the
Condo
Advocate
Restoration Project Managers
for BC's Leaky Condos
By William Boei
Vancouver Sun Saturday, April 20th 2002
This web version shows excerpts from the original text. For a full-text version contact info@thecondoadvocate.com
The noise of jackhammers reverberates through the building like machine-gun fire, drowning out conversation. It's a startling sound in the living room of a luxury waterfront condo in peaceful Harrison Hot Springs, where not even the rain can obscure the awesome view over Harrison Lake to Echo Island and the peaks of the Lillooet Range.
The vista changes from minute to minute as light and shadow flow over the landscape; it's a view to contemplate full-time during a long retirement.
But these days, their view is filtered through a shroud of green netting that shields walls whose skins have been peeled away. Beneath the netting is a framework of scaffolding reaching to the roof of the four-storey building. Yes, it's a leaky condo. Before the repairs began, the roof and the windows leaked; building paper had been applied the wrong way so it guided water into the walls instead of draining it out; on the main floor, the concrete slab sloped to the centre instead of outward, and when water dripping through the walls reached the slab, it was trapped as surely as in a bathtub.
The insides of the walls were rotten. Not long ago, you could grow mushrooms in the carpet of Carol Curry's main-floor unit. And yet, there's little anger and no obvious despair, and they will have done it at a fraction of some of the cost estimates they got before deciding to take the job into their own hands.
A couple of engineering reports later, they knew they had a serious water-ingress problem, that the walls were going to have to come off, and that repair-cost estimates ranged up to $1.9 million - $95,000 for each of the building's 20 units.
They calculated that for every dollar in material and labour costs, other factors - contractor's overhead, engineering costs, scaffolding, demolition, GST, Homeowner Protection Office warranty compliance costs - added another 72 cents. "If we spend a dollar on a stud - you can't get a stud for a dollar, mind you - the actual price to put it on the building is $1.72," Cadwell said. "It's staggering."
The scaffolding starting going up in November, and the walls began to come off in January. That was when the owners truly realized The Cascades was a leaky condo, and a bad one. The contractor found rot more severe than anyone had expected, especially on the main floor. There was also mould; one column "oozed black" when it was uncovered, Curry recalled. But the mould is not one of the more toxic varieties and has caused no known health problems in the building.
Cadwell now figures the final total to fix the building will be $820,000 or $41,000 per unit, still less than a third of the high bid at $2.6 million or $130,000 per unit. Despite the lower cost, he insists: "It's going to be done right."
The owners saved money by questioning everything. He said the key has been to establish a level of trust with all the people working on the building that enabled him to "ask silly questions without offending people," to question everything, and to stick his nose into every part of the job, even if it meant crawling around on the roof in the rain and snow.
When the job is done, the original stucco cladding on a face-sealed wall system will have been replaced by a rain-screen wall system and new vinyl siding.
The Cascades look like a multi-storey igloo. Curry figured it looked more like a giant Q-tip, or an insect's cocoon. "I kept thinking of the butterfly we were going to become." Although they do feel some anger - at the developers who built leaky buildings, the provincial government stalling on compensation, the federal government profiting from GST on repairs - committee members say the hands-on restoration has been a positive experience.
It has cemented the building's feeling of community and confirmed that the owners can deal with overwhelmingly complex problems. It has also taught them, Cadwell said, that when it comes to leaky condos, it's "buyer beware, and beware, and beware." Cadwell says he has learned so much he may be able to make a consulting business out of it.
He has summarized some of what he and the owners of another leaky condo in Chilliwack know about planning and executing what he calls a "known-cost design build" and posted it on a Web site http://www.thecondoadvocate.com/. The site also offers consulting services.
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