Published on
June 29, 2007 in
House.
Time for another update, I wish I could say it was good news. We were hoping to have at least started on the driveway and house pad by the end of June but it’s looking unlikely now. We bought out developement permit the end of last week and got all the info to our mortgage broker.
Last Friday I got a call from her where she suggested we go through CMHC, even though we have a 25% downpayment and can go with a standard mortgage, because the rates would be comparable and dealing with CMHC would somehow be easier. It wasn’t. Early this week she called back with some questions from CMHC on the strawbale construction and asked if we had experience in building with strawbales. I replied no, but it being infill only it shouldn’t be an issue. She said ok, and said she would talk to the CMHC. The next day she sent us an a-mail stating we would need a structural engineer to review and stamp the drawings and be present at each of the draw inspections.
I was, and still am, quite confused at this request as our building structure is being built with conventional stick framing that exceeds the NBC requirements. It seemed an arbritrary requirement and suggested that the CMHC representative didn’t have enough info on what we were doing to make informed recommendations. The fact that they did anyways, and one that adds considerable costs and delays to the start of our project seems irresponsible and unprofessional to me and I said so in a reply to our broker.
More after the fold.
Continue reading ‘House Update – permits and mortgages’
Waste and inefficiency is by far the biggest contributor to climate change and pollution. If we still exploited cheap energy in the form of fosil fuels and still utilized man made amterials such as plastics for the last 50 years but used them efficiently and without waste and world would be in much much better shape.
The next time you go by a construction site, if you can (without putting yourself in harms way) look inside the dumpsters on site. Besides the waste from packaging you’ll vast amounts of still usable building materials simply thrown out because it is more cost effective to get rid of them than store them for future use on other jobs. I have taken 100′ coils of rope, pallets of polyicoanurate roof insulation, glazing units for windows ordered the wrong size, tools and more from job site dumpsters all over in my career in construction/design.
More after the fold.
Continue reading ‘Building Material Waste’
This morning I started week nine (the final week) of the Couch to 5K running program. Week nine is three days of 30 minute runs (3 miles at my current pace) and the first run felt good. I have started looking into what to do after the C25K program is done, some people choose the One Hour Runner program (OHR) others the Hal Higdon Spring Training prgram (HHST), they are similar programs in intensity except the OHR continues the 3 day a week schedule while HHST goes to 4 days a week. I am leaning towards the HHST program as it seems to be the best option for overall fitness levels.
Tomorrow morning we are meeting with our mortgage broker! Hopefully everything goes alright, we still have a few items in our estimate with allowances but these shouldn’t be major issues as we know the approximate costs. If all goes well tomorrow afternoon we could be lining up contractors and ordering materials! I fit doesn’t go well, well I guess we’ll decide what to do then.