Chapter 11 of 13
If the framing chapter is about building for other people, this one is about the houses that were John’s own — and about the plain pleasure a self-reliant man takes in doing everything himself and handing nothing to anyone he doesn’t have to.
A good deal of it is a run of standoffs with building inspectors, told with relish, in which John more than once ends up teaching the city its own code. But the heart of it is quieter: the house next door he bought with a phone call and a handshake, the tenants he could not bring himself to evict, and a lifetime’s proof of a simple sum — that the money is made not by earning it, but by not paying anyone else to do what you can do with your own two hands.
By the time we were done building this house, I thought I’d have a nervous breakdown. I mean that. All the fighting with the engineers and the building inspectors, all of it, by the end I was about wrung out. And I’ll tell you straight, I’m done. Done for good. I built houses my whole life for other people, and a few for myself along the way, but this last one, the one I’m sitting in now, this was the one that near finished me. It wasn’t the work. The work I could do all day. It was the fighting over the work.
It started right at the footing. I had the footing engineered and laid out proper by site surveyors. Paid them nine hundred dollars to come and do it, certify the whole thing by code. Everything done right, every bit of it by the book. And then the city tells me I can’t pour. I’ve got to wait till Monday for an inspection. Now I had everything ready to go, men and concrete and all of it. So I phoned the city hall and I got the manager, Peter.
“Peter, who’s got the right to tell me I can’t pour? I’ve done everything by code. Site surveyors, certified, the whole works,” I said.
And I told him they could take that bylaw and shove it, and he knew where I meant. Next day, by noon, we had the pour approved. That’s how that one went.
Then they sent a building inspector around, a fellow named Kevin, and he comes walking around my foundation with a tape measure. Now you can’t do that. Once the site surveyors have certified the layout, the building inspector’s got no business running around with a tape, measuring this and measuring that. That’s a no-no. But he did it anyway. Walked the whole thing, measuring. So I went out and I confronted him on it, and he left. Then I phoned the department and I told them straight: “Kevin is not allowed on my property.” And that was the end of Kevin.
Then there was Rudy. Rudy was the plumbing inspector, and he rejected my rough-in. You know why? The dishwasher and the stove, where they were going to sit, I’d only marked the spots on the floor. I was prepping for a finish that came later, so I’d marked it all out, this is where everything goes. And I wasn’t even there when he came around. So Rudy rejects the whole thing over that and leaves me a notice. Well. I took that notice down to the city hall, and right in front of Peter I crumpled it up in my fist, like that.
“You can give this to Rudy and he can shove it, and he knows where. I don’t want to see Rudy on my property ever again,” I said.
So that was two of them gone.
There was a foundation inspector, Lorne. Lorne comes up.
“John, you didn’t fill your tie holes,” he says.
“Lorne, I don’t have to,” I said.
He didn’t believe me. So I got the code book out and I showed him the honeycomb rule, right there in his own book, and once I did that, nobody brought it up again. The man was a foundation inspector, standing on my own house, and I had to teach him his own code.
Take the deck railing. That one changed around 2006. For years, all the way up till then, the rule was if your sun deck was six feet off the ground, your railing had to be forty-two inches. Then they changed the whole works. Now you measure from the finished ground up to the top of the deck. Six feet, forty-two inches. Five feet or under, thirty-six. And under two feet off the ground, no railing at all. Even Peter didn’t know it had changed. He’s the manager, been in this business years and years, and he looked at the code.
“John, you know what, I didn’t even know that’s what it said,” he said.
So there I was, teaching the city hall their own rules.
Now I’ll tell you why I put up with all of that instead of handing it off. The way Grandma and I made our money, our whole lives, was doing everything ourselves. On our own house we never once hired a painter. Not one. I did all the finishing, she did all the painting. That’s how it always was with us.
And it adds up. It adds up to real money. Let me run it for you. The foundations, I did them all myself for eleven hundred bucks. Eleven hundred. If I’d given that off to a contractor it would’ve cost me ten thousand. The painting, the two of us did the whole house in a couple of days, and hiring that out would’ve run eighteen, twenty thousand dollars. We did it ourselves. So when it was all said and done, this house, built by hand, cost us about four hundred and fifty thousand dollars. Hire out all the subtrades, every bit of it, and it’s six hundred thousand or more. That’s the difference. A hundred and fifty thousand dollars, just for doing your own work and putting up with the inspectors yourself.
Now I’ll tell you one more, and this one I have to be honest about, because honesty is the thing. The final inspection, my own upstairs. The inspector’s going around and he points out the code wants twelve-inch tile around, and I’d only put in six-inch. I didn’t know that. I’ll be honest with you, I did not know it.
“John, I’ve got the feeling you’re not going to do anything about it,” he says to me.
“You’ve got the right feeling. I won’t do a thing,” I said.
And he looked at me, and he could see I meant it. And he passed it anyway. I told him the truth, I didn’t know and I’m not changing it, and he passed it. That’s the way it goes sometimes when you don’t try to put one over on a man.
Now the house next door — that’s a different story, and a good one.
It’ll be September first that Grandma and I have lived in this house eighteen years. And back in 2012, the neighbor wanted to sell the place right next to us. We didn’t have the money for it. Didn’t have a cent toward it. But I went down to the bank.
“I need three hundred thousand dollars,” I said.
And the bank said, “Here it is.” Just like that. A line of credit, three hundred thousand, held against our own house. Our house was good for it, so they gave it to me.
Now the owner, he wanted three hundred and fifty thousand. I said no. “I’ll pay no more than three hundred.” And here’s the thing. I knew things about that house that he didn’t know mattered. The electrical panel in there was illegal. Down in the basement the wires were hanging all over the place, just hanging everywhere. So I knew what I’d be getting into, and I knew what it was worth, and I wasn’t going a dollar over three hundred.
The realtor he had was a big outfit, the one from up north with all the equipment. And in the end that realtor phoned the owner and told him to take my offer. Then he phoned me back.
“John, give me an offer so I can close him up at three hundred as it sits,” he said.
“Okay. No inspection, no subject,” I said.
And I’ll tell you, there’s a big difference in what a man will go for when you come at him with no subject on it. No conditions. Cash, as it is. I knew I had the money. I’d already talked to the bank, everything was in place. When a man knows you’ll close, clean, no fooling around, that’s worth something to him. So I got it for the three hundred.
Then I put about twenty-two thousand dollars into it. I knew going in roughly what I’d spend, and that’s about where it landed. There was no bathroom downstairs, so I put a nice one in, a bathroom with a shower and all of it. Drywalled the whole thing through. Put a couple more windows in. By the time I was done, twenty-two thousand.
And that place is worth over a million dollars now. One million, right beside me here. I figure the lot alone could fetch around nine hundred thousand, just the dirt. There’s a fellow thinking about coming in and tearing it down and putting up a brand-new big one on the lot. And you know what, that wouldn’t bother me one bit. Tear it right down. Doesn’t matter to me. The land’s the land.
But the best of it wasn’t the money on paper. It was the tenants. We rented that house out and we were blessed, just blessed, with a top-quality couple. Class A1 tenants, that’s what they were. In twelve years they gave us about two hundred thousand dollars in rent. And never once a problem. Nothing. Not one thing. The house was so clean I wouldn’t even walk into it. That’s the truth. I didn’t go in their house, that’s how nice they kept it. And if something needed fixing, he just fixed it himself. Didn’t even call me. You don’t find that. You don’t find tenants like that.
We could’ve given them notice a long time ago, if we’d wanted to. We talked about it, even. But we couldn’t do it. I couldn’t bring myself to do it. They were so happy in there. They always told us, “John, unless you kick us out, we’re not moving.” And the school was right close by for their kids. So how do you put people like that out on the street? You don’t. I couldn’t. So they stayed, and they were good to us, and we were good to them, and that’s the whole of it.
People ask me sometimes how many houses I lived in, and I can walk you right through them. The first one I built and lived in was on Lilac, back in 1971. Then there was one on Leburn. One on Ash. One on Walmsley. Two in Chilliwack, built them both and lived in them both. And then this one, the one I’m in now, the one that near killed me to build.
There was one I didn’t build, though. The Rainbow house. That one was put up in 1972, but I bought it, I didn’t build it. And we did a lot of renovating on that place. I put about ten thousand dollars into it. It had the real old casing in it, the old doors, and I ripped everything out. All the baseboard, the casing, every bit of the flooring, the whole works. And I put everything in brand new. Brand-new kitchen cabinets, the whole thing done over fresh. By the time I was through with it you wouldn’t have known it was the same house.
So that’s the houses. The ones I built, the ones I bought, the one next door that made us all that money and gave us those good people to look after. I built for other men my whole life, over two hundred of them. But these ones were mine. And I’ll tell you, I’m glad I’m done now. I’d do every one of these over again though. Every one of them. It’s only the fighting I’d leave behind.