7 Lessons Learned Building a Net Zero Duplex in Vancouver, BC.
Part 3
January 2025 has arrived with some clear messages for all of us to pay attention to. I am finding it difficult to comprehend the scale of displaced families in Los Angeles, California and wondering where they will be able to rebuild. At the same time, I am thinking about my kids' future and the education system that they are enduring as they apply to universities in Canada. Trying to explain that at age 17 they have to make a choice to take Sciences, Arts, Engineering or Business as if the world we are living in has boundaries around these concepts. These kids understand complexity in their bones and can feel the dissonance between what's happening on their screens and what they are learning in their classrooms. How does memorizing content or writing an essay on a topic you don’t care about, change the systems they were born into? Imagine applying to university based on the problem you are hoping to solve? Imagine if you could apply to a school where the outcome was collaborating on designing and building a net zero community? Education systems are tough to change because they are a reflection of our culture. I’ll be writing another post on education in a time of climate chaos so stay tuned for that one.
For today I’d like to spend a bit more time sharing about the net zero duplex build project that we completed in Fall 2023. We live in the duplex and many people stop us on the sidewalk in front of our home to ask questions about the process, so clearly there is a desire for folks to understand how it all came together. I love that we cut the gas line forever and that our energy bill is almost non-existent after one year of living here. We did one small thing for the climate. I hope this series of posts inspires one family to cut their gas line and consider net zero or solar.
My first post about the duplex shared a bit of the backstory and the ‘why’ of the project. The second post attempted to tackle some of the big design decisions we made early on. This post emerged as a list of lessons learned. I’m planning a fourth post with all the nitty gritty energy system details and waiting for our one year BC Hydro anniversary to include charts. Everyone should learn to understand the importance of a simple graph (that’s the teacher in me speaking).
Now back to the lessons learned;
Lesson 1: New Builds are not the same as Renovations
One of the things that everyone said to us as we were building was “just you wait, everything will be 20-40% more costly than you planned”. It was the automatic response of any friend or stranger on the street when we mentioned that we were building a duplex on our property. What I learned from designing the duplex from scratch with the amazing Lanefab team is that we considered every cabinet, every window, every drawer handle and light fixture before we signed off on the final contract.
We knew how much it would cost to build when we signed off and we were within 5% of that number as long as we didn’t change our minds along the way. It turns out that price increases are common when you embark on a renovation project as it is more likely that you will encounter unexpected challenges and surprises after you start opening up the walls of an old house.
I want to be super clear about this as many folks don’t believe that we didn’t go over cost. There were many, many moments in the build process where we could have easily spent $10,000- $20,000 on features that emerged as options as we put the duplex together. We had to be very careful to hold our line on the decisions in order to stay on budget. Many folks building homes have deep pockets so the tendency is to say yes to changes that come along and we had to be careful to say no when these options were presented to us. The loan had a limit and we were not able to go beyond that number.
It was explained to us that the price would be close to the stated contract unless we encountered a giant boulder in the ground when we started to dig or some other obstruction through the excavation. If there were no surprises during the first phase before pouring the foundation, we would have a clear idea of the costs of the project. We were lucky that our lot didn’t have any surprises when it came time to dig!
Lesson 2: Decision fatigue is real
The first email to Lanefab to seriously explore the duplex design was sent in 2020, we moved out of the old bungalow in August 2022 and we moved into our new home in December of 2023. A quick glance at the emails saved in my ‘duplex archive’ would be in the 1000’s to give you an idea of the amount of communications on the project. When you are involved in every step of a design and build, it’s easy to get overwhelmed by the sheer number of decisions that had to be made. Whether it’s selecting finishes, materials and colours there is always one more quick decision that arises due to changes in supplies or minor shifts in design. Every decision connects to other decisions and there is often a cascading impact if you make one small change. As the duplex was coming together we would find that standing in the space could change your mind about a decision we had made in a computer sketch years prior and it would have been easy to make many changes to the original plan and budget.
As a first time home builder, I noticed that every choice felt important and I didn’t have a lot of experience with what mattered most. I had a hard time knowing when to trust the flow of the process and when to stop the process and ask more questions. I definitely ask a lot of questions and the team was really amazing at responding to all my queries. After a few years of the project, I found the constant decision-making started to wear me down. As we got into the finishing stages of the project it was hard to know when to slow things down if something had to be changed as the trades were moving at a speedy pace once the interior work began. Decisions were needed quickly and if something shifts from the original plan it could have serious consequences on our bottom line. At the end of the day, we are extremely pleased with the end result and happy with the decisions that were made during the build. I personally found the design stage to be energizing and learned that choosing tiles and flooring drained my energy!
Lesson 3: Get comfortable with minor changes
My husband and I had completed renovations on our old house but we had never been a part of a build from scratch. I learned that mistakes happen and that is a common part of the process given how many groups of people are on site and how many parts are needed that are coming from a wide range of suppliers. There was a long gap between the time we designed the duplex, waited for permits and actually built the home before the choices that we made were to be installed. I was a bit surprised at encountering mistakes in this process and I assumed we had made so many decisions ahead of time and we didn’t expect that changes would happen with colours, manufacturers etc. After talking to friends who were in the construction business they confirmed that mistakes happen all the time and part of the job of the contractors is to ensure that they catch them before they are installed.
There are so many people involved in the process that it is not surprising to imagine that more mistakes didn't happen and we got almost exactly the duplex that we designed on paper. Lanefab used a number of software systems that allowed the team of designers and builders to work together, but there are still human errors and details that get missed.
One small example was a simple request to have what is called a ‘shower niche’ or ‘niche de douche’ installed in each shower. I had requested these but they were not in the final drawings and we were lucky to catch this in time for the installation of the tiles in the bathrooms. We had chosen the size of the niche and they were installed with the long edge on the vertical. I had assumed they would be installed with the long edge on the horizontal but I didn’t mention anything until it was too late. It's actually embarrassing to write about shower niches when the world is literally on fire but the reason I included this was a simple example of the level of detail in design and installation that you need to consider when building from scratch. I chatted with the tile installer and he said “I use big Costco shampoo so it made sense to make it go this way”. I laughed because I wished I had been on site that afternoon to discuss this with him. I used this example to demonstrate how important it is to ensure that every detail is in the drawings. More importantly you need to be able to look at the drawings and imagine what is missing! These are skills that can only be learned through experience.
Lesson 4: Learn to Speak the Language of Building and Design
One day I was ordering an extra sconce for a bathroom when I realised that my husband had no idea what a sconce was. I tried to explain the difference between a lamp, a pendant lamp and a sconce and he thanked me for handling all the details while he worked extra hours to support the process. There were a lot of terms that I was unfamiliar with at the beginning of this process that are now part of my lexicon. I imagine there are lots of ways to learn about building homes and many TV shows that help you understand the process but I found that nothing could prepare you for the speed of decisions and considerations that need to be made in this process.
One of my favourite parts of the house is the soffit (see image below) - another term I didn’t know until we started to choose the material and stain for this part of the house. A few other terms that you might want to understand include FSR (floor space ratio), building envelope (all the components that separate the indoors from the outdoors) and the difference between trim, cladding, fascia and soffits. You will learn many other terms when choosing flooring and fixtures including sconces (similar to a wall light but more like a candle where the word originated), niche (recessed space in a wall) and also millwork (this one is worth a google search as it was historically only wood milled products like door frames, molding and trim but can include cabinetry). By the end of the project I had become moderately fluent in building and design so that I could at least follow along with the conversations happening around me.
Lesson 5: Deeply Understand Interest Rates
When we started planning this project, the interest rates were the lowest they had been in Canada for many years. Unfortunately, by the time we secured financing and were ready to take down the old house, the rates had continued to rise. We could not have chosen a more difficult moment to build but we had no idea that the rates would rise so significantly over the next 2 years. Rising interest rates added a layer of stress and complexity to the project that we had no control over. The reality hit pretty hard in the final months of the project and we had to make real changes in our lives to make it through to the end.
We learned that very small fluctuations in rates can drastically change the financial picture of a project. This sounds obvious but it is surprising how much a small number can have a huge impact on a project. My husband and I both understood interest rates conceptually but not until you have lived through a creeping interest rate hike when you have a large amount of money on the line it is hard to understand the feeling in your body. If you are not comfortable with risk, change and uncertainty, tearing down your house might not be the best idea.
Lesson 6: Know and Trust your Lender
Projects like this one are sometimes called “citizen developments” because we are just homeowners who are trying to make a change to our existing property with no intention of becoming land developers. We had to go to a number of institutions and banks to discuss the financing of this project and I am not going to dive too far into those details in this post. We did eventually find the right lender and one lesson if we were to do this again is to increase the amount that you think you need to borrow just in case the project goes over budget or overtime.
We had to secure the financing before we went to the design stage and that was many months before the permitting stage (not to mention build). The cost of materials had already increased slightly (across the board) by the time we had to sign the contract for the build. We secured our financing early in the process and we learned that it is difficult to make changes to that initial figure as you go along. Banks and lenders make their money from exactly this situation so they are not looking to lend folks more money in the middle of a project as it increases their risk.
We learned that there are major differences to a line of credit and a construction loan and you will want to investigate the advantages and disadvantages of both of these options if you are borrowing money to develop your property. Most of the folks who are able to do this scale of project have experience in borrowing money and have access to a lot more capital than we did. Another small lesson that we learned is that if we had to refinance the project, it would be much easier to do when the duplex was near completion as the lenders would be more likely to assess the duplex at a higher value (and therefore lend more money) than at an earlier stage when it was basically a hole in the ground.
Lesson 7: Plan for a Changing Climate and Supply Chain Disruption
I started this post talking about the fires that are still burning in Los Angeles and want to end on a note about our changing climate. Extreme weather events like heavy rains, fires and heatwaves are more common now that we are living through the real impacts of climate change.
We had taken the old house down in the summer of 2022 and were keen to get the project moving. Unfortunately, there was a concrete strike so the only concrete coming into the region was going to larger projects like hospitals and schools. When we finally got the concrete it was a relief to begin -imagine we are now living in a rental property and paying interest on the loan. In December of 2022, we had finally poured the first stage of the foundation when we were hit with an extreme cold snap followed by snow that would stay on the ground for weeks. This building delay shifted our timeline by a few weeks but the team was able to catch up later in the process. I imagine as global temperatures rise and the climate continues to be unpredictable that all projects will need to build these delays into the plan.
From the time we started this project to the time we finished we noticed that our Vancouver summers had become significantly warmer with an increasing number of days that had extreme heat warnings. We planned to install two AC units in the home so that we could have air conditioning on these type of extreme heat days as we would not need AC with a typical net zero build. After living through last summer (2024), we realised we could have easily installed 1-2 more units to ensure all the rooms on the top floor were kept cool during heat events.
It was surprising to all of us involved to realise how quickly these changes were happening and how we need to be planning for even more extreme temperatures. My next post will talk in detail about our air filtration system that is designed to help filter smoke from forest fires.
Thanks for reading all the way to the end of this post - I’ll be spending some time putting together the energy systems post and will be back here soon.
soffits! speaking my language. thanks for this great piece. love a shower niche and your duplex is just gorgeous