Episode 56: HP Reno Review

Discover the challenges and triumphs of renovating a 112-year-old home as we bring back the builder – TQ Construction, and the homeowner, Dr Janet Simons, to review the high-performance whole home renovation project. Including lessons learned, scope creep, and pesky woodpeckers, this episode is packed with information to help you on your next home renovation.

YOU CCH THE RECORDING OF THIS EPISODE ON YOUTUBE.

Check out FortisBC to learn about their latest rebates and information on renewable energy options.

BC Housing: We’re working with partners across industry to increase the supply of safe quality, accessible and affordable homes. The Secondary Suite Incentive Program will help provide new homes at affordable rental rates for British Columbians. Learn More – www.bchousing.org 

Trail Appliances makes everyday life better. With the best selection in Western Canada, hassle-free delivery, and a price match guarantee, you’ll always get the best deal. At Trail Appliances, you’ll love buying an appliance as much as you’ll love using it.

Co-Host, podcast editor: Jennifer-Lee Gunson: jPod Creations
Co-Host, Mike Freedman, AI Technology & Design
Production: Rami Films
Distributed by Black Press Media: Today in BC.

Henri Belisle, President, TQ Construction Ltd.

Henri Belisle is the President of TQ Construction, a family-operated business founded over 35 years ago by his father Ralph Belisle. Henri is a Red Seal Carpenter trained at BCIT and is continually seeking to deepen his understanding of residential construction.
As a kid, Henri worked alongside his family in construction and developed an affinity for the design-build sector. While overseeing the day-to-day operations of the business, Henri is also 2nd Vice Chair of the Homebuilders Association Vancouver (HAVAN) Board of Directors, Vice-Chair of HAVAN RenoCouncil and Past-Chair of HAVAN Young Professional Committee.

Homeowner, Dr. Janet Simons, Medical Biochemist, Site Medical Lead, Pre and Post Analytical

I grew up in Kingston, Ontario, but also spent significant portions of my childhood in New York City, the Netherlands, and Belgium. Following my Bachelor’s of Science in Honours Biochemistry from the University of Waterloo, I completed my medical school and residency training in Internal Medicine and Medical Biochemistry at McMaster University. After my residency training, I moved to Vancouver to join the Department of Pathology and Laboratory Medicine at St. Paul’s Hospital.

In addition to my laboratory practice, I continue to enjoy clinical work in Internal Medicine. I am particularly interested in helping both the clinical services and the laboratory increase efficiency by improving communication and achieving better mutual understanding. When not in the hospital, I enjoy cycling, hiking, and exploring Vancouver’s restaurant scene.

Listen and like for your chance to win a gas BBQ compliments of our Podcast Partner FortisBC.

EPISODE 56: HP Reno Review.

JENNIFER-LEE:

Hey, Mike, we’re back with season seven, episode one. It’s been a while. How are you?

MIKE:

I’m fantastic. And, you know, it’s really, really amazing to think about the fact that we’re already at season seven and how far this podcast has come along and all the amazing guests that we’ve had and the things that we’ve learned. How far have we come? When we first started recording, we were sitting across the table like really far. We had to wear masks in here. We weren’t allowed to look at each other a certain way. And now here we are a bunch of years later. sitting around the table. And what’s really exciting is some of those initial conversations we had, we were talking about some of the challenges at getting going during that time. And now a lot of these projects are finishing or near completion. So, we get to go back and revisit some of the important decisions we talked about last time our guests were on this podcast.

JENNIFER-LEE:

Yeah, and we get to invite our old friends back to like, he’s been on our podcast a few times, but Henry Belisle, owner of TQ Construction, and he brought back his amazing homeowner, Janet Simons. Hi. Hey, welcome back guys. Thanks. A bit different, like Mike said, we don’t have two tables across from each other this time.

JANET:

It’s been a while. I don’t think I was even pregnant and now I have a one-year-old. Yeah, a lot has changed. This is how I keep time now.

JENNIFER-LEE:

It’s the before and the after. And I was just thinking about it too. I was like, I don’t even think you got permits, but I don’t think you started construction yet on the home.

HENRI:

We might have just begun the initial demolition and excavation work for the project, but it was really early days. I remember that project took a little longer than we wanted to get out of the permit. I think we were all counting the days, and the moment we started, we kind of hit the ground running.

 

JENNIFER-LEE:

Well, I feel like a big world event might have gotten in the way of that permit, but that’s okay. Your home’s done now. So now you have a baby and a new home. Yeah.

JANET:

It’s been a busy year or so for sure.

MIKE:

How long have you been living in the home for? Like when, when did these guys finish up for you?

JANET:

We moved in July. Okay. I forget when in July.

MIKE:

So, not only did you have a baby, but you got to move with a baby.

JANET:

Yeah. Wasn’t that fun? It was honestly, I would say moving with like, I think he was maybe about four or five months. That was probably better than moving when I was like eight months pregnant or something. So as timing goes, it wasn’t that bad.

MIKE:

As I’ve been told, doing almost anything is better than doing anything at eight months pregnant.

JENNIFER-LEE:

Probably, yeah. But they come with more stuff though at that point.

JANET:

Yes. Yes. And the stuff continues to accumulate, but now we have more space for it. That’s the upside.

MIKE:

Well, plus at that age, they’re not running away yet. Like you try to imagine moving with a one-year-old is bolting all the time.

JANET:

Yes. Well, we have one of those now and yeah.

MIKE:

Exactly.

JENNIFER-LEE:

There we go. So, let’s take the audience back a little bit, because we haven’t seen you since season three. And now we’re on season seven. So, it’s been a while. And like we said, we have a lot of things happening. We have a baby; we have a new home. Can you tell us a little bit about who you are and the project?

JANET:

Yeah, for sure. So, I’m a medical professional here in Vancouver. And growing up, I was sort of immersed in a lot of construction-y things with my mother, she was She did some passive houses. She was sort of project managing some project houses that were passive, lead green standards. So that was sort of how I grew up. And then she also did a big renovation of the house that we lived in as well. So, I had a lot of experience coming in with older houses, renovations, as well as sort of green building ideals. And obviously, I had a vision for what I wanted for my own house.

JENNIFER-LEE:

Perfect. And the gentleman beside you made all your dreams come true. I had a lot of help. Maybe that’s later on in the podcast where we ask you, tell us really, did Henry give you everything you want in your house? But we’ll wait till the end of that. Sure. Can you give us a little brief, we know you, Henry, but just for people that want to refresh their minds a little bit, a little brief bio about Henry and TQ. Sure.

HENRI:

Well, I’m Henry. I’ve been in the building industry for most of my life in some form. My parents started this TQ construction in the mid eighties and I kind of grew up around the business. Like a lot of construction companies, we started off pretty small building, you know, fences, decks, small additions, things like that. And then progressively grew into taking on our own projects. And even to where we are today, where we’re essentially a fully operational design build firm, where we offer turnkey services for any homeowner like Janet here. Who wants to take on some kind of transformation for their home or their property, whether that’s major or minor renovations or custom builds. We focus pretty extensively on single family properties or homes for people. So, we don’t tend to do property development or any large-scale work. But our main focus is essentially customizing homes for people to live in for a very long time.

JENNIFER-LEE:

There we go. I’m going to ask you this question first and then Janet can give us the answer. But how do you feel the project turned out?

HENRI:

I’m really proud of the end result. I think there’s a handful of things that I think we definitely could have done differently. And in hindsight, like in the lessons we learned along the way, if we had applied them at the beginning, we would actually be much better off. But I think we with the information and the and our understanding of the building and the property at the time when we started, I think we made all the best choices we could. And I definitely would think that. Yeah. I think overall we achieved our goals. And I think there’s a handful of things that I think when we were to walk through the project again, we would think like, oh man, we should have designed it that way from the start. Or that there’s a few details that we could, there’s probably was a way to make work, but we couldn’t quite figure it out in the span of construction itself, where you’re like, you’re kind of hitting a timeline, hitting a budget. And when time and money are unlimited, you can probably make it all work, but.

MIKE:

There was one other factor at play as well. You were trying to do this renovation. during one of the most challenging times to work. We had issues with labor. You couldn’t exactly go in a city hall to get your plans approved. And there were all sorts of things. And let’s be, let’s add to the fact, this wasn’t like a typical renovation. This was a heritage house. So, there was a lot of special considerations and there isn’t exactly a playbook or manual on how to do this. So, a lot of this is relying on your expertise and experience.

HENRI:

That’s right. And also, it’s, I mean, renovation is a pretty, light term for what we actually did.

JANET:

We rebuilt the house.

HENRI:

Yeah, we essentially rebuilt the house, and we lifted the existing structure, rebuilt the foundation, did an addition off the rear and reconfigured a good amount of the interior and refinished all of it, redid all the plumbing, electrical, mechanical systems. And the main reason we did it that way was because, like you said, we did the project under Vancouver’s character retention incentive plan. And so, we were able to actually have at the finish, a larger house than if we had built a brand new one on the lot. And I know that was a big incentive for you to actually get the project.

JANET:

Yeah. I mean, I think that’s the square footage, but also, I mean, there were some things about that house that were really very nice, and it would have been a shame to actually tear it down. Like I remember going in there and you see like the 25-foot-long beams, like a ceiling joist and stuff. And you’re like, you can’t get that kind of lumber anymore. And it was, it’s really nice. And like, we sistered everything. And I think we put like twice as much wood back into that house as was there in the first place.

MIKE:

Were you guys able to reuse any of the old wood? Like you sometimes hear about that repurposed, right?

JANET:

A lot of it stayed. I think like all those big beams, and everything stayed. And then, yeah, the engineers were like put eight times more wood in there. But we still did do have a lot like a lot of the original structure. That’s right. Which is nice. Yeah. It would have been a shame to just tear it down, I think.

HENRI:

Yeah. Yeah. I try to retain as much of the original structure as we can when we do projects, but as much as makes sense.

JENNIFER-LEE:

And how do you feel that the project turned out? Pretend Henry’s not listening. Give us a real tea here.

JANET:

No, I mean, at the end of the day, we really love our house, right? So, I mean, I guess that’s the most important thing. It feels like our house. We like living there. Thinking about the process, definitely there were some things that we kind of like took two steps forward to take a step, you know, like one step back, two steps forward. And there was definitely some, you know, like challenges and disagreements along the way. The neighbors got involved at one point, that was fun, you know, so.

HENRI:

That never happens.

JANET:

So, I mean, there’s all of those things. At the end of the day, the finished product, like we’re, like, I would say like 95% happy with. there’s, you know, there’s yeah there’s definitely like still some like the windows I think are still like not exactly as like sound proof as I would like them to be and but you know there’s not that there’s not that much like big stuff, although I don’t know if this goes on the podcast or not because I don’t know if the city of Vancouver is going to come after me but so do you remember that the city made us do Cedar Yes, on the front of the house.

HENRI:

On the front of the house.

JANET:

And so actually under the roof line on both the front and the back of the house is cedar shake. Yeah. Because that’s, you know, we designed it that way. And then we decided to use cedar, I guess, for both of them, rather than getting like a very small amount of… That’s right. Anyways, so the woodpeckers found it almost immediately and there was a lot of damage and your guys tried to fix it, but they kept getting in. So long story short, we just this week already have your siding guys back to just replace all that cedar with hardy shingles. So, it’s just these sorts of things where it felt and I feel it feels like some of those, I feel like this is the end of it now, but we’ve been in since July. So, it’s been a long time where I feel like little bits of the project still sort of continue, right?

HENRI:

I know we just had to drop off a new freezer for you.

JANET:

Yeah, there was a new fridge, a new freezer. Kim Mechanical is still hanging around my house. So, there’s been these sorts of growing pains. And then again, I don’t know if this is relevant to the podcast, but just yesterday, one of Louie’s guys fell off a ladder and broke his nose on our front yard. Yeah, and then sent a ladder careening across the side gate which popped off its hinges, but one of your guys just happened to be there because we had to ask Aaron to come because that side gate wasn’t working very well anyways. So then, so one of you guys, I don’t know if you heard or heard about this, but one of you guys happened to be there.

HENRI:

I talked to Aaron yesterday, he didn’t tell me any of this.

JANET:

One of you guys happened to be there, and he was like, oh yeah, I’ll just pop it back on. So just, that worked out, but yeah. Wow, okay.

SPEAKER_03:

So just a great reminder to people contemplating a project right now, make sure your contractors and your people working on your property do have insurance.

JANET:

Or when a Henry’s team is there to fix it after it goes sideways. But I guess the point of this is that even though we moved in in July, there’s still like bits and pieces of it that were going for a long time.

JENNIFER-LEE:

Yeah. Well, it takes time to get to know your new house, right? And that’s normal. Everyone will say like, oh, I just want to get a perfect house and shut the door. But when you have a great contractor, it actually shows how great of a contractor you have because they will come back and help you with different things. These things happen in the first year. And it’s nothing to do with the craftsmanship. It just happens.

JANET:

I would say definitely. At the beginning of this project, I had this very HGTV vision of you walk in and everything is perfect from day one. you know, lots of things happen, but it’s never going to be like that, right? There’s always, there’s always stuff that like is hanging on and then you do this and then you have to go back and do the other thing. And then you have to do paint catch up to the sixth time. And it’s a, it’s a cycle.

HENRI:

And because we live and like, it’s the home that you’re living in. We can’t as a, as our builder, like for us to do our job correctly, we, we, it’s not just about quality. We also have to deliver the project on a timeframe. So, you can move in when you’re moving out of your old home and all those other things. And. given unlimited time, we could probably give you that HGTV experience, but life is connected to what we do. And we have to essentially be ready to turn the house back to you and not take an extra six weeks to mess around.

MIKE:

Not only in limited time, but in limited budget too, because often those experiences are not reflective of reality.

JENNIFER-LEE:

And I’m sure once those cameras go, they have touch-ups to do too.

HENRI:

I’ve talked to a few people who worked on those shows.

JENNIFER-LEE:

We really should be asking you about all the dirt, but it’s all about Janet today. And I want to know, you talked about a few lessons learned so far, Janet, but back in the early stages, either it’s pre-planning with Henry and team or during the process, or you’d have both. Did you find, what are some of the things like key takeaways you took from it? Like lessons learned that maybe you wouldn’t, you do a little bit differently next time when you get Henry to build your next dream home.

JANET:

I would say, you know, we did, I think we did a good job with the planning. I think that there was maybe sometimes where it was, maybe there was just misunderstanding where it’s like, because we had talked about something, there was sort of an assumption that like, okay, like this is really important or this is like set in stone and we have to move other things around it. Whereas if we had maybe just like talked about it a little bit more, it’s like, oh, actually I don’t care much about that. So I guess when you’re talking about what’s important to you, it’s also, you know, important to like prioritize or say like, you know, this is a must, must have versus like, I’d really like this, but if it’s going to compromise something else, like let’s, you know, I think, I think there’s just like that. And it can be interpreted through different members of the team. Like I had that conversation with Henry, but then how does that get interpreted two or three levels down to how important is this or not? And are we going to like die on this hill or make adjustments?

HENRI:

Right. Yeah. And it’s funny you mentioning that is that one of the things I talked about, I asked the team before coming on here, I’m like, is there anything that you like, this is a pretty successful project for us. And we’re happy with the result. Like, what did you think were some of the main factors? And one of the things that was pretty consistently said was that both you and David had a pretty clear image of what, what success looked like to you. And you communicated that pretty clearly early on to us. And that made a lot of. like the challenging that what it might be challenging a lot easier. And yes, some of those things that we took, like these are the requirements for the project. They’re like, cool, this is everything we’re going to do. But then later on, as you get through the work, we find that like. Option X, Y, Z may not be as critical as our overall goal.

JANET:

Right. But and then and there’s always trade offs, right? So, it’s like understanding, like what is what are we willing to trade off for what? Right. And sometimes I think there’s so many of those decisions in a project that is this large that it can be hard to have that conversation every single time. So, there’s always a judgment is like, are you going to talk to the client about this? Are you going to make a call on their behalf based on how you know them? And so, some of those may be like, actually I would have liked to have that conversation. But I understand that like it’s, there’s just so many of those decisions points that we can’t be like constant, like I can’t, you can’t be calling me 18 times a day for every decision, right? So, I think there’s some calibration always that goes on there.

HENRI:

Yeah. We have to have act as your representative as best as we can, but we do need to get that feedback. You’re right.

JENNIFER-LEE:

And when your husband, Janet, decided to do this project, because I know you talked about keeping the existing house Henry and lifting it. Did you think it was going to get that extreme or that big of a project? Were you just like, oh, we’ll just do a few fixes here or there?

JANET:

Or were you guys like, no, we want to… No, we went into it very much. I think, ironically, but I mean, we were worried from the beginning, it’s like, okay, we’re going to start doing things and it’s going to scope creep, right? We’re like, we want to avoid scope creep. So, we have this great idea to avoid scope creep, Henry. We’re going to go in knowing that we’re just totally like lifting, re-gutting, redoing the house. Therefore, there can be no scope creep. Not at all, right? Never happened. Of course, it still happens. I didn’t even know that was an option, but yes, let’s add that!

HENRI:

And you guys started off about as well as any homeowner can about like being clear about what their scope is. So many people we work with start off with just like, hey, let’s do, we’ll start with our kitchen. And by the time we’re out of our first meeting, we’re redoing the whole main floor. And we’re like, okay.

MIKE:

It’s easy as a homeowner to upsell yourself until you see the budget and then you go back to reality. So, it’s good that you were able to maintain that balance because it is a precarious balance between, you know, what our ideal budget is and what the ideal experience. And it’s almost like a Venn diagram where the two overlap. That’s kind of the sweet spot. One of the things I really liked about this project was the fact that you’d used several energy sources, which I think is really forward thinking. And I think given their current circumstances, really smart. Can you give us some commentary on whether you think that was a good decision retrospectively? And if you had to do it all over again, would you do it that way?

JANET:

So I mean, I’m still happy with the choice. I still think it’s the right choice. So, what we did, we have a heat pump, that’s our main heating cooling. And then as our backup heat source, we have actually a hot water heater. So, we have on demand gas powered hot water heater. And then we’re that the system uses hot water from that if it needs to augment the heat pump for some reason. I still, in theory, like the system and we still have had the HVAC guys back several times because it is a new system and I think they had some programming issues with the thermostats and then I think maybe there’s something with the control panel they’re going to replace for me. So, I think there’s definitely still like, there’s like a learning curve, new technology, I think that comes with the territory. I still think that it’s like a good system. And like you said, like forward thinking and sustainable. So, I’m so happy with it.

MIKE:

To keep you warm during a cold snap in this winter.

JANET:

Yeah. Yeah. No, we’ve been warm. I’ve never been cold in my house. We had some issues where the hot water, like the backup heat system was getting kicked on while we were trying to cool the house in the summer. So that was less ideal. But they’re fixing it and iterating. So, I think there’s always that little bit of like, break in costs when you’re talking about something that’s not super mainstream. I think we were willing to accept that. And at the end of the day, I mean, it does work. The system does work, and it is efficient, and we are happy with it. And it’s not we went with the high velocity air handling, which Some people tried to like warn us off because they thought it’d be too loud in the house, but we don’t have that issue at all. And we’re really happy with how it enabled the design to be what we wanted it to be.

MIKE:

And the indoor air quality is good as far as breathability?

JANET:

Yeah, indoor air quality is good. My husband has bad allergies. So, it is, and he’s noticed like even this year, starting early, I think I mentioned his allergies this time last two years ago when I was here. But it has been good. We we’ve been changing the filters still like almost every month just because there is like all that construction dust and stuff still in the system. But it has been good for us. Yeah. We have a cat and stuff and it’s all been doing well. Yeah.

JENNIFER-LEE:

Can you just explain to us, because it sounds like something really fancy, what a high-velocity air system is?

JANET:

So basically, there’s two… Okay, I’m going to get this so oversimplified, but in my head, there’s two bits to how you heat your house, right? There’s what’s making the heat or cool, like the pump or the furnace or whatever, and then there’s how you’re circulating that through your house. We’re just talking about the air handler, which is separate from the heat pump or the furnace. You can have bigger ducts, ducts, like with a T, not a K. Bigger ducts.

JENNIFER-LEE:

I was like, you have ducts at Woodpecker? What type of farm were you on?

JANET:

You can have bigger ducts that take like large volumes of air. And so those. To get like the circulation, you don’t have to move the air as fast. So that would be like a traditional system. And then the high velocity is smaller ducks that are like maybe what, like six inches, five inches in diameter.

 

HENRI:

Yeah, enough that you can, you don’t have to do as many extensive drops in the ceilings and things like that. So, you can squeeze in between joy spaces.

JANET:

So, they’re a lot smaller, but in order to get the same amount of air flowing and recirculating through your house, the air has to come up faster. So, they’re high velocity. So, it means just the air is getting pumped through a lot faster than a traditional system. It also means that instead of like the big rectangular like air vents, the grills that you have in your house, you have these little like three- or four-inch little circles on your walls or your ceilings. And it’s a lot cleaner looking as well.

JENNIFER-LEE:

So, from a design perspective, probably a lot nicer to look at.

HENRI:

Everyone’s happier with it. And like Janet says early on, is that where sometimes people get warned off of them is that when they’re not correctly installed, they tend to whistle because you can hear the air moving fairly quickly. But our friends at McKim Mechanical did a good job.

JENNIFER-LEE:

But again, not to sound like we’re on repeat on this podcast, but it’s really important to hire the right contractor that’s going to hire the right trades to put in the stuff, so you don’t get whistling because that’s probably more annoying than a baby crying.

MIKE:

Eventually a baby grows out of it. If you don’t have the right people working on your house, that whistling stays there. I was working on a house at the North Shore And it’s the third owner and they finally found the problem and it was in the ducting behind the walls. So that’s a really great example of the sort of thing that keeps you up at night. Staying on the topic, I mean, we always talk about the big pretty stuff at the house and the big reveal and everything else, but I think this is a great place to talk about holistic health in the home. So, we talked about indoor air quality and just out of curiosity, how was it during forest fire season? Nice and breathable?

JANET:

We haven’t, I mean, I guess there were forest fires last summer.

MIKE:

It obviously worked because you didn’t notice.

JANET:

So, there we go. We didn’t have any issues last year now.

MIKE:

But one of the other things we talk about in terms of a healthy home is lighting as well. Both natural lighting and an extension of natural lighting as well. How, how do you feel about the lighting in your home as far as like the holistic benefits to you and your family and just how are you managing circadian rhythms and sleep and melatonin levels and all of that good stuff?

JANET:

Yeah, no, I mean, so one of the sort of add ons that maybe made our budget a little bit bigger that we did was we did do some home automation with the lighting right, so we have the ability to have, you know, like, between 9 p.m. and 6 a.m. the lights come on at a lower intensity, right? And we have time of day programming, so a switch might do one thing during the day, but at night you can press the same switch and you just get a dim light, you know, path down to your kitchen kind of thing. So, we’re able to, yeah, so we’re really happy with that. We are able to, you know, keep the lighting levels lower when it’s dark outside. We can also have things on programs, and we have automated on our blinds as well so we can like have the blinds open and close which is nice. It’s great when the baby is sleeping a little bit too long for his nap will like to open his blind and that sort of like naturally like, you know, get wait gets him to wake up with us going in there and like rubbing his back. So, so that’s all been really nice, and I do think promotes like yeah like you said healthy circadian rhythms. Yeah, and also, I will say that some of the lighting fixtures that we like the fixtures themselves that we chose, just like, bring me joy. Like, I just really like them. So, I just like, it’s just like nice to like walk down and like your front hall and you’re like, I love this chandelier that it’s really like, paint a picture for the audience. It is it is LED base it so we have from our front hall sort of you know like this we have like quite a bit of height and so similar to this it has like a circle that’s hanging from the ceiling and then multiple pieces coming down and the pieces coming down the pendants are black cubes that are like open and then there’s like LEDs inside the cubes and they’re all at different heights. That would make me happy too.

HENRI:

Isn’t it all like a staircase?

JANET:

It’s kind of modern but like you know contemporary but like.

MIKE:

We’d like to see a picture please.

JANET:

Let’s see if we can find one.

JENNIFER-LEE:

And of course we’ll put all the resources up on Hayden.ca.

JANET:

Of course. Yeah, so like the chandelier in our front hall, the chandelier over our dining room table, they just like make us happy and so that’s also very nice.

MIKE:

Well, I think it’s pretty easy for me to go off on a tangent and talk about technology for hours, but because I like you both so much, I won’t. Instead, what I’m going to do is I’m going to take this opportunity to have a quick break because there’s so much amazing feedback, especially when you have someone coming back and, you know, before we were talking in our early episodes about planning. how to execute a great project. Well, now we’re able to look back retrospectively. However, before we get deep into that conversation, we do have to take a couple moments to thank our amazing podcast partner. So, hold on for just a couple minutes. We’ll be right back. And we’re going to dig a little deeper into this project.

JENNIFER-LEE:

Measure Twice, Cut Once is grateful to our podcast partners FortisBC, BC Housing and Trail Appliances. Support from our partners helps us share expert knowledge and resources with families looking to build, design and renovate the home right for you. Trail Appliances makes everyday life better with the best selection in Western Canada. Hassle-free delivery and a price match guarantee. You’ll always get the best deal. At Trail Appliances, you’ll love buying an appliance as much as you’ll love using it. Affordable, accessible, quality housing is a top-of-mind issue for many British Columbians. For BC Housing, creating access to housing solutions that meets everyone’s needs is guiding principle. BC Housing is working with governments, nonprofits and residential construction industry members to create practical solutions to BC’s housing challenges. To learn more about BC Housing initiatives, programs and services, go to bchousing.org. And we all need reliable and efficient equipment for better comfort, health and safety of our homes. Whether you want to adopt some energy saving habits or take on a major energy efficiency upgrade, FortisBC can help you save energy. Be sure to visit FortisBC.com where you can also find amazing tips on low and no cost ways to save energy. Plus, great information on what FortisBC is doing on low carbon energy with solutions such as renewable natural gas. Competition alert. Listen and like this episode for your chance to win a Napoleon Prestige P500 stainless steel natural gas barbecue valued at $1,600. Compliments of our podcast partner, FortisBC. Details at haven.ca slash measure twice, cut once. Now let’s get back to our guests.

MIKE:

All right. We’re back. And during the break, Janet showed me a picture of that light fixture. Isn’t it amazing?

JANET:

It’s not the best picture because I didn’t get the top of it, but because I was taking a photo of something else.

JENNIFER-LEE:

We’ll have to get you to take one from the top for our audience for the Haven website.

HENRI:

A couple I can share with you.

JENNIFER-LEE:

There you go, some pros.

HENRI:

Perfect.

JANET:

Can I add free advertising for Trail Appliances, your sponsor that you just talked about?

JENNIFER-LEE:

Always. We love Trail. Please do. Did you get Trail Appliances?

JANET:

So, one of the things that we had happen was our very large and expensive fridge decided to sort of crap out on us like six months after install. And it’s a Genn-Air fridge. And I will say that like Trail Appliances was extremely great at like advocating for us with the manufacturer because Genn-Air, they sent the repair guy, he diagnosed the problem, He said, we need two or three pieces to fix these parts. And Genn-Air said, well, the parts are indefinitely on backorder, we have no idea when these parts are going to show up. And Trail Appliance was like, no, that does not sound like an acceptable thing. And so, there was this one person, Rose at Trail Appliances, thank you, who spent a week haranguing Jenn-Air until they sent us an entire brand new fridge.

JENNIFER-LEE:

That’s great. We love them. And actually, I’m going to plug them a little bit because they are actually going to be our last episode of the season. So, they’re going to be coming here talking about all their amazing appliances and their great customer service at the end of the season.

MIKE:

Yeah. We didn’t plan this, but thanks for the shout out. Henry, I want to chat with you a little bit because there’s the perspective Janet has, which is inside out and you’re the outside in. You’re the head of the team that brought this to bear. Obviously, you did so during a challenging time. There were a lot of constraints that were beyond your control. Hopefully we never have to go through this again in our lifetime, but nonetheless, there are some great lessons that can be gleaned from the experience. What are some of the lessons, Henry, that you learned in this project that you’ll be able to use in future projects and leverage to improve the process for the next people who come through and get a project like this of this scope done?

HENRI:

Oh man, there’s so many things that come to mind. Fortunately, I think for me and how I think about this project, none of them are like massive. A good example of like good, what seems like a good decision during the planning phase of kind of at the start and then sticking to it. It’s like a lesson we learned. And this kind of comes around to kind of the story of Janet’s hot tub and where it ended up landing. So originally, we designed it to be like recessed into the deck because that seemed like an awesome idea. Like you walk out on your deck, you can kind of like just go right and sit down into the hot tub. But then going back to our conversation about the mechanical, we then realized the only real place to put a heat pump was under the deck. And in the city of Vancouver, you can either put a heat pump at the front of the house or the back of the house. And so, most of the back of the house is already spoken for. And then we’re like, OK, well, we’ll just put the heat pump or put the hot tub on the deck, and then that’ll be fine. And then getting into construction, team realizes that actually railing heights need to be the top of the walkable surface, which would be the top of the hot tub cover, which would mean that you’d have basically like an 11-foot-tall fence on the back of the deck, which is not what anyone wants to look at. And so, the reality of the idea and the idea itself kind of slapped together and realized we needed to relocate it.

JENNIFER-LEE:

The neighbors would have loved that.

JANET:

They probably wouldn’t have minded, but it would have blocked the view from our kitchen.

HENRI:

We have a great set of windows right off of the sink that you’d be looking directly into a fence and not into the yard, which ends up being finished really nicely. And a number of other things like that. That’s a good example of like what Janet talked about earlier about us, like sticking to an idea when we probably shouldn’t have. Because originally it was like, we want the hot tub on the deck. OK, guys, we have to put the hot tub on the deck. Everyone take this very seriously. And then like as we get through it and then like construction guys are like, I just had my inspection. We have to put like an 11-foot-tall guardrail here. This is silly. Like, oh, well, we need to we need to rethink this whole thing. There’s a few other things like that through the project that we definitely learn from in terms of how we’re approaching it on the efficiency side and the airtightness side. We definitely like the detail we used to recess the stair into the basement tight against the wall could have been done a little better. It was a challenging way. We built it in a way that was challenging to air seal. Like it’s We built it the way we thought would be the best structurally, because that’s what our instincts led us to do. But then going through it, we realized that if we had basically built the stair slightly off the wall, properly sealed it there, we wouldn’t have lost as much air in the building through that one point. And that’s probably one of the larger points of failure in the house. Another thing we learned was about onboarding your drywall team correctly. We had initial, right after we did the initial drywall, like classic efficient drywaller, you put your boards up and you just cut around, you basically stick your saw and you basically cut out the holes for the windows. But what that leads to is like slight nicks on your air barriers. And so, then we had to patch that up after the fact, and it’s never quite as good as you’d hope. There are a few little things around that. I’ll tell you my biggest thing that frustrates me about this project, and I think it might be one thing that bothers you too, is that we weren’t quite able to execute the design and the laundry the way we wanted to. And that’s because basically the hardware required for some hidden doors to hide everything away, and the millwork and the framing, when you did all the math, you basically ran into the clearances and everything becoming so tight that the construction and the millwork guys were basically like, we’re not confident in doing this, we probably shouldn’t. The more cavalier version of me thinks we still definitely could probably pull this off.

JANET:

But wasn’t it also going to be like $10,000 or something?

HENRI:

And I was like, no. And that was part of it, was that the cost of the hardware for these hidden doors was like $3,000 a piece. And we’re like, God, this is insane. It’s one of those things that in hindsight, if we had put all the information together in context and really dug into a little deeper around the clearances of the hardware, the construction and the millwork and the appliances all together, we would have come up with something that works a little better. It’s the one thing I think we, when I think back on how we left it, we could have done much better.

JANET:

Yeah, I mean, that’s the kind of thing where it’s like, we were kind of in flight when it was like, oh shit, we figured out that this isn’t going to work. And then we sort of just like, okay, let’s abandon it entirely. Whereas if we had sort of done that a little bit sooner when we were in the design phase, we could have designed it slightly differently. Totally.

JENNIFER-LEE:

Yeah. And do you still enjoy your laundry room or are you like, no, this is the bane of my existence?

JANET:

No, no, no. The laundry is in the main floor, like the second-floor bathroom, which is totally fine. We just originally were going to have like these cool recess doors so that you could like block it off and you wouldn’t know the laundry’s in the bathroom. But at the same time, look, we have a baby now and we do three loads of laundry a day. So, it kind of doesn’t even matter.

HENRI:

Those drawers would have been permanently open.

SPEAKER_03:

You wouldn’t have been hiding the laundry anyways.

MIKE:

The good news is you’ll only be doing that for another 22 years.

JENNIFER-LEE:

Mike knows, he’s got three children.

MIKE:

We’re on our second washing machine in 10 years. And we bought good stuff too, ironically from Trill. So, a question for you, you know, we try not to get too technical here, but we talk about step code quite a lot. For people who are listening or watching who aren’t aware what that is, that’s just an energy efficiency that we as an industry are moving towards building. Now I know that you would originally wanted a much higher level of step code but safe to say that that house is still above significantly above existing step code. Can you talk a little about sort of that delicate dance that you had to do and where some of the compromises came in that still allowed you to achieve this, but maybe not as high as you otherwise would have liked.

HENRI:

Sure. I’d have to double check our energy model to know exactly where we landed, but my memory serves, we would land somewhere between step three and four for the way this build works, which for a house built now 112 years ago, I think it’s okay. Very significant improvement over what the original structure was. I wouldn’t say there’s a ton of, like I touched on a couple of the lessons, learned the things we would have done differently from a construction perspective. In terms of trade-offs, we had the good fortune of, under Vancouver’s character bylaw, and also the way the house was situated on the property, having a little extra space on the lot that allowed us to do some outboard insulation, so that we were able to hit our insulation targets without actually decreasing the interior floor space. And that was one through the benefit of the Vancouver’s character bylaw, but also the good fortune of the house being positioned slightly differently than initially seemed. And so, we were able to gain the extra space in the side yards. Another thing is that the windows we chose were not the most high-performing windows you could possibly get. It’s really important for Janet to have some nice wood double-hung windows. They’re beautiful. They have kind of like double-hung, so like the top part, the top pane moves down, the bottom pane moves up. It allows you to kind of really customize your airflow.

JENNIFER-LEE:

But she can still hear some noise, she said.

HENRI:

Yeah, they’re not the most airtight possible windows.

JANET:

I think that’s definitely like one of the bigger trade-offs, which is like, it was important to me that we have wood interior, first of all, right? So that’s probably not like the best way to construct a window with all the technology that we currently have.

Everyone walks in the house and be like, oh, are those original windows? And I sort of giggle at them. But that was like important to me that this sort of had the vibe and it was like respecting sort of like- And it really fits the home. And it really fits the home, right? The trade-off is, yeah, like double hung windows are probably less energy efficient and sound barrier than like your great, great, great casement windows. But I hate casement windows. Like I absolutely hate them, and they don’t fit the house. So that was like, you know, that was a decision that we made. Yeah. Right.

HENRI:

Exactly. And like a hot tub is not the most high performing part of a home, right?

JENNIFER-LEE:

And where is the hot tub now? It’s still on a deck or is it? It’s on the ground.

JANET:

It’s on the patio, like at ground level.

HENRI:

Yeah.

JANET:

And we’re actually very happy with it. It works great because we just come out instead of coming through your kitchen to your deck where your hot tub is, we come out the basement and we have like a big shower or bathroom there.

JENNIFER-LEE:

And no 11 foot.

JANET:

And no 11 foot railings.

HENRI:

Yeah. We’re all glad for that. Yeah.

MIKE:

I was going to make a joke about hot tubs.

SPEAKER_03:

He’s like, am I going to get in trouble for saying this?

JENNIFER-LEE:

Oh, I’m going to get in trouble. It’s just a question of how much trouble.

SPEAKER_03:

Well, let’s move on to a more serious thing.

JENNIFER-LEE:

So, you did talk about the fact that you were between step code three and step four. code four. Usually step code is not a requirement for renovations, but obviously you have exceeded these requirements for renovations. Can you tell us a little bit more about that?

HENRI:

Yeah, by a long shot. For a project like this for renovation, the actual requirements we’d have to meet would be pretty light. Because you’re dealing with an existing structure, you’re allowed to essentially leave parts of the home as existing and non-conforming. and then not be required to upgrade them. So, for us to be compliant and still meet like the aesthetic goals that Janet and David had for the project. Would not have been too difficult. Uh, we wouldn’t have had to made more than like, I think, uh, 50% improvement to the air tightness, which I think the time was like 14 air changes per hour.

JANET:

So, it’s like, just like visually see the outside.

HENRI:

You can like see holes in the building from the inside. And so, there was like a lot of it was fairly low hanging fruit, put it in a high performing heat pump, high efficiency boiler, better windows, you name it, you name it after that. Then it’s like. we were well beyond what the required code was for this project, like without trying very hard at all.

MIKE:

Well, and you also have to take in consideration that some of the technology you put in there, like lighting control and shades, people think of shades as aesthetic, it’s blocking light, it’s privacy. but there’s a huge amount of thermal management that goes with shade. So, if you’re going to take the time to invest in a technologically sound house at a higher level, you can further enhance that by leveraging some technology. So, it sounds like you’ve really leveraged a lot of the technology that’s available to achieve your goals, which is kind of ironic considering the fact that you can take a house as old as that and bring it up to absolutely above modern spec right now. There’s a lot of homes being built that aren’t to that level that are brand new using brand new materials, starting from scratch. which is phenomenal. Now, in order to achieve that level, obviously we have to have a conversation about budgets, right? Because you get what you pay for in this world, whether you’re hiring a fantastic firm like TQ or just trying to build a house like you’re getting and have built. Are you okay if we do a little chat about budget? Sure. Okay, perfect.

JENNIFER-LEE:

That’s usually not everyone’s favorite topic.

JANET:

It’s definitely not like the best part of the project.

MIKE:

Well, no, but it’s, you know, for somebody who’s watching, contemplating a project, they have to consider all these things, right? And just like you had to consider that from where you were at the time, it’s part of the process. It’s not the most fun part of the process, but it is still crucial. And of course, we need to talk about budget in terms of the ability to have success in your house. Because if you don’t have a good budget conversation ahead of time, you run the risk of, being a lot over budget at the end, or not even be able to do all the things you want to do. So, take into consideration a couple of things. One, this project was done during a more difficult time. There was an acute challenge getting labor on site and things like that. So, some of the results are going to be a little bit more skewed to COVID conditions than current conditions for someone starting a new home right now. Where did you land with budget? Were you right on budget, a little over, a little under?

JANET:

So, when we started this project, my long-suffering father, who’s entertained my mother through these multiple project houses of hers, said, whatever you think you’re going to spend, double it. And he was pretty much exactly right. Yeah.

MIKE:

Whatever I think I’m going to spend to build my new home, double it. Now, is that because of the nature of the renovations or because of the materials and scope of what you wanted to do there? I’m just trying to help people understand that, right.

JANET:

I think it was a combination of a lot of things. one it’s yes it’s that scope creep it’s that you know even though we thought we were planning to do the whole house up and down in and out it’s still like oh you can spend an extra hundred thousand dollars to automate everything wouldn’t that be a cool idea oh we can like upgrade this oh actually we do want that hot tub oh you know oh yeah we didn’t talk about fences you know like things just continue to sort of pile on yep And then also it was like probably at least 20 or 30% of it was just time and, you know, during like, you know, when we started the planning until we got permits, that’s a long period of time, cost of things goes up, nothing gets ordered until we actually have permits. So, there was that. And then, I mean, shit happens. Yeah, it does. It’s the rest of it, right? I mean, there’s always going to be like a 10 to 15% shit happens budget.

HENRI:

Right, yeah. For most projects, there’s always just the stuff that happens that you couldn’t see coming. And you’re right about the timing of the project. Not because things were expensive then, because things are also expensive now. But what made it challenging, talking about like the budget, the budget climbing was that we were in the middle of a massive time where prices were incredibly uncertain. And so, we were estimating based on two years of data, usually is what we do at this time. We were using between 2018 and 2020. pricing changed pretty substantially after 2020. And now it’s fairly stable, pretty predictable, but at the time we’d think, hey, this is a good number in our budget. We’ve done 10 projects using number this plus or minus 5% to then all of a sudden like, nevermind, it’s 40% more than that.

MIKE:

Wait, two by fours are nine bucks each now?

JENNIFER-LEE:

Well, that’s the thing I was saying about, so earlier before the break, you were talking about how they had to put so much more wood into the structure to hold it up and to be part of the house. But that was during the time where like, I even know my dad on the job said he’d be crying because wood was so expensive.

JANET:

It could have been worse. I think we actually hit it a little bit after. We were on the downswing. You don’t want to put more wood in there. I know. I mean, it definitely like, you know, it was bad, but it could have been worse. And timeline too, right? Like time is money too. When you just have people who need to be on the job doing stuff, but you’re not getting things like lined up the way that you want. You know, there was like the cement factory strike or whatever.

HENRI:

I had fully blocked it out of my mind.

SPEAKER_03:

PTSD is sort of shuffling that stuff out of our heads.

JENNIFER-LEE:

But like, where were you guys living to? Were you guys paying a rental cost, or no?

JANET:

No, we did own the condo that we were living in. Okay, so you’re lucky there, but some people don’t have that. It’s still months that we’re paying two mortgages. It’s, you know, it’s, you know, so yeah.

MIKE:

Henry, I’m going to ask you a quick question. This is a little bit of an aside, but I think this is good information since we’re talking about that. We are living in a time of inflation. There’s a whole bunch of extenuating circumstances that are causing the cost of things to go up. As a builder, as a project manager, how do you manage this fluctuation in price? And also, how do you communicate this with people like Janet, where you have to go, okay, by the way, those two by fours are $9, not $3, the way they were when we started.

HENRI:

That’s it. I mean, the short answer is with difficulty is how we manage it. Uh, it’s really hard. It’s really hard to do a great job of one, being aware of what everything costs on a moment-to-moment basis. And to essentially be able to forecast, forecast that. Cause like you say, it’s oftentimes we’re making these commitments or, or clients like Janet are making these commitments. And then a year later, we’re actually executing the work. And so that one of the ways we started doing that, again, a lesson that we learned from that time was essentially to put in our budget, essentially, like a line-item accounting for inflation, essentially, literally, it’s like X amount of percent of project value. between now and eight months and we zero it out at job start. And it usually covers some of it. Other things are essentially like constant and regular communication with your key trade partners and your vendors. So, I think it’s us basically checking in and making sure like, hey, you price this job. Are you, is this price still good? Now that we’re four months later, six months later and getting ready to start, as opposed to just starting to work and be like, oh, surprise, which we used to be able to do. Cause people would hold their pricing for, you know, a year, 18 months at a time because the market was fairly stable.

JANET:

Yeah, I mean, there’s definitely things like that, where it’s like, they got to the point of like, okay, we’re going to order the floor material. Oh, shit. It’s another $10,000. And it was like, okay, I guess. But it’s like, yeah, I mean, I think like maybe like one of the lessons there is like, you know, if you, like you say, if you kind of keep on with your suppliers a bit more, maybe they could tell you like, oh, it’s going to go up 50%. Do you want to put the order in? Like, are you far enough along that you could lock it in now? I think we ended up doing that with a handful of fixtures for your project and all the plumbing and electrical and I’m sitting in a warehouse for like a year.

HENRI:

So that, I mean. Because we were told that it was going to go up in price by about $20,000. And like our rep gave us a call ahead of time. Like you have this quote in our system. It’s pretty substantial. we’re going to see a pretty substantial price increase coming up. Would you like to order it now?” And I was like, I called Jen. I’m like, are you okay with we do this? We’re just going to sit in our shop for a while. But it was like a substantial amount of money was saved by just buying it ahead of a price increase that we saw coming.

JENNIFER-LEE:

That’s why you need to work with great professionals that are going to tell you these things. Janet, as a homeowner, you went above and beyond the requirements for your home when it comes to being more eco-friendly. What are some things that you learned from that, like that you would pass on to other homeowners that What about that? Because obviously you’re very happy with your home. Your husband’s allergies are good. You feel good in the home. You love, even though, you know, the light fixture doesn’t really give you anything, but it gives you happiness, which is a mental health benefit.

JANET:

You’re good. What’s an LED light fixture?

JENNIFER-LEE:

So, it’s also an energy efficient. Sorry. See, you thought about every detail.

JANET:

So, there you go. I mean, I think, I think I said this last time. It’s like, for me, it’s really about you know, thinking about, you know, 20 years from now, are you still going to feel like your house is up to modern standards, right? Where if you’re, if you’re really doing something for the long term, you can, you can build it to today’s standards and it’s going to feel 20 years old and 20 years from now, or 40 years old and 40 years from now. And we sort of wanted it to be like, yeah, like in 20 years, maybe we like, we’re going to repaint it. But in that time, we might like, you know, refinish the floors, but it’s going to be like, the house is going to still feel safe, warm, dry, cozy, quiet, all of these things. And we’re not going to get into redoing mechanicals and things like that. So that was, I think, really why it made it worth it for us to be thinking a little bit ahead of where we are now, knowing, like, we all see where things are going in terms of sustainability, energy efficiency, and all of that.

JENNIFER-LEE:

You just might be buying a 12-person hot tub in a few years.

JANET:

Sure. I mean, whatever, the hot tub.

JENNIFER-LEE:

And Henry, as a builder, any thoughts about us lessening our footprint? Short answer though, because I know this could be a long answer.

HENRI:

How much time do we have? In terms of lessening our footprint specifically, the best thing you can do is to do less. And that comes down to like whatever the version of your project is that makes the most sense. And when I say do less, I mean like preserve as much of the original building as possible. So, the main sources of, energy loss in a building are essentially like the recreation of the product. So, it’s keep your original foundation, work with the wood you have, upgrade the insulation, make those steps. And then like Janet and David did a great job of thinking like a way a lot of builders would think about their own homes. and that you invest in the infrastructure and the envelope, and then you decide to deal with the rest. And so having a good mechanical system, well-plumbed, well-wired, well-insulated, warm, comfortable, healthy home, in my mind, should be everyone’s first priority. You can change your flooring, you can change your cabinets, you can change your appliances, all those things much easier down the line than you can to change your plumbing or your heating and cooling system.

MIKE:

A lot of great information today. And I really, you know, this was an exciting episode, not only to have both of you back in here where life has taken you, but also some of the things you talked about. I mean, clear communication is one of the backbones of what we talk about here, but you both really illustrated clearly the importance of two-way communication. Both of you had a clear line of communication with each other. What that did is that led to alignment, which led to better results. You also talked about getting everyone on the same page. So, in this case, it was the high-performance page. And you talked about your drywall are not really understanding the nature of how this house was built. And that again, underscores communication. And finally, I think the thing I’m taking away most from this is even though we’re building today, don’t build for today’s standards, build for tomorrow’s standards, because most assuredly in 20 years, you’re going to have a 20-year-old house. What you have in terms of options and what you could do with that house all depends on some of the decisions you make today for tomorrow. And as always, we just love having you guys on. You’re such phenomenally good guests, so candid, and you’ve shared a lot of these lessons you’ve learned. Couldn’t have thought of a better way to kick off season seven.

HENRI:

Thank you.

JENNIFER-LEE:

Yeah, we love it. And before you guys go, I know you guys have given so much information, but if you could each give one tip to the homeowners about this particular project, keep this as your guide of something that you would let them know about.

JANET:

I mean, I think for me, it was really just staying really involved as the homeowner every step of the way. You know, a lot of communication, but also so I just had a good, like, I think we, I had a really good sense of what I wanted it to be. And so, I was just present and consistent and like, yep, this isn’t looking what how I want it to be this, you know, like, can we talk about this and

HENRI:

Yeah, I think you nailed it. And it is the clarity of communication and also the consistency of it. I think, Janet, you did an incredible job of being clear about what you wanted to see at the end of the work and maintaining that as a consistent theme of all the decisions we were making collectively, whether it was myself or anyone else on our team, Sam, Aaron, Rebecca, whoever. And having that kind of show up consistently and being like clear and be able to communicate it clear, like, well, like an articulate way that other people understood makes everything a lot easier to be successful. And I think if any homeowners thinking about taking on a project, the best advice I can give is to be sure about what the things that really matter to you and then be candid with everyone you’re working with about those things often.

JENNIFER-LEE:

That’s great advice.

MIKE:

Jan, I got a question for you. Do you have a barbecue on the property yet? We do. You do? Okay. So, you’ve just underscored one more valuable lesson when you’re doing a project is to get a good barbecue. Now, for those people watching and listening who don’t have a good barbecue, it’s your lucky day. See, here’s the deal. All you got to do is like and listen to this episode. And we’d love it if you tell your family and friends as well, but for sure, like, and listen to this episode. And you have a chance to win a Napoleon Prestige P500 stainless steel natural gas barbecue valued at $1,600. Compliments of our podcast partners, FortisBC. All you got to do is go to haven.ca slash measure twice, cut once. There’s all the details there, as well as our past episodes, like the one with Henry and Janet, and you can win a barbecue and get some great information.

JENNIFER-LEE:

And for notes and links to everything mentioned on today’s episode, including that awesome lamp or not lamp chandelier. I just got so excited about it that Janet shared with us, as well as other resources that Henry shared as well. Go to havan.ca/measuretwicecutonce. Thank you to Trail Appliances, FortisBC, BC Housing, Rami Films, Jpod Creations, and AI Technology and Design. It takes a team to build a home and it also takes a team to build a podcast. Thank you for joining us. See you next week.