The Bane of My Existence
Hi Hello! This is week 2 of the blog and to my surprise I am still excited about it lol. I have a tendency to dive into new projects very quickly and then lose interest just as fast. It’s a blessing a curse and sometimes. I’m going to bring y’all up to speed on the drama of our place on the Sunshine Coast which was the final straw that led to my 4 week leave off work. I don’t know if anybody cares, but it feels therapeutic to write it out, so here we go! haha. I will start off by saying that I’m not disclosing the names of any of the engineers that are involved because we are still in a legal battle with them. All the this information I’m sharing I’ve already communicated with him.
For those of you that are new here, I bought some land on the Sunshine Coast in 2018 and it took 4 years to build our place. 3 of the years was getting permits and dealing with this wall so that we would have a house building site that would be protected from any rock fall on the hill/cliff behind the house. So you can only imagine my shock when we were told the WALL ISN’T GOOD ENOUGH.
We purchased the land in 2018 because it would be our city escape and we could supplement our income/justify this investment by renting It out when we weren’t here via Airbnb. However, the district changed their rules towards the end of 2020 so that you could only airbnb if there was somebody living on the property full time either in the same unit or a separate one. (This is all relevant information, I promise lol). Sine our place wasn’t built with two units in it and our land is zoned to have up to two dwellings, we asked our builder about coming out to see if a small studio would be a possibility down the road (not now). Our builder, Gary Lamb who is amazing btw and nothing to do this fuck up and came onto the project once the wall was done, brought a geotechnical engineer out to scope a second building site (this engineer was not the original person who designed the wall, we will call him “The Good Engineer”).
This is when a huge ass boulder was discovered, that the original engineer who designed the wall (who I will reference as (“Wall Engineer”), totally missed. If that rock fell down the slope, it would bulldoze the wall and the wall would collapse into the house. In addition to him missing the rock, EVEN IF THAT ROCK WAS NOT THERE, the wall still sucks. Basically, this engineer really fucked up. We found this out at the beginning of May. When we had Wall Engineer out to look at the wall he designed and inspect the rock, he admitted he missed this GIANT BOULDER and the house was not safe. Common dude, really?
Is there a word more extreme than panick? Because that’s what we went through. Not only was this summer Bobo’s last few months of paternity leave before we have to be in the city again full-time, with childcare for two babies quickly approaching, the purchase of our new home (that we bough in March way before this boulder issue was discovered), we were heavily relying on this place to generate SOME income for us whether it be from 30-day rentals (which is allowed), long term tenants or just put it up on Airbnb like everybody else does up here,. It took 3 years to deal with permits, engineering, reports, machinery, etc to get that initial wall and I’ll be fucking damned if its going to take that long to resolve. So in the ferry terminal line up on the way home the day we found out we couldn’t stay there anymore, we called a bunch of construction lawyers.
We found one and hired him on retainer. It has been a fucking headache 4 months trying to get this bloody thing resolved ASAP.- which btw, 4 months is a BLIP when you’re taking on a legal battle. Although the other company blatantly fucked up and missed the rock which they fully admitted to, their argument is that we would have had to deal with this whether it be now or before we put the house up, so they shouldn’t have to pay for all of it. To take them to court to fight this would be $60K in legal fees at minimum and years in litigation which means we wouldn’t be able to use the place during that time. Our lawyer advised us to just agree what they offered it which is
They are going to pay for half of the rock to get blasted and removed (this is happening next week!).
I was rightfully concerned that the engineer missed other boulders. If he missed this boulder that’s sticking SIX FEET out of the ground, what else did he miss? The company that fucked up agreed to pay for a third party engineer out to scope the land out to provide me some assurance. (We will call this one “Third Party Engineer”, original, I know). The Good Engineer AND the Third Party engineer both agreed the wall still needed to be re-done even if the rock was blasted but the original company is ignoring that part and they’re saying they’re satisifed with their wall design. How the hell am I supposed to feel safe when two other reputable engineers said it’s not safe? So we’re on the hook to re-do the wall ourselves and then we’re taking them to small claims court (which we dont need a lawyer for, so it should be “affordable” to try and re-coup the costs of the wall based on negligent designs.).
They are paying for a small portion of our legal feels. Maybe like 1/4 of it. It’s not finalized yet so not 100% of percentage
Third Party engineer did say mid way through August that since it’s been so dry, it would be safe to use the place until mid September before the rain comes and there’s an increased risk of the rock sliding down. We are up here now soaking up the final days of summer. I am not working this week and I’m doing a thousand projects around the place to get it prepped for rentals (making tables out of tree stumps, painting furniture I thrifted, etc)
The rock is supposed to be blasted in the next two weeks and then we’re getting the wall worked on directly after that. We are on the home stretch (hopefully) to moving past this. Bobo will be back to work in two weeks and then we’ll be renting our place out (more on this later!).
