After 28 years, it’s amazing what you take for granted, and what you get used to. My wife and I are looking hard at selling our condo and buying a new one. It’s about time to get a new home.
When we bought our current condo back in 1995, we’d been renting since 1987. The financial commitment of ownership was new, and it scared me. My Dad had never owned a house, as far as I knew. All my life, my folks had rented, and for my first eleven years, we moved about eleven times. As an adult myself, I saw that the allure of home ownership was mostly in its permanence. I’d learn later that, over time, it could be less expensive than renting (at least in Vancouver). In those ways, me and my wife were fortunate in buying our new condo, back in 1995.
We were most unfortunate however in that our place was a leaky condo in a poorly-built post-Expo wooden low-rise. It was classic wood frame construction with the kind of California stucco on the outside, built before rainscreen became a requirement.
We had plumbing issues since day one: in our first week, we watched soap suds goosh up into the toilet in our ensuite. It was funny at first, making poltergeist jokes or yukking it up over our “self-cleaning crapper”.
A few months after that, we had our first rainfall leak that soaked the carpet in our master bedroom. On rainy nights, we could hear the little taps of raindrops inside the wall. Over the next 20 years, every exterior wall of our flat had some water ingress, including our sunroom (a cold room that opened onto our patio) which had to be demolished and completely rebuilt due to degradation from past water leaks and some very active carpenter ants.
Oh, and every few years, a copper pipe would break or have a pinhole leak above us (we’re on the first floor). We’ve had overhead leaks or drain line overflows over our kitchen, diningroom, and both bathrooms.
Sometimes, if the drain lines haven’t been maintained in the basement, kitchen waste water would back up into our kitchen sink. This used to be a once-every-two-years event, but became a once-per-month event for three months a year ago. In the laundry drain line, once or twice, hardened detergent or whatever would block a drain line, causing other people’s soapy laundry water to back up through our laundry drain pipe. We got a backflow valve installed to prevent it, but not before our new laminate floor next to the washing machine had gotten ruined.
As the building has aged, we’ve had ants, silverfish, and mice running around the building. (Thank god we had cats.) That situation is well in-hand in the last couple of years, thanks to our didecated strata council and good budgeting.
So, even though this had originally been our kind of “dream home” and our first ownership stake, there have also been multiple water-related issues and problems related to building deficiencies which have soured the home-owner experience fairly bitterly.
As the years went on, other residents became affected too, but things did gradually get better: In 2018, the roof was redone and the entire building envelope was rebuilt (rainscreen, thank god). We can honestly say that the wood structure and waterproofing of our exterior walls and ground-level membrane have all be rebuilt or replaced, and are now in excellent condition.
Coming in the next year (we hope), the majority of the building’s old copper piping will be replaced with new flexible Pex piping. So, buh-bye crappy copper, hello 25 years of reliability (and yet another big levy).
With many of the repairs have come levies and insurance claims, not to mention a lot of unwanted frustration, uncertainty, and stress during the repair work. We guess that since buying in 1995, we’ve probably spent over $150k to deal with leak repairs or other water-related damages in our place. That number is a source of both frustration and pride.
In January, a leak through the ground-level membrane outside one of our bedrooms seemed to be the final straw. Months of tenacity from our strata and building management brought a restoration team to our doorstep, and as I write this, we’ve paid our bill and thanked the good tradesmen for making our home waterproof once again. Thank god for helpful volunteer strata board members, and tradespeople who take pride in doing a good job.
But although materially, mechanically, our suite has never been better, that recent leak event was the last straw for us emotionally and financially. The insanity of our various building deficiencies is head-shaking, but only surpassed by the insane rise in housing prices in the Vancouver condo market.
It looks like a good time to downsize into something newer, and to move on to a new chapter. If home is a state of mind, it’s time for us to change ours. Someone else will take our place, and make this rehabilitated condo into their own dream home.
