Water catchment followup

It's been an entire year since installing my rainwater catchment system, so I thought it was time to write an update about how it worked out.  The short answer is Great!!

My 2500 gallon water tank was filled up by the rain from the first storm of the 2016-17 winter season.  I used the water for watering all my plants the rest of the year, including 10 fruit trees, my vegetable garden, ornamental beds, indoor plants and for my chickens.  By the next rainy season, I had only used about ¼ of the tank.  I was frugal with my water use but now I know I don’t need to be. 

My worry about draining the tank didn’t happen thanks to the simple wrist reminder.  I put an elastic band on the tank valve and whenever I turned on the valve, I put the band on my wrist.  It was amazing to me how many times it was necessary.  I’d leave the vegetable area thinking I was going to shut off the water; the next thing I knew I would be in the house and noticed the band on my wrist.   I never actually left the water running when I wasn't in attendance, but the valve at the tank has a small drip, so if isn't shut off, it could conceivably empty the tank, though it would take a very long time.

I had a hose going to the vegetable garden beds with a shut off valve on the end.  I used the hose to water the vegetable beds.  It was slower coming out of the hose than from the tap because of the lower pressure, but did the job.

Unfortunately I don't have pictures showing my amazing tomato plants.  Thanks to the block wall at the back of my property, I have the perfect spot to grow tomatoes.  The wall is south facing and provides the extra heat the tomatoes need.  My plants quickly outgrew their 5' cages and produced tomatoes into January!  and people say you can't grow tomatoes in Half Moon Bay!!  Beets also did exceptionally well.  For perennials I have rhubarb, strawberries, blueberries and huckleberries.

The rest of the backyard is heavily mulched.  In the mulch I planted pumpkin, cucumber, squash, artichoke, and of course, my fruit trees.  I watered everything using buckets or a hose from the tank and was rewarded with enough produce to share with family and friends.  

My front yard is also heavily mulched and is planted with native plants.  The plants grow so well that they need a lot of pruning but little to no water.  I also have a small rain barrel in the front yard.

I use no water from the city for landscaping and am also very careful with what I use indoors.  Last year I used 6 units of water.  A unit is 748 gallons.  That comes to 4488 gallons for the year or 12.3 gallons per day.  Yes, I'm only one person, though I sometimes do have company.  However, I expect they are careful with their water usage knowing my values.

Do you know how many gallons you use a day per person in your household?

One way to determine how much you use for landscaping is to compare your usage in the rainy season versus the usage in the dry season.  The difference should give you a good idea of what you are using for your landscaping.

I designed my new house to use 3 rain catchment tanks.  Because of my experience from last year, I will only need a fraction of the water in the tanks for landscaping, so I need to use the water in other ways.  My plan is to use the rain water from one or two of the tanks for toilet flushing and laundry.  This will require the tanks to be connected to the city water, which in turn means I will need to install back flow preventers.  I will have to have the plumbing redesigned and the tanks will need to have pumps installed.  It will take a fair amount of planning, but should be worth it in the end.  I'll let you know, if and when it happens.

Happy watering.... or happy NOT watering!!!

The Nightmare Phase

It has been a looooong time since I last wrote about my house building plans.  I haven’t written because I didn’t have much good to report. My dreams turned into something of a nightmare.  Let’s just say, to put it nicely, the architect failed to deliver on his promises and apparently there isn’t much I can do about it. 

Lessons learned--

1.    Make sure your contract has some details in it, including--

a.    A payment schedule such that the final payment comes after the work contracted for is completed.

b.    Some kind of deadlines with penalties if they are not met.

c.     Legal remedies for breach of contract.

d.    And the ability or foresight to modify or append the contract if things change.  

2.    Insist on references and don’t rely on what you read and see.

3.    Use a local designer/architect that you can sit down with to work on your plans.

4.    If you are in California, make sure your architect is up on the latest Title 24 requirements as it can affect the design of the building and/or hire a good Title 24 engineer.  Work with the Title 24 engineer sooner than later.

5.    Don’t get the engineering done until the plans are finalized—including Title 24.  

The stories behind the lessons--

1.    My contract for the “schematic design phase” is one page long, which is unheard of these days. It is obvious that my architect wrote it without the help of an attorney.  Being the trusting person I am, and not having done this before, I didn’t question it.  

a.    The contract has a dollar limit which was reached and paid in the first year of this 2 year process so there was no incentive on the architect’s part to complete the work stipulated in the contract.  

b.    The contract says this phase is “anticipated” to take 3-4 months—far from a promise or commitment.   In actuality it took 26 ½ months.

c.     My attorney tells me that I cannot recover the cost of a lawsuit because such a contingency is not in the contract and the cost of a lawsuit would be more than my damages.

d.    I did make some changes to the original design.  At the time, Peter was encouraging and supportive of the changes and said they would negligibly affect the cost and time of the project.  Since then, he has blamed the delays on the changes.  If the changes I requested would impact the time and cost, he should have told me at the time rather than using them as an excuse for delays, etc.  I could have chosen to forgo the changes or we could have amended the contract.  By the way, I do not believe for one minute that the changes significantly impacted the delays.

e.    My architect had only 2 of the 5 things the architectural licensing board requires in a contract.

2.    When I was considering hiring the architect to build my house, I based it on several things. The first thing was the design, second were the details of the cost and construction process on the LogicalHomes website, and finally he won me over with his charm and enthusiasm.   At the start I asked to see some houses he had built and questioned why there were no pictures on his website of actual houses—rather than just renderings.  He never responded to my questions and had excuses for not showing me the factory or finished houses.  I regret now that I did not press for more information.  I have to admit I was also swayed by his media presence, which includes being written up in Dwell magazine and appearing on the news as a promoter and builder of shipping container homes.  If he has actually built a prefab house as described on his website, I have yet to see it.

3.    The great majority of our communications have been via email and phone.  In the 2 plus years since I first contacted the architect, we have actually met face to face only 3 times.  We met the first time in a Starbuck’s where we discussed my goals and discussed the placement of the buildings on my lot.  I thought that was extremely helpful.  The second meeting was when he came up for the design hearing. While the hearing went smoothly, there was no time to review the plans because he was off to another meeting.  The third time we met was Nov 2016 when I flew down to LA to actually see a custom house (not one of the prefabs) under construction and the factory he wanted to use.   While both were interesting, my request to sit down with him and go over the plans never happened.   I’m curious to know how many architects never go over plans with their clients in person.  My guess is very few, if any.

4.    Title 24 is worthy of its own blog.  In short it is the California code for energy efficiency standards of a building.  It takes an energy modeler or Title 24 engineer to determine a building’s compliance.  Apparently there are good energy modelers and not so good ones.  The cheap ones manipulate the report to get compliance, which is what we had, but the inaccuracies were caught during plan check. When we went back to the person who did the report, he said he couldn’t do it and to find someone else.  The energy modeler we hired next worked with us to modify the building to get compliance.  The architect’s design included metal studs.  That along with the metal shipping container walls is not good news.  We had to change to wood studs and up the insulation to get compliance.  These were changes he blamed on me.

5.    The cost for the engineering was not included in the contract.  After the engineer did the structural drawings and calculations, he had to go back and make changes on 2 occasions, for which I had to pay extra. The first time was for a condition in the design approval that the floor of the house be 12” above the crown on the street.  The engineering was already done before I was aware of the impact of this condition. Because my lot slopes slightly down from the street, this meant the house would have to be 3’ above the ground. The idea of having to have steps out all the doors was very disturbing to me.  I looked around the neighborhood and could not find one house on my side of the street that met that requirement.  I went to the city planners and asked them to explain to me the purpose of it and to show me where it is in the building codes.  They guessed it had something to do with flooding, but could not find it in the codes.  The requirement was eventually waived and the foundation plans had to be redrawn.  The second time the engineer had to make changes was during plan check when the plans had to be changed to get Title 24 compliance.  We could have avoided those changes and associated expenses had we not rushed to get the engineering done.  Thinking back on it, that was the only thing the architect did not delay in getting done—probably because all he had to do was send the plans to the engineer.

People ask me why I did’t fire him and find someone else.  At first I told them that I thought he was a good guy and well intentioned and I wasn’t ready to give up on him.  Later on I felt I had too much time and money into this to start over.  The closer we got to a building permit, the harder it was to quit.  I kept thinking it is just around the corner—it will happen any day now—but the days become weeks and the weeks become months and the months became years.  When I did talk with other architects, they told me they didn’t want to get involved with another architect’s plans.  It would have meant starting over from scratch.  

We did finally submit for a building permit in the end of March 2017 and got the plan check comments back on April 19, 2017.  Almost every communication we had after that, the architect told me the plans were almost ready.  We were finally ready to resubmit in early August.  The second round of comments came back in a couple of weeks.  The corrections were minor.  I was able to figure out solutions for some of them, the engineer was quick to make his corrections, but the architect’s corrections weren’t ready until the end of September.  

When I knew we were close to finally getting approval, I realized that I didn’t have the fire sprinkler plans which are required for the building permit and are also required for the water district to sign off on the plans. Back in March when we originally applied for the building permit, I had obtained several bids for the sprinkler system, but the architect told me to hold off.  First he told me that we should wait until I had a contractor because he would have someone to recommend.  Then he told me to hold off because the fabricators could take care of it. Needless to say he didn’t follow through with either option so I had to go ahead and hire a company to do the sprinklers.  This ended up delaying getting the actual building permit until the middle of January 2018.  

And after all this time, over 2 years, and repeated promises, the architect failed to help me find a contractor and to give me any firm cost estimates, which were also requirements of the contract.  As you might guess.  I am DONE with the architect and would warn everyone to not do business with him.

Since January I’ve been scrambling to find someone else to build my house. I finally have a good prospect, but that is a story for another day.

The best part of this entire experience is how much I’ve learned--and not just about what NOT to do.  I’m getting better and better with SketchUp, I’ve learned a ton about Title 24, and I’m constantly learning new things about the design/build process, as well as, green products, technologies and certifications.  If I ever get the house built, it will be better than ever!!