Get your building permit before January 1st 2012

Get your building permit before January 1^st 2012

If you are in the process of having a house designed, interviewing builders or you are ready to build but have decided to wait until spring to start construction then you should submit your plans for a permit NOW! If you wait until the New Year your house will cost you more money!

The reason for this is because the Ontario Building code is going through some large changes that will affect you. They have decided to raise the energy efficiency on all new houses. There are going to be certain things that your contractor doesn’t do now that they will be forced to do in the New Year.

The system that is coming out is a columned system. Which means that you pick a column from A to M and you have to follow it through the constructing of the building. This means that if you deviate from the column you will fail your final inspection with the building department.

This new system has to be agreed too when the designer is drawing up the plans. There is a lot of paperwork that the architect will have to prepare for the house plans. If the paperwork isn’t done properly then the building department will not issue a permit for the building.

So any house plans that have been drawn up in 2011 and submitted in 2012 will not be approved. All 2011 plans will have to be completely revised to meet the new code standards. Also the plans will have to be revised showing the column you have decided on.

Another thing that will happen is that you will have less room to change your mind about certain things as the build process progresses. The minimum standards in a lot of areas in the new code are close to the maximum standards in the old code. So in 2011 you were able to pick and choose where you wanted to spend your money, in the new code you will basically only have the choice of spending more money or sticking with the minimum code of 2012. This will probably end up costing you about 20 to 30% more across the board for insulation and heating equipment.

If you want to avoid all of these hassles, you should submit your building plans now before the New Year rolls around. Your plans don’t have to be approved this year; they just have to be submitted so that they are in the system as 2011 submissions. The design costs you save alone will be worth it.

Another major concern is that because the code is changing, the building departments have to relearn all the things that they are looking for in building plans. This means that you will have delays in getting your building plans approved in a timely manner. With a large number of people trying to beat the January 1^st deadline with their plans, the building departments will be overloaded. So if you want to start your build in the winter months and you don’t submit your plans until after the New Year you will be waiting a lot longer for approvals. The building department will have to clear the 2011 permit applications before they even start looking at the 2012 applications. Since the 2012 applications are all under the new rules there is bound to be a lot of confusion with what exactly the rules are going to be and how they should be instituted. You could be looking at least a month delay just to get your plans approved by your local township. This doesn’t take into consideration if you have to deal with a conservation authority or a commission who will be even less knowledgeable about the new code changes.

So do yourself a favour and submit your building plans now before the January 1^st 2012 deadline. It will save you money from the design end all the way to the finished building.

Rob Abbott

Operations Manager

Village Builders Inc

Be advised there are changes to the Ontario building code as of January 1, 2012

Ontario Building code is changing as of January 1^st 2012

To most people this is probably comes as a surprise, but to builders it is not. We have known that this was coming for about a year. What has caught everyone off guard is that as early as 6 months ago we were told that the government wasn’t ready to implement the new changes. So to everyone’s surprise the government announced that the new rules take effect on January 1^st 2012. Like usual the Ontario government is so disorganized that they can’t even give there building inspectors literature on the new changes to the building code yet. As I write this it is the week of December 12^th to the 23^rd the inspectors just started receiving there literature. I talked to a local building inspector who said that they had just taken a course on it, but the government was so ill prepared that they couldn’t even give them any literature to take home with them.

The changes are all upgrades involving energy efficiency. The bottom line to people that want to build a new home or renovate one in Ontario is that it will cost you more across the board.

I am all for energy efficiency in new homes and I have long been a proponent in raising the new home standards, but to do it in such an unorganized way is ridicules. I personally attended a meeting put on by the local homebuilders association where a government employee presented some of the new code requirements. But she warned us that none of this was set in stone yet and could change. That was in May of this year.

At the moment we are pricing 3 different new home projects for the spring. We just got a look at some of the changes to the building code and have had to call these clients and warn them that we will have to re-estimate there projects because of the changes.

As a custom homebuilder we already do a lot of the new changes in the code as habit. But there are a lot of things that we don’t do because the client has not instructed us because of cost. Because of this we could end up having to raise our prices in some areas of the building as much as 20 percent.

I will give an example,

·       New building codes state that a new house with an attic space must have a minimum of R50, the current standard is R40. That is a 20% increase in cost.

·       New wall insulation is R24, the current code is R22. This means that you might have to install foam on the outside of the building to meet code.

·       Basement insulation has gone up and now you will have to frame 2x6 walls, the old code was 2x4 walls, that’s a 30 percent increase in framing material and insulation.

These are just the tip of the iceberg with the new code changes. We are sitting around wondering how we are suppose to continue estimating if we don’t even know the rules that we are using.

So if you are thinking of building this spring be warned that your costs will be higher!

Rob Abbott

Operations Manager

Village Builders Inc.