Owner Builder

It’s important to make sure that you get everything that you agree to with your contractor in writing. Really! Every little detail, every change, even the details of the types (and sometimes colour) of materials. This can be done with appendices to your main contract.

There are a lot of shady people who seem to gravitate towards fields where people aren’t educated about the issues involved, and one of these areas is construction. I won’t talk about mechanics and law. You have to protect yourself, and the best way to do this is to make sure that you have everything in a contract. Cover the basics in your main contract (available here), and use addendums or appendices to cover anything unusual or any specific details, such as material lists, unusual timelines, change orders, and so forth. (I’ll be posting a copy of a change order form you can use later).

When you’re doing the contract, it’s best to have an impartial witness available, at least for your part. If any of your contractors are incorporated (they are, aren’t they?) then a corporate seal holds up in courts to the same effect that a witness does. So, they can use that in lieu of a witness. Don’t really stress about that, since in most jurisdictions (even in the USA) the contract is still binding, whether there are witnesses or not. This just makes it easier to prove, should you have to. And I hope you never will have to!

Remember, if it isn’t written down, it wasn’t agreed to!

Once the cribbing was done, then we had to get the foundations up. Of course this seemed to go great! However, once we pulled the frames off the concrete, I saw that the window frames had been hard-set into the concrete. This is really a stupid thing to do in most circumstances, because you can’t change the frames or windows after that. And (naturally) they put the wrong frames in. Therefore we had to have them bring in the windows to fit the frames they had set - and they paid the difference, since the windows they set were slightly more expensive than that ones that I had ordered. These guys just made an assumption based on the drawings and the window sizes - they knew who I was talking to about windows, but didn’t realize that I had ordered the final set from another supplier and had never really ordered from the original company I was speaking with. That was because the same size windows were cheaper from someone else. Go figure…

The cribbers were nice guys and easy to work with. I was there for the pouring of course, since I had to pay the concrete supplier and get the invoice from the pump truck. This is basically co-ordinating three different subcontractors to all show up at the same time to do their work. While that took a bit of juggling (basically about 10 phone calls back and forth to find a time that worked for everyone). By the way, the most difficult one is the concrete. So, what I did was find a bunch of times that the cribbers could come, then the concrete, then the pump truck. Eventually it all worked out, and the co-ordinating really took less than half an hour.

Well, they got everything poured and set, and everything looked great. But the cribbers screwed one thing up. They lost where they had put the pipe for the sump pump under the cribbing! It had simply disappeared. They hadn’t marked it ahead of time (mistake 1), they put it directly into the footing (mistake 2, ideally it will go just under it), and then they also had the pipe cut shorter than the width of the foundation footing (mistake 3). After the walls were up, we had to dig a hole under the footings to put the sump pump pipe in. And what a pain that was! The cribbers ended up doing that, at their cost.

Once the approvals were in, the excavators were booked and sent the approved plot plan for excavation and digging of the basement. This was interesting, since they actually showed up and started doing the work before we even had a contract! While that was nice, it was a bit disconcerting to go out to the site and see a backhoe digging out the basement without knowing he was going to show up.

So, that part went well, and I booked the cribbers right away. I used the same guys for cribbing as I did for the foundation walls… What a fiasco these guys were!

The Devon project had a mistake right from the start, before I even had approvals. The drawings from the architect didn’t comply with the town’s lot coverage regulations.

In dealing with the mistake that was on the plans, measuring and knowing lot coverage is the architect’s responsibility. Before you do a drawing that is to be used for approvals, the architect is required to have a copy of the plot drawing (also called a plot plan). So, of course the architect had this. It is the architect’s job to make certain that the initial plans given by the designer (in the owner-builder case, that’s usually you) complies with any site regulations in regards to size, height, and so-forth. With the Devon home, he didn’t. So what did I do?

I had him go back and redo the drawings according to my instructions to make it smaller.

And he had the audacity to send me a bill for correcting his own mistake. He was never paid that extra bit. However, we were unable to recover the extra cost the surveyers charged us for having to approve the plans twice.

This kind of error was something that I’d never come across before. I learned a lot about that step in the due diligence process. And hopefully somebody else will learn from this, too.