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What's Inside
March, 2008
Renovation nightmare – avoidable?
John Fretz
Can the renovation nightmare be avoided? Experience helps, but who in their right mind would want to do it again? The builder who meets deadlines is a rarity unless you are in the “by appointment to the Queen” league.
In November a few years ago, my wife and I thought it would be a relatively uncomplicated and affordable proposition to make our basement usable by gyprock-ing the ceiling, putting in a no-frills bathroom and upgrading to copper pipes.
So we find someone on the recommendation of a friend (ex-friend), who reassures us that the job will be done by Christmas. The relationship starts out promising — we discover common interests, and get along fine.
His mantra is: “I got a crew standing by.” What crew? The one that’s always off on other jobs and mysteriously shows up at random times only to slip away a half hour later to some infinitely more pressing commitment.
Our contractor proposes digging down ten inches to give us more headroom. “Isn’t that complicated?” we ask in all sincerity, forgetting to ask about the effect on the budget. “Three guys, one day,” he says. At this point, we’re no longer rational.
“I know these homes,” he reassures us, but doesn’t check the depth of our common wall.
Fast forward to February. Three days, two boulders and six men later, with the basement windows open 24 hours a day to accommodate an excavation ramp, the common wall, dividing us from our very nervous and by now hostile neighbour (with cracks in his wall), is sitting on a bank of oozing mud. It’s Venice à Montréal.
An urgent, terse exchange ensues between the contractor, a structural engineer and us. The contractor agrees to buttress the brick wall with cement “at his own expense”.
On top of this, the once pleasant plumber has turned sullen. Unbeknownst to us, costs have gone through the roof, or in our case, the basement, and he insists on being paid $15,000 for a job that we were told would cost $5,000 “tops”.
We were actually told that if we wanted the contractor to control costs and meet deadlines, why hadn’t we said so? To make a long, sad story short, by March, the basement was finished and we learned that everything cost twice what we thought it would and took three times as long, and that we were seriously wanting in business management skills. Thinking of renovating? Think Zen.
