop.

After those initial delays, things seemed to be moving along pretty smoothly. The concrete for the footings was poured at the end of August, and they began working on the foundation walls almost immediately after the concrete cured. I knew we had a huge basement wall that was going to be poured (it was over 10 ft high), but it was hard to believe how many panels they would really need to complete our house.

When the guys were about 80% done with building the form walls, the owner of the company, Bill Lamb, decided that he was going to borrow a few of the panels that were needed to complete our job, and used them for another job. I’m guessing he thought that he could build his forms and return them before they would be done with ours.

It ended up taking about 3 weeks to get the forms back on our job site after they were borrowed. The guys were able to finish that last 20% of the job in about 3 days, and then we had to wait for our turn to get concrete. Thankfully the threats to strike were finally over, but the delays they caused by the Teamsters 174 were still affecting how quickly we could get concrete.

Finally at the end of September 2017, the Super Pumper (concrete pump truck) was on our job site and poured the walls for our foundation. It felt a bit ridiculous how long it took to get to this point. It ended up being close to 3 months for something that should have easily been completed in a few weeks.

Things with concrete went relatively smoothly as far as the slab goes. The only real negative thing that I can think of is how terrible their timing was, as far as getting concrete on site. You see, typically you will pour a slab in the morning and let it cure for a few hours before you bring out the power trowel, which is like a giant fan blade with a handle that’s used to smooth the concrete. The troweling takes quite a while to get a good finish, and since they didn’t actually pour the slab till the afternoon, the guys had to work really late in the night (close to midnight). I’m thankful that they did work as late as they did, as they did a great job pouring that slab.

One thing that I’m still trying to resolve with Joe are these LED work lights that were charged to my account and then disappeared. Because the guys had to work so late, they needed work lights to illuminate the job site. In October the sun sets around 5PM, so they had to work for many hours in darkness. Joe’s assistant ended up buying 4x $150 LED work lights from Dunn Lumber, which ended up being charged to my account. That was fine and all, but these lights ended up being brought to the house Joe was building for himself for safe keeping, and they ended up disappearing. Had I known that I would end up owning these lights, I would have gone out of my way to make sure that they were taken care of. I remember seeing the lights laying there the next day, but I couldn’t imagine that I would be the one having to pay for them.

You’d think that these folks would be prepared for situations like this, without having to buy brand new work lights every time the sun set. I can imagine it’s not totally uncommon to work past 5PM in the Winter on a project.

At any rate, I’m still trying to resolve this with Joe, since I don’t think I should be responsible for paying the $600 for those lights since he lost them. It’s a lot of money and I feel like they were careless with them.. I was also not presented with invoices for almost 4 months after this so I didn’t even know that they were mine till long after they were lost.

I had planned to document more of the drama I had with concrete in this post, but it’s close to 1AM and I’m getting tired. In a later post I’ll talk more about our exploding wall and the slough of delays we had to endure in the Summer this past year.

 

The Holidays have been pretty tough this year. Last Halloween I packed away all of our decorations, lights, etc., since we just began framing (November 2017) and I couldn’t imagine that we would be spending another Halloween, or Christmas, in our Kenmore home. We were thinking, with framing happening when it was, that we’d totally be done before Summer. With the idea that the building process should be about 10 months, we figured we were already 4-months in from when that timer started. We were wrong, so wrong.

Our son, Max, was so excited for Halloween this year, and it hurt because I really couldn’t bring myself to unpack the items that we already packed away in boxes. We have a lot of decorations that we purchased over the years, and I really debated about putting them out, but I just got so sad whenever I went in the garage and began searching for them. I couldn’t help but think about how disappointing it is that we still are not moved in to our new home.

I did end up putting up some decorations for him, but it was far from what I really would have liked to do. I really feel like I let him down and that hurt. I should have pushed through it and found the decorations, but it is what it is now.

We’ve made plans to be out of town for Thanksgiving; We’re flying to Hawaii on Thanksgiving day, and will be returning to Kenmore just before Max’s 4th birthday. For Christmas this year we are considering leaving town as well, thinking of maybe going to Southern California, but we’ll see. There is a chance that parts of the house might be ready, but we are trying really hard to not get our hopes up.

If we stay or go, we’ve basically decided that we’re going to get a Christmas tree and place it in the new house. Will try and make the best of it.

As mentioned in The Beginning, after many months of pointless delays, our building permit was finally filed on June 17th 2016. We were told by Joe that the permitting process would take 6-7 weeks, so we weren’t terribly worried about the timeline as the old house was still standing, and the tenants were still in the process of moving out. It seemed like timing was good for us to break ground sometime in September. I wasn’t terribly excited about the idea of framing over the winter, but at this point, it wasn’t something I was going to try and worry myself about too much as I just wanted to get moving.

It turns out that there were quite a few (to say the least) properties with wetlands in Kirkland. City Hall was ill-equipped to deal with the flood of building permits that were submitted before the proposed wetland buffer changes. They were essentially expanding the setback from 60 to 100 ft for any properties with wetlands. The increased number of permits being submitted resulted in much longer wait times. Our permit wasn’t touched by anybody at City Hall till December, almost 6 months later.

As expected with any building permit, the city had some corrections for the architects and engineers, but those revisions did not make it back in a timely manner.

I began asking Joe on January 10th, after the Holidays, about news regarding the permit, as I had not heard of any updates on it in close to a month. I knew the Holidays meant that very little was likely to get done, so I wasn’t surprised that the updates weren’t out quite yet. I was told when I asked, that they were finishing up a few things, and that they’d be submitting those changes within the week, around the middle of January.

On February 10th, I decided to press again, since I hadn’t heard any news from Joe regarding the permit, and decided to call City Hall, to see if I could get any updates on what was going on with our permit. The person on the phone claimed that they hadn’t received any updates from our builder, so I forwarded that information along to Joe, and was re-assured by him that things were in fact submitted to the city and that we were “waiting on them, not the other way around.” It was slightly concerning that the city claimed they had not received the updates, so about a week later, after not hearing anything, I decided to go to City Hall and talk to the person who was actually reviewing our permit. I got hold of Ron Braun and he confirmed that they had not received any of our latest updates, and it was at this point that I called Joe, with Ron in the background, and told him that the city had in fact not received the updates.

The revisions we were waiting on were finally submitted on February 16th, 2017.

As noted in My Dungeon, we were also submitting a revision to the original plan, where we would be digging out the entire basement under the South side of the house for a workshop.

When we first met with our builder and architects, I had told them that I wanted a 2-car garage with lots of workshop space in the back, asking for the equivalent of a 4-car garage, and I unfortunately never double-checked the dimensions on the plan till we were well past the review dates. On the blueprints, there was a beam running left-to-right, halfway through the garage, and I, for whatever reason, assumed that it was some border between the two-car garage and the workshop behind it. It was not till I started to mock things up, when I took the dimensions of a pickup truck, that I realized I would only have 10 ft of space behind the cars for my workshop.

When I did bring up the idea to the architect in February 2016, of expanding the garage past the lower patio to the East, it sounded like it would be a very expensive, and time-consuming endeavor, so I ended up just deciding that I would live with the smaller garage and live with the idea of parking my cars outside permanently. I definitely didn’t want to cause any extra delays as we wanted this house to get done as soon as possible.

While trying to accept the state of affairs, I was trying to think of ways that I could  recover some extra space for storing things in the house, and came up with the idea to dig out the entire basement. Looking at the blueprints, it it seemed like it should be pretty easy to dig out a few extra feet under the South side of the house, up to 5′ tall, as to have a lot of storage space that did not count against our final square-footage (because of the low ceilings). I talked to the builder and he thought that the idea seemed totally do-able without having to make any changes to the plans. This sounded great, so we tentatively decided that when we dig out the foundation of the house, allowing us to have a lot of storage for all of the random boxes, toys, bikes, etc. that would typically clog fill the garage.

About a year later, during one of our in-person meetings in February 2017, Joe suggested that we actually dig out the entire basement, and ignore the idea of staying under 5,000 covered square ft, as the added area in the basement would add a lot to the value of the home and wouldn’t “cost too much more” and would “be a great value”. He noted that since the current permit was in review, that crews could actually get moving on moving dirt now with the current permit once it is approved, and just file a revision concurrently since those revisions only took 2 weeks. This seemed to solve all of my issues as it would have given me a huge workshop (35 ft x 12 ft) and would have allowed us to continue to stay on schedule. I remember leaving the meeting extremely happy, as well as Tina, as she knew how much it meant to me to have a workshop in this house.

Little did we know that this decision would add so many delays and costs to the project. I wish Joe would have been a little more upfront and realistic with us as we were totally new to building a house and didn’t know what to expect. In the end, this small change probably cost us about $200K, and added a lot to the time, as the excavation company was not comfortable digging out the basement without the final plans approved. The “quick” turn-around with the architects ended up taking almost 2 months.

The digger that we had on our property in March 2017 (right) ended up doing nothing but be a giant paper-weight for the tarp; They packed up and went to another job while we waited for our permit to be fully approved. Resuming things proved to be difficult as the little orange excavator ended up breaking down just before they were able to get to our job and was a little too old (7,000 hours run) for the repairs to be worth it. Finding a replacement during this time in the building season proved to be a challenge, as there was so much construction going on in the area and there was no replacements available in the state.

 

It was almost exactly two years ago from today that the old house was demolished. Facebook reminded me about it earlier today so I figured I’d continue where I left off.

Our tenants moved out of the old house at the end of June and our permit to build was officially submitted to the city on June 17th. With construction imminent, I ended up buying a time-lapse camera (a Brinno TLC-200) because I wanted to be able to capture every moment of the build and use it as something to look back on. I’d seen a few construction videos folks had done in the past and it looked like a lot of fun. With plenty of wood and supplies in the old house I ended up building something that looked a lot like a self-standing basketball post. It was basically a 10′ tall 2×6 attached to a base that was weighted down with two 60 lb bags of cement. With that I thought I’d be able to position the camera around the property as the building progressed.

Since the old house had one of those popular asbestos popcorn ceilings, we had to have a special crew come out to remove it before it could be demolished. I was somewhat familiar with the process since my mom had a condo in Hawaii with asbestos, and the folks removing it basically sealed all of the windows/doors, soaked down the ceiling and then scraped away the popcorn in to some hazardous waste bags.

I remember being slightly surprised the day that the asbestos abatement crew was out working on the house. I knew the process involved covering up the windows, but I remember things feeling really eerie. The windows were all covered up with white sheets, lights inside the house were all on, and the screens had been broken in a few locations around the house. The garage door was forcefully opened with a broom handle, and a trail of broken light bulbs leading to the back yard. It really felt like somebody had broken in to the house and set up a meth lab.

Thankfully there was no meth lab, but I didn’t expect the garage to be ransacked. I was storing a few items there that I was planning on picking up before the demolition. The box of light-bulbs and a vintage all-metal drill were two items that I was actually on my way to the house that day. The drill was gone and a number of the bulbs were broken and littered around the house. They led me on a trail to the back yard where I noticed the pole I had built was laying on the ground and the brand new time-lapse camera was gone. I’m guessing the crew thought that the camera was recording them. I talked to one of the retired neighbors who had a prime view of the house and they told me that the asbestos guys were the only folks at the house that day and he noted how strangely they operated. I was 90% sure that they stole the camera after they were caught stealing things from the garage. Joke is on them though, since the camera wasn’t on..

I ended up filing a police report, but knew that nothing was likely going to happen. It was annoying as the camera was close to $200, and something I was on edge about purchasing to begin with. As painful as it was to shell out more cash for another camera, I did end up buying another since I really did want footage of the construction.

I didn’t know what settings to use for the camera and had spent time looking online for suggestions. A lot of folks with construction cameras had suggested that you take a picture every 30 minutes with 30 fps so that over the course of a 10-12 hour day you’d end up with almost a second of footage. Over the course of 10 months that would make the video like 4 minutes in length. For the demolition I thought that I’d double the footage to 15 minutes per picture since I wanted the resulting video to be a little longer.

So I set up the camera to take a picture every 15 minutes thinking that this would probably take a week to complete. My calculations were so far off it was almost comical. The bulk of the demolishing was probably done in the first 4 hours. The rest of the time was basically filling the dumpsters and waiting for trucks to empty them. The resulting video at 30 fps ended up lasting about half a second.

So October 19th, 2016 the old house was gone and it was now waiting time for the permit to be approved so that we could move on to the next phase.

There was a time in my life where I felt really lucky to be able to build a custom home. That was 3 years ago when this journey started. Things have been anything but smooth over these past few years and I’ve had many moments where I wondered if the pain we were going through was worth the end result.

We naively didn’t dig too deeply when we chose our builder. We found a guy who seemed really nice, seemed to know what he was doing, was very responsive whenever we contacted him, and generally seemed like a good fit since he built the style of home we liked all over Kirkland. I figured that any builders reviews were going to be negative, and assumed that a builder is a builder is a builder.

Things initially went pretty smoothly. We were able to close on the property in July 2015 and had meetings with an architect at Architects Northwest the following month. Site surveys were all completed before September and we had our CAD floor-plans ready for review in November. There was a bit of back-and-forth with some delays related to the Holiday season, but since we were able to rent the existing house, we weren’t too concerned as the renters were able to help us keep costs in check. The main thing we had on the back of our mind was the July 2016, the date when we would have to have our plans submitted in order to be grandfathered in with the sensitive area setback.

Our property has a natural stream running at the far end of the lot. One of the reasons we were able to find such a large lot in Kirkland was the fact that the property was not sub-dividable. The current setback for new developments with sensitive areas was about 60 ft back from wetlands and streams, and the city was changing the rules in July to 100 ft, which would have forced us to have a spit-rail fence pretty close to our backyard which we would have to stay away from and we wanted to have as much backyard as possible. A couple of years before we found this lot, we almost purchased a 1 acre lot in Woodinville, but we ended up backing out of that lot, and in the time since we had Max, we decided that we really wanted to be closer to work, coffee shops, and be able to walk to things in general. I still wanted land, and finding 0.31 acres in Kirkland was amazing.

I didn’t think about it too much till later, but we made the huge mistake by telling our builder that we were not in a hurry to get the house started. At the time we were mostly thinking about the fact that the house was rented, and we didn’t quite have the finances figured out to build the house we wanted. It seems like he took this lack of urgency on our side to mean that he would submit the permit at the last possible moment before it was due on July 1st.

I wish I had known about MyBuildingPermit.com sooner. Our builder told us that he liked to submit the permit in person, so I sort of assumed that there wasn’t going to be any sort of digital trail that I could follow-up with online. We assumed everybody was taking care of things. We did reach out in April to see how things were going, but we were told at this time that they were waiting on an Arborist report and that they were aiming for mid-April to submit the permit. The timeline seemed reasonable still as we were told that it would take 6-7 weeks for the city to review the permit, and we still had tenants till the end of Summer, or so we thought.

On June 9th, our tenants informed us that they were going to be moving to Arizona and asked if they could break their lease agreement. Assuming that the permit was submitted, I told them that it was no problem, and wished them well. I informed Joe that our tenants had moved out before the end of the month, and I was hoping we could move forward with demolishing the old house.

The permit was finally submitted a week later on June 17th 2016.