We’ve had something of a gap in major reno work over the last few days as we wrestled with the city about interpretations of arcane details of building codes, and whether we needed to install a plastic vapor barrier between nice new insulation and yet-to-come drywall. The spouse, the architect and the engineer all argued that the insulation itself obviated the need for additional layers, and the engineer provided scientific documents to back this up. The architect, for his part, offered chapter and verse on a house not far from ours where the city conceded that it didn’t need the extra work. But what power do those three have when up against the City Building Code, even if the city lets its voicemail boxes clog up, and spends a week not replying to our increasingly frantic pleas?
To cut the long story short, the city won, as you always knew it would, and spouse and helpers spent three days stretching heavy duty plastic over wood and foam, with a particularly evil, cloying black gunk as the glue between the two.
Black gunk, after several attempts at scrubbing it off
Lessons:
- Don’t necessarily trust city planner when he offers assurances that a precedent has been set, and things are going to work
- Don’t pay extra for an engineer’s letter you are not going to need
- And accept from the start that the People With Power will win.
If wouldn’t hurt quite so much, but for the fact that the inspector looked in bafflement at the newly installed vapor barrier, and wondered why we had done it anyway. “I thought you were doing foam,” he said.
Well yes. So did we.
In the grand scheme of things I suppose it’s not a huge deal. We lost a week, and we’re adding a few percent to the overall cost of the transformation in the form of the letter, the time and the materials.
But the kitchen supply store tells me that another kitchen buyer had its own city-induced delays, so that buyer is taking the week that was penciled in for our kitchen delivery, and ours moves back into mid September, with the countertop set to arrive a couple of weeks after that. Then it will start looking like a home
Next up:
Drywall, tiling and design decisions on whether there’s anything we can do to create a coat closet on the 1st floor, and how we build the 3rd floor Murphy bed that will form part of a wall of cupboards on the opposite side of the room to my office space. It will be a good bed in a perfectly air conditioned room, so we might even move in there ourselves during heatwaves.
Would-be guests take note (of the bed, not of its unavailability during a heat wave).
