house stress send-off

 

The construction of our house spanned the 13 months between my 32nd birthday and Jack’s 32nd birthday.  It was literally the fulfillment of a dream we had shared for many years, but it was also the most stressful period of our lives.

In this post I’m going to detail the worst parts of the process, not out of macabre self pity, but because I want to remember all of the things we overcame and to give myself a break for the effect that prolonged stress had on us. 

Oh and next time someone (who isn’t already a client) asks us if we think they should build a house, we’ll be able to point to the type of things that can go wrong.  My favorite architect tells me we could have had it much worse.

 

The stress came from a sour and bottomless cocktail of prolonged busyness, acute panic-inspiring revelations and on-going interpersonal conflicts.  The moments of sheer panic began about nine months after we purchased the land in the fall of 2012.  Roughly in order of descending stress they were:

• when the water wasn’t already available on the street when the easement for sewer and water through our neighbors’ side yard was rejected by the city
• Before we bought the lot, we confirmed the side sewer’s existence with the city.  The old sewer was never location during construction, so we can only assume the records were wrong.
• The real estate listing said “water available in street” and “sewer available”
• We submitted a pre-application to the city with a basic site plan and Seattle Public Utilities said we’d need to build a water main to do the project, and that there wasn’t actually a sewer so we’d need to build a sewer main too.
• We appealed and proposed an easment through the neighbor’s yard, which the neighbors agreed to verbally
• The city rejected it and said “build a main to improve the whole water system”
• We figured our another solution where we reclassified our lot and our neighbor’s lot as unit lots of a parent lot, with an easement. (See http://aglie.blogspot.com/2013/09/building-permit-first-pass.html)  We justified the absurdity of the cost of the main relative to the value of anything built on our small lot.
• SPU grudgingly agreed, at the end of 2013 http://aglie.blogspot.com/2013/12/wac-we-acquired-clearance-water.html
• when a strict interpretation of the code said we could build zero houses because we couldn’t round up to one on land use calculations
• While we were dealing with the water and sewer issues, we faced another problem with a strict interpretation of the code that said we could build an apartment complex but not a house on a lot of our size.  See http://aglie.blogspot.com/2013/09/building-permit-first-pass.html for more.
• when many neighbors chimed in on the neighborhood email group to criticize us for the exceedingly long (but totally legal) closure of the alley.  Many people did write supportive comments, but the negative ones really got to us.  I’m clearly not cut out for politics.
• the contractors schedule called for the alley to be closed for about one month, but as you can see from an irate neighbor (who doesn’t live on our section of the alley) on a large group email thread, it was over 8 months.
• Thanks for updating us, but really you just need to clear the alley and repair where you caved in road. It has been over 8 months. You need to stage your construction work on your property. It looks like there is room on the west side of the home for you to do so. That is what everyone else has done. There have been many other homes built with alley access and NONE of them have required closing the alley. Every other construction site has staged their work on the site they are building.

I am surprised the city has allowed this for so long. It could possibly impair emergency vehicles, and certainly inconveniences greatly your neighbors …

I am sure your intention is to truly apologize. But both emails have said sorry and then said why it is not your fault and how you yourself are suffering by having to pay the city to keep a public alley closed or because you couldn’t afford to higher better contractors (not nice to say about these guys that are building your home). This is not a hallmark of a sincere apology.

I am sure the city light department has good reason to legislate how close homes can be to utility poles. It is unfortunate that this didn’t come up when you designed the home. If you can afford to build your own home, close a public alley for 8 months then probably paying to get it fixed is your best option. Seems rather privileged to hope the city will "just let it go".

I know I am sounding hostile and really I am a relatively nice person but I think you just need to get your stuff out of the alley.

• when the electrical lines turned out to be too close to the already framed out house
• In March, 8 months in to construction, a Seattle City Light inspector driving by noticed that one corner of our house looked a little too close to the electrical wires.  The house has to be 10’ away, and workers have to remain 10’ away while doing the siding etc.  We had a land survey done for permitting, which marked the foot of the nearby telephone poles, but didn’t note that one pole leaned towards the house significantly.  Based on land survey, we expected the house to be parallel to the wires, however one corner was 11’ away and the other was 9’6” away. 
• This posed two problems, first that workers couldn’t continue siding because of the proximity and second that the already built house couldn’t exist, where it already did exist.  The off-the-cuff estimate from the myopic SCL engineer was something like 70k dollars to raise the poles up 17’ or so, so that the wires would be far enough away.  He suggested moving the wires away from the house on the cross piece of the pole to allow work to continue on the house that couldn’t exist.  Jack asked if that could be the permanent solution and he said it was impossible.  Jack pointed out the dozens of houses in a four block radius that are in violation of the 10’ rule.  He said “but they are already built”, as was ours.  There was an implied threat that we’d never be able to get electricity hooked up.
• After much worry and discussion (and weeks of construction delay), the solution came back to Jack’s reasonable original suggestion.  We spent about 3k to have them move the wire a bit further away from the house, on the same cross piece at the top of the pole.  
• It took three months to reach an agreement and actually get SCL to write a letter explaining the agreement that we had reached.  There was so much bureaucracy that without the letter we didn’t trust that the problem would not resurface, preventing our electrical hookup. 
• when the (admittedly long-suffering) neighbors who granted us the easement announced, in the thirteenth month, that we couldn’t bring any equipment in to dig, or disturb anything in their yard when we were already past the one year construction term granted by the bank
• We really do understand how it wasn’t a fun process for them.  They were the most affected by the whole process and the communication warp between us and them and the contractors and sub contractors and the city made things worse.
• The schedule was so at-risk that we felt our only choices were to hire a lawyer to enforce the easement, which would have been expensive and aggressive and maybe not even efficacious enough, or to pay even more money to solve the problem by boring underneath their yard for sewer and water.  We did the latter and then other neighbors complained on the group email list about one day’s worth of noise from the boring machine.
• when the permit of occupancy was finished a few days before the bank would have charged us 28k for being late, after having already given us a month of grace time
• it was completed four business days before the last minute
• http://aglie.blogspot.com/2016/08/hallelujah-we-have-our-certificate-of.html
• when the change order for the type of radiant heat wasn’t as comparable as everyone expected
• Many people gave us the impression that two types of material were similarly priced.
• The more expensive was in the plans but the less expensive was in the fixed-price bid from the contractor.
• Because of already completed engineering work and specs, we stuck with the more expensive type and it turned in to an unexpectedly expensive change order.
• The compromise with the contractor was that we bought the material directly to avoid the contractor’s mark up.
• when we had to get five other house holds to sign a document saying that we would all split costs of repair on the shared side sewer
• In Seattle home owners are responsible for side sewers repair all the way up to the connection with the main, even when it is under the street or sidewalk, and off of their property.   When houses share side sewers, the city requires them to have to have an agreement saying that the owners will split the cost of repair on the shared side sewer.  We became the 6th house on a side sewer, but through some fluke, the other five houses which already shared a sewer didn’t already have this very standard agreement on file with the city.
• We had to convince all of them to sign it.  Most people were agreeable but it took a full three months and by the end, I think some folks who were ready to sign it initially, felt that there must be some hidden downside to signing it. 
• One neighbor was told incorrect information about the responsibility extending past the property line.  The neighbor directed us to her friend, who turned out to be her lawyer.  The lawyer wouldn’t call us back at all for a long time and we became quite desperate, further souring relations.  When we finally talked to him, he hadn’t talked to her about the issue.  It was all very fishy and stressful. 
• In the end we could only get it signed by taking on another home owners share of responsibility for the shared portion.  I have never worked so hard to convince someone to do something.
• This issue really represents a lot of our troubles.  The neighbors signed three separate documents related to sewer, water and the easement.  The first was signed long before we started, during the permitting phase but we only learned of the other two from the city mid construction.   We were in a pickle, with all of our resources already invested in the house, needing signatures on closely related documents in order to proceed with construction.  We couldn’t walk away and the neighbors had no incentive to sign.  If the many many discussions with the city had made clear all of the required paperwork before we started the process, our relations with our neighbors would have had a much better start.  The plan was to do the sewer/water digging at the beginning of construction, but because of all of the paperwork delays and necessary harassment of our neighbors, it was literally the last thing that was finished.
• when the contractors demolished the rock wall shared with our neighbors and then said the rocks were too big to move causing another massive neighbor-affecting delay
• Those rocks that the contractors said were too big to deal with without an unavailable piece of equipment -  well Jack, Kirk and I rolled 95% of them to the curb and disposed of them two or three at a time in to the back’s of people’s Subarus and trucks, after posting them repeatedly on craigslist.
• Meanwhile, the neighbors dealt with the 4-5 week absence of a fence (with dogs and even less privacy than before) when they’d been told it would only take one week. 
• Jack preemptively insisted that the contractors not start on the rock wall demolition until they were sure they could manage it quickly.
• This debacle also delayed the sewer and water digging.
• http://aglie.blogspot.com/2016/06/construction-month-ten.html

The interpersonal stress was surprising to me.  For most things in life, making the best effort to do the right thing, seems to work.  What’s more, the dynamic between all of all the many stake holders in my venn diagram is just a mess.  The neighbors held us accountable for things far beyond our control.  Empathizing and apologizing didn’t help and any explanation we gave was seen as shirking responsibility, despite the fact that we were trying as hard as we could to make things go according to plan.  Being in situations where we needed things from other people, who we had only recently met, was really tough. 

Though I have no plans to do this again, the things I would do differently are:

• Believe much less of what the contractors said about schedules, from the very start.   I personally liked our G.C. but we absolutely should have had a contract with penalties for delays.
• Push back on the contractor much more on everything as it related to the neighbors.
• Ask all the questions we didn’t know we needed to ask, like “is a ground survey sufficient for the power lines?” and “is the easement paperwork the last thing we’ll need from the neighbors?”

Jack had worked in residential architecture in Seattle for three years before our construction started.  He says he would now know enough to better handle some of the issues we encountered, but many of them, like the power-line issue just come down to bad luck.

With that, I will lock up this stress and throw away the key!