Welcome to our Condo Life Cycles Forum

[editor@bccondos.ca]

Condo Life Cycles. Check here for information and updates on building obsolescence.

Welcome to our Condo Life Cycles Forum, where we hope to shed some light on the question, Can I reasonably expect my condo to stay dry and otherwise endure for more than a year or two without frequent and expensive maintenance?

The maintenance obligation is a huge and onerous burden in condo ownership, even if your building has an effective rainscreen, but the exact extent of that obligation is unpredictable under our current legislative scheme. Vendor disclosures may be even less reliable than minutes of the strata council’s meetings. Indeed, for too many of us, the actual state of our condo’s disrepair came as a complete surprise – even when we had competent building inspections completed prior to purchase.

In our search to understand what might be considered reasonable maintenance standards, we finally hit paydirt on the 4th Floor of the Vancouver Public Library. To learn about building obsolescence, go to http://www.vpl.vancouver.bc.ca/general/catalog.html. Type in ‘durability guidelines’ under Title Browse and click on Durability of building materials and components 8: service life and asset management: proceedings of the eighth international conference on durability of buildings materials and components, 8dbmc, Vancouver, Canada, May 30-June 3, 1999/ edited by Michael A. Lacasse and Dana J. Vanier, published by NRC Research Press, 1999. You can have a look at it in the Reference section of the downtown branch or click on Search the Web to read parts of it piecemeal online. Roll up your sleeves for a good dig through considerable jargon to get to the gold nuggets. We’ve asked Dr. Lacasse to provide the library with more copies of these excellent volumes and will let you know if they arrive. We’ll be awhile sifting through it all, so check back for updates.

So far, we like Mark Lawton’s excellent article at page 989 of Volume Two, Reacting to Durability Problems With Vancouver Buildings, now available online at http://www.morrisonhershfield.com/papers/F8DBM55.pdf, which casts some welcome doubt on the quality of leak fixes. This is a must read for anyone contemplating these terrifying renovations. It’s one thing to build with good technology and quite another to repair a faulty design. Lawton also discusses toxic mold, an issue we now monitor under a new forum, Toxic Mold, http://www.bccondos.ca/forums/viewforum.php?f=8

We were relieved to discover that the library does, in fact, have a copy of S478-95 Guideline on Durability in Buildings, Structures (Design), published by the Canadian Standards Association in 1995 and available for sale at http://www.csa-intl.org/onlinestore/GetCatalogItemDetails.asp?mat=000000000002410603. (We haven’t yet had a reply from CSA regarding our request to put the booklet up on the web at least until the leaky condo crisis is over). It doesn’t come up on a computer search, so you have to ask for it at the Science and Technology desk on the 4th Floor of the downtown VPL branch. It looks to be a sort of Canadian building bible and is favorably reviewed in at least one paper from the above conference proceedings. Here is a sample from page 20:

A4. Provision of Maintenance and Inspection Data Base
On handover of the building, the Guideline recommends that complete documentation of the building’s design and construction, as well as recommended maintenance schedules, be obtained by the owner. Tables A1 and A3 described in this Appendix and completed for the specific building are part of the database that should be provided to the future owners together with other relevant supporting documentation (See Clause 10.3.2). This information is expected to form the basis for an “owner’s manual” which identifies the nature and extent of post-commissioning work necessary to ensure achievement of the design service life.

A5. Owner Responsibilities Because the operation of the building is not the responsibility of the designer, the fulfillment of the necessary maintenance program should be verified by the owners by inspection and documentation. To minimize maintenance costs, repairs should be undertaken early and as necessary to prevent progressive acceleration of deterioration, following correction of the root cause of the problem.

Unfortunately, these guidelines may not carry much legal force here in B.C. Read what John Robertson, Vancouver’s Chief Building Official, had to say about them further down. We’ll be investigating the disturbing implications of that statement in the days and weeks to come.

In the meantime, read more about standards and leaky condo studies at the Conceptualized Reference Database for Building Envelope Research website at http://alcor.concordia.ca/~raojw/crd/index.html. This is a very complete technical compilation of leaky condo data, including material on toxic mold. We very much like the references to international studies and standards, which shows a healthy ability to think outside the wet, toxic box. We’ll be reviewing a number of these reports with their authors and other experts in the days and weeks to come. Keep checking this forum for new information.

As consumers caught in B.C.’s housing construction fiasco, we need to learn more about these standards, how they are developed and how binding they are on building designers. Please post questions and comments directly to the forum or to editor@bccondos.ca. Tell the experts what you think of their standards and how they should be enforced. Please react freely to everything you read here.