When i say “easy” i mean waking up at the crack of dawn to take 390 kg of asbestos shingles to the dump. This will be my last trip for a while until i start on the basement drywall and i think the bags will be lighter when i do that so i am pretty happy. I also hope to reuse a bunch of the drywall so maybe there won’t be as much. All in all i took over 1100 kg of asbestos shingles to the dump. 31 bags in all. $231 in dump fees, $200 for bags, and three trips to Delta (whatever that works out to in gas) and it is all done.
I am glad i don’t do this for a living.
We got our first set of floorplans from the architect which was really awesome. This is the first time we have seen how the basement will work which really helped Sarah who has had a hard time visualizing the layout of 2 br suite. Innes took our comments from the last meeting when we saw the 3d renderings and fleshed it all out.
Upstairs he has managed to get us our 14′ 4″ in the dining area! That will give us just enough space for a 12 person table! The only trade off is that the roofline is going to cover part of our upstairs window. That wasn’t in the original plan and it can’t really be avoided if we want to have the large dining area so we are going to have to suck that up. I put the window in so i can take it out and we are going to re-shingle anyway so hopefully we can just move it over. It is part of our long term plan to reno upstairs but we don’t want to do it now. We are also hoping to be able to avoid putting sprinklers up there right now but if suddenly we are doing work up there, that looks less likely.
The other kicker is that because we have to redo the stairs (the basement will be taller so we need an extra few feet of stairs) we have to bring them up to code. No big deal, they were a bit sketchy and had a weird twist in them. Only problem is that to bring them to code we need to make them 36″ wide. They are only 30″ right now. If you have been to our house you are probably wondering how we are going to do that. So are we. The only option we have is to move the wall in the kitchen. It is a load bearing wall. It also supports our stairs going to the second floor. This sounds expensive. It is not optional. I asked the architect if we could just pretend that we were not going to have inside stairs and apparently we can’t do that. If it is part of our “unit” then it has be accessible from inside. Ugh. Again, i will do the prep and demo the wall and hope the engineer works out a clever solution.
The basement had some odd choices but gave us a great starting point to think about what we want. Architects and designers think about space and not the cost of making the space so while i had assumed that the bathroom would be underneath our bathroom, the architect put it at the front of the house partially under our front porch to make effective use of the space around the entrance. Great use of space but more expensive to plumb. The also thing that was odd about that is that to go to the bathroom in the morning, you need to walk through the living room. We asked him to move it.
He also put in a half bath off the kitchen which wasn’t in our plan. I talked with a friend when we were out on a hike (yes i got out for a hike. I am trying to get in shape for a 135 km hike with friends in the rockies later in the summer) and she supported the idea. We also called our friend Shelly who is a fantastic real estate agent and a straight shooter. She said it is a nice feature and will let us rent it at a higher price. Sarah and i have lived our entire adult lives with only one bathroom shared with up to 4 people depending on our roommate situation. I guess we want tenants with higher expectations than we have.
The living room and kitchen will both be a decent size. He moved the suite exit to the west wall and got rid of the basement bedroom window facing north. Both of these make the backyard more private for us.
He also included a storage closet in the kitchen in the suite. We decided to axe that in favour of more counter space and maybe some room for a kitchen table. The living room came out pretty huge and all together there is almost 1000 sq feet!
Our laundry/utility area is going to be under the covered deck. I hadn’t anticipated this but i guess it works. We will also have a 7 foot x 14ft storage area under the end of the deck for bikes and lawnmower. We could build that to put a second door on it and give some room to the tenants too.
Meeting with the architect was fun and i think it is going well. He explained his choices and listened to our concerns. We should get more drawings soon!
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