Make fast!

During a violent storm, lying in bed in the upstairs of our house feels a bit like being at sea. There’s definitely some give in this 19th-century structure. People have tried to tell me that the capacity to bend and flex is a design feature – that the old-fashioned building methods were meant to allow for shock absorption, to help a house withstand big gusts.

I’m not so sure. Down on the shore, there is plenty of evidence that sophisticated boatbuilding skills and techniques were transferred to homebuilding – in modest dwellings of a certain period, and in the grand homes of captains and merchants. But our house is far into the hinterland – a purgatory for nautical types, and a wilderness to the upwardly mobile. And any time we have opened a wall during renovations, what we can see of the framework suggests that the builder was not a fine craftsman, but a guy who was hurrying to get the thing closed in before winter, using whatever piece of lumber came to hand.

In any case, it has held up. And though there have been a couple occasions when we thought about retreating to the cellar as a gale swept across this drumlin, we have never actually done so. (The treacherous stairs and the thicket of cobwebs are deterrents.) Over the years, the house has earned our trust, providing the feeling of safety that is a big part of what it means to have a home.

But maybe this is a false sense of security. When it comes to wild weather, the laws of probability come into play – and with our increasingly erratic climate, the odds are not as favourable as they once were. For new construction, government agencies and insurance industry organizations are now promoting “resilient homes,” built to better withstand heavy winds and rainfall-related flooding. (The latter is inconceivable on our hilltop site, but the former is a certainty.) Many of the extra design features can be incorporated at a small premium – but with materials already very pricey, builders are particularly resistant to cost increases. A number of the now-optional upgrades are expected to become mandatory in a 2025 update to the National Building Code.

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People love to grouse about building codes, but abiding by them is a basic act of citizenship. They have been around, in some form, for hundreds of years – or perhaps for thousands of years, if you reckon the ancient texts containing proclamations on proper home construction. Their evolution tracks our species’ journey from cave dwellers to members of a complex society.

Libertarians may complain that building codes are an intrusion upon personal choice and private enterprise, and builders may be quick to point out that some of the technical requirements are unjustified or inconsistent – but without them, the home construction business would be an absolute racket. Part of the rationale is consumer protection, because the general home buyer cannot possibly know what is hidden, or not hidden, within those walls. When buildings fail – incrementally or catastrophically – some of the costs are borne by society at large.

Vern Faulkner (who appears on the cover of this issue of RD, at work on a new house that is clearly designed to last) is a building inspector as well as a journalist, and he was telling me recently about some of the common code violations he sees. The most obvious examples appear in the design and construction of decks, because this is the kind of project that seems manageable to a halfway competent do-it-yourselfer. He says one of the dead giveaways is structural members fastened with screws, which have considerably less load-bearing and shear strength than nails of similar size.

Being somewhat less than halfway competent in the realm of carpentry, I like using screws because they are so easily backed out to correct mistakes, but I have also noticed how easily they snap off – especially long ones – when torqued into dry, tight-grained wood. I do reinforce them with nails once I’m confident everything is as it should be – but for all I know, the mixing of fasteners might be verboten. Building codes are prohibitive to my construction ambitions – and this is probably for the best.

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The topics of code compliance and climate also arose in my recent conversation with Paul Larade, a Dartmouth-based electrician who does photovoltaic solar installations as well as wiring for renos and new construction. He told me about going to the store to pick up materials for a shed he was building, and getting a quizzical look from the clerk:

“The guy said, ‘Where are you from?’ And I said, ‘Cheticamp.’ And he said, ‘You don’t need to build this roof like you’re in Cheticamp.’”

For those unacquainted, this Acadian community is on the west coast of Cape Breton Island, stretched out in a narrow band between the ocean and the mountains, and it is known for high winds known locally as “les suêtes” – a contraction of the French “sud-est” (south-east). The winds come across the Highlands, then rush down at increased velocity. The meteorological term for this phenomenon is “foehn,” originating from observations of warm, dry winds in the leeside of mountains in the Alps. (In German, the word “föhn” is also used to refer to a hairdryer.)

“In Cheticamp,” says Paul, “what they do is they actually tar the whole shingle – every single one – and they’ll put 12 nails per shingle. Otherwise it’s not staying.”

This is a social code, rather than a written one. Local people just know. “They redid the roof of the church three or four years ago, and it was an outside contractor,” says Paul. “It was a metal roof, and they were told, ‘This is not your average community.’ And they were like, ‘Yeah, yeah, it’s good.’ And then the next month, half of the roof of the church was gone – peeled right off – because they had built it like they would in the city. So they ended up having to do the roof twice.”

A more dramatic instance of wind damage occurred back in 1993: “It hit 245 kilometres per hour, and they had a little wind meter in Grand Étang – which is the worst part of Cheticamp – and it blew off, so they don’t know how much wind they exactly got that day. But it was strong enough that the old hospital – it was a four-storey building – it took the roof of the hospital off and threw it a kilometre onto Cheticamp Island – like, across the bay. So it was quite significant.”

For private homes, extra-robust construction is the local custom. “My grandfathers on both sides of my family built their own houses, and there was a very specific way that they had to build – otherwise it wasn’t staying there,” says Paul.

“My house here in Colby Village was built in ’77, so it’s all two-by-four construction, 16-inch on centre. New construction has to be two-by-six, 16-inch on centre. In Cheticamp, most old homes are two-by-six – a rough-cut two-by-six, a true two-by-six – every 12 inches. You needed that.”

A peculiar design feature, especially in those older homes, is the absence of windows facing the southeast. If there are windows on that side, they are usually equipped with three-quarter-inch plywood shutters that can be closed up tight.

“Cheticamp is one of those communities where we’ve been dealing with wind – 180 or 200-plus kilometre-per-hour winds – for ages, basically since the community came into existence. So it’s never been built for anything less than that,” says Paul. “Probably two or three times a year you get 200, 220, 240. And it seems that in the last few years they’re getting more common.”

Talking to this guy, it’s not hard to tell that his house in the city is not really his home. In fact, he has a piece of land in Cheticamp, and plans to start building a house there next year. He’s going with ICF (insulated concrete form) construction, so he’ll be safe in his bed when les suêtes are blowing at night – and he won’t have the sensation of being out on a crab boat. Naturally, he’s installing solar – a technology that has not yet caught on locally.

“There are a few systems, and everybody’s going, ‘Well, we’ll see if they’re still there in a few years, then we’ll think about it.’”

Paul suggests that if all buildings were constructed to Cheticamp standards, they would likely hold up better, over the long term. Designing for extreme conditions, rather than typical conditions, is good old-fashioned common sense.

In engineering, the risk of system failure is minimized through redundancy – duplicating critical functions and components. It’s a built-in backup plan. But in the managerial mindset, redundancy is often seen as wasteful – something to be avoided or eliminated, in the name of economics.

In uncertain times – in other words, at all times – we should ensure that all of our essential systems, including food production and health care, are resilient. And perhaps there’s something to be said for flexibility, as opposed to rigidity. DL