I tell a lot of horror stories from the condominium industry about awful developers who build inferior products, who change the blueprints for the buildings, or who delay occupancy and registration.

You’ve heard these stories before, both from my own experiences, and those of my clients.

But I rarely talk about houses and how those renovations and builds can go wrong.

Today, let me think back to my childhood, and the utter disaster that was 96 Bessborough Drive…

Ah, memories!

“Ninety-Six.”

My close friends and I need merely say those two words, and memories come rushing back.  We need not say the physical address, street name, or give a description of the topic, but just “Ninety-Six,” and we know.

Same for “One-o-Seven” and “Eighty-Two,” which were my other friends houses growing up.

“Remember Mike’s 19th birthday at one-oh-seven,” we might say.

It’s classic.  And god DAMN it makes me feel old…

That was my house – in the photo above.

I make no secret on this blog, or in my business, about where I was raised.  96 Bessborough Drive, in Leaside.  Although that house no longer stands.

As I wrote on this blog back in 2008, our original house was torn down, and two were built in its place:

I was a bit torn up at first, but I got over it pretty quickly.

Those two houses fit in better with the streetscape than our original house did.

From what I understand, our original home was built around 1900, before most of the homes in Leaside were built around it.  The old farmhouse behind ours – on Heather Road, which was owned by Nick Kypreos for a decade, is another of the original Leaside houses as well.

Our house was added onto probably sometime in the 1960’s, since there was nothing but empty land next door.

My parents bought the house in 1992, and put a huge addition on the back of the house.

It was the true Canadian Dream!  Work hard, save up, and eventually move from a nice house in a nice neighbourhood onto a better street in a bigger house!  Build your dream house in your mind over the course of twenty-years, and then put it into practice!

That was the plan, although as we learned within days of moving into the house, and probably once a month for the first five years we were there, the house was an absolute disaster.

My dad hired a very well-known Leaside contractor, who has since passed away, but shall still remain nameless, and you might say that his firm was “the” renovation company in Leaside in the 80’s and early 90’s.  The house took a lot longer to complete than planned, just like every house before it, and at the very end, my dad and the contractor had a falling out, and it was pretty much decided that they’d go their separate ways.

We moved in around September of 1992, and everything seemed fine.  The house smelled of fresh paint, hardwood varnish, and freshly cut carpet.

We had a sauna in the basement, and I had never been in a sauna in my life.

The first weekend that we were in the house, my friends and I (12-years-old at the time) decided to take a sauna, which sounded great until I realized that we just sit there and sweat until we want to get out.  What the hell was the point, I wondered…

There were two shower-heads in the sauna, on either side of the little room, and my friends and I were fascinated with the idea of getting hit with a shower spray in front and behind! (doesn’t take much to make a kid happy…)

We left the shower running for twenty minutes, then finally turned it off, and got out.

As soon as we opened the sauna door, my heart was in my mouth, and I thought, “My dad’s gonna kill me.”  There was water EVERYWHERE!

The floor of the bathroom, the carpet in the office, the play room next door – the whole floor was flooded.

My dad was not happy.  Not in the least.

Having cut ties with the contractor, my dad brought in somebody else to assess the damage, and try to find the cause.

The cause?  You wouldn’t believe it.

The drain in the floor, under the cedar planks in the sauna, wasn’t connected to ANYTHING.  Yes, seriously – there was essentially no drain!  So the water from the shower had nowhere to go, and simply poured out into the adjacent rooms.

The sauna drain was fixed, but the word “sauna” was taboo in the Fleming household for quite some time.

A few months later, I remember going down to the basement to use the computer (remember when your family had ONE computer for everybody, and it was always somewhere inconvenient?), and as soon as my foot hit the floor, I felt that “squish.”

It was deja-vu all over again.  I freaked out, and went to check the sauna, but that wasn’t it.  And this time, the water was on the left side of the basement and not the right.  But nevertheless, there was water everywhere, again!

Our “new” contractor, who may as well have been Superman, came in and assessed that the water had come from the sump pump.  The sump pump, of course, was not connected, and all the rain water was just collecting in a basin that eventually overflowed into the play room.

The contractor had taken another short cut, and while there was a hole in the ground in the basement, there was little more than a plastic pump laying in the water.

The winter passed by, and in the Spring of 1993, we noticed more water in the basement – this time in the office, not too far from the sauna, but on the other wall.  The water seemed to be coming from the wall, which had greenhouse windows on top.

Our new contractor/best-friend opened up the wall, and it was soaked inside.  The insulation was dripping wet.

Everything was replaced, but almost as much as an experiment as a repair, and within weeks, it was soaked again.

That’s when it was determined that the only thing to do was dig next to the foundation to determine what the problem was.

There was no room for a back-hoe to get through, so two burly dudes started digging with shovels in the morning, and when I got home from school, there was a giant pile of bricks on the lawn.

I was too young to understand how houses were built, and thus I assumed that the brick walls of the house went all the way down to the basement, when in fact the foundation is concrete.

But I was interested in what was going on, so I went and watched the two guys digging.  To my surprise, every time they put a shovel in the ground, they’d take out another red brick.

They eventually dug down about ten feet, in what I think was a hole probably fifteen feet long by eight feet wide, and they pulled out over eight hundred bricks!

Yes – the contractor, rather than pay for the disposal of old bricks, decided to BURY them in the ground!

But rather than bury them, oh I dunno, say in the middle of the backyard, he buried them next to the foundation, and over time they put pressure on the concrete wall, and a giant leak began to form.

Our new contractor/God told us that these bricks would have filled a full bin, and that (at the time) was about $800 to dump.  So basically, the house contractor did about $30,000 worth of damage in order to save $800.

Genius.

A few months later – in the Summer of 2013, I believe, I was sitting at the computer in the basement, and I heard a loud POP!  It was like a gun, or so I thought, and then I heard a very faint “sssssss” which I couldn’t really identify.

In a matter of minutes, there was water dripping from the ceiling, and a giant pool was forming in the drywall.  I was a child, so I didn’t know what was going on, and although this was about twenty years before HD TV, I sat there and watched it like it was exactly that….

Eventually, the drywall began to sag, and then it burst.  Honestly – I watched it for twenty minutes.  I had no clue what was going on, don’t judge me…

Once the drywall had burst, water came POURING out!  At that point, I thought it was prudent to go up and tell my mom, who called my dad, and he said to find the shut off valve for the house.  We didn’t know where that was, and it took him a half hour to get home, and turn it off.

By then, the entire basement ceiling was flooded, and soggy drywall was falling down in clumps.

Our new contractor/saviour came in and ripped out all the ceilings, and started looking at the pipes.  I remember him saying, “I’ve never seen anything like this.”

He told us that the copper pipes running throughout the ceilings in the basement (and the basement was in the addition, which was new), were actually recycled!  He explained that new copper pipes come in long rods – often as much as 16-feet.  The copper pipes that were in our ceiling were all soldered together in odd places, and they looked like a mish-mash of 2-foot pieces with 6-foot pieces with 3-foot pieces, and that it’s impossible to get copper in pieces like that, unless it had already been cut.

He explained that although copper is extremely durable and its life cycle is fantastic, if all these pieces were used, and soldered together, it was only a matter of time until they burst.

All of the pipes in the basement had to be replaced, then the ceiling repaired.  Miraculously, the carpet was salvaged.

While most of the damage in the house was confined to the basement, I do remember when my mother’s shower started to malfunction, and our new contractor/saviour took the “skirt” off the bathtub to investigate.  Under the skirt, wedged in every single square inch around the tub, was construction debris.  Pieces of 2 x 4, pipes, drywall, insulation, screws, old lunches – everything you can imagine finding on a construction site, it was stuffed under the tub.

At that point, I remember my parents having this “OMG” look on their faces, as they gazed around the room, visualizing other areas of the house, and likely thinking, “Our whole house is fucked.”

My dad started litigation against the contractor, and we went away for the summer shortly thereafter.  While away, we got a phone call from our next door neighbour who said, “It was the damdest thing, I was outside in the driveway, and I noticed there was a garden hose stuffed through your laundry exhaust!  I pulled it out, and it was running!”

We told our neighbour to use the spare key and go inside, and he said the kitchen was flooded with water.  All the hardwood eventually had to be replaced.

We could never prove that the contractor came to our house at night, took the garden hose, stuffed it into the exhaust, turned it on full blast, and drove away.  But if it wasn’t him, and I don’t give the local raccoons enough credit to pull that off, then it must have been an act of God.

We didn’t have any major problems after that, and we lived there for another decade.  But problems in the house became a running joke, and if somebody dropped a fork on the floor at dinner, somebody else would say, “WATCH IT!  That can bring the whole house down!”

Maybe it’s a good thing a developer bought our house and tore it down.

In any event, stories about renovations-gone-bad or terrible contractors are like golf stories: they all sound the same, and they only matter to the person telling them.

But the next time you complain that your contractor was three weeks late finishing your back deck, just be thankful you didn’t have four complete floods of your basement inside a year, and a contractor who shoved a running hose into your kitchen…