The Hottest Guy in Town

Reno fever has taken over the city and made contractors like Brad Wurmlinger (pictured right) the hottest guys in town.

By Matt O'Grady, photograph by Marina Dodis (Published: September 2006)

"THAT," SAYS WENDY HUDSON, pointing westward, “is the Dollar Mill house. Mr. Dollar himself built it.” We’re standing across from one of the last remaining examples of the sort of housing Robert Dollar built for senior employees of his lumber mill, which operated from 1917 to 1943 and spawned the North Shore community of Dollarton. The shingle cottage with the jerkin roof dates to 1922 and is a protected heritage site; surrounding it are examples of 1970s-, ’80s- and ’90s-renos that collectively chart the area’s evolution from a blue-collar mill town to a white-collar community now considered part of Deep Cove—by real estate agents if not locals.

Hudson’s property, across the street, is decidedly not a heritage site. The rickety frame house was built in 1950 and floated down Indian Arm in 1969; in the words of the general contractor Hudson has hired to renovate it, “There’s very little goodness to work with here.” Hudson bought the 4,500-square-foot Cape Cod-style home last year intending to fix it up while preserving its character.

The contractor, Brad Wurmlinger, has called this on-site meeting—on a Tuesday morning in mid-July—to deliver bad news: after spending two weeks gutting the interior, he’s discovered severe structural problems. The house will have to be rebuilt.

Wurmlinger, 34, is the principal behind CBD Construction; he launched his building career at age 12, working summers for his father’s and uncle’s drywalling business. At any one time he’ll have three or four Deep Cove-size projects on the go, with at least 50 trades and subcontractors and 100 workers involved in each. His focus is on large-scale home renovations, mostly on Vancouver’s west side and North Shore, though he also dabbles in retail and restaurant construction. He is, like everybody connected to local real estate, a busy guy—he gets at least a call a day offering work, and turns down most of it. Being in demand means you can be picky. Brad won’t do a $50,000 job, or even a $100,000 job. And he doesn’t do the ’burbs. Why? Because, he says, everyone there fancies himself a do-it-yourselfer. “My brother-in-law wants to do the plumbing” is the sort of refrain he hears east of Boundary.

Of course, Deep Cove is a suburb, too, but unlike Burnaby or Coquitlam (where Wurmlinger lives with his wife, Cybele, and their two-year-old son, Miles), it has views—indeed, million-dollar views, which justify a $500,000 reno like this one. Hudson drives the point home in a quick walkabout of the gutted abode, stopping to gaze out the large-pane windows. “This is why I bought the place,” she says, indicating the panorama of Indian Arm and Belcarra Park below. The edifice itself, though, is more of a liability, which Hudson had only the slightest notion of when she bought it.

Hudson, a 41-year-old investment banker, interviewed eight builders for the reno before settling on Wurmlinger. “They’d come in and tell me what I wanted to hear. But there was this huge disconnect between what I wanted done and what the budget was.” Wurmlinger blames the original design—“idiotic would be the best way to describe it.” Yet whereas many builders can work only from drawings, Wurmlinger picked up some design skills from the Building Engineering Technology program at BCIT and figured that, with some modifications, Hudson’s needs could be met. “Instead of abandoning her and saying, ‘It can’t be done,’ I came up with a solution for how to build the house cost-effectively.” The project was originally budgeted at $300,000. After Wurmlinger reworked the design they arrived at a price of $460,000. Now, with the rebuild, the project is expected to top $500,000—yet Hudson still thinks that “Brad is great.”

“Great” is not a word homeowners typically use to describe their contractors. Legion are tales of contractors asking to be paid upfront and then not showing up, or starting the job and then disappearing for weeks to work on other projects. Most of the problems, says Wurmlinger, boil down to money. “The contractors who have a hard time getting manpower on the site are the guys who priced their jobs too low. They’re also the grinders—these are the guys who take 60 days to pay.” While Wurmlinger doesn’t overpay, he says that over the past five years he’s never had a jobsite sit idle for more than one day. “If it came down to it, to keep on schedule I’m going to do the work, too. My tools are always in the back of the truck.”

Which is not to say that everybody loves Brad. He recounts the story of an elderly neighbour at a west side project, a former politician, who swore a blue streak about the smell of the topsoil he was using and said he was calling the B.C. Assessment office because “all the noise we were creating had reduced the value of his property.” Another neighbour took to regularly careening down the street in his car to scare Wurmlinger’s workers. And then there’s the tale of a well-known high-tech executive. “He lived near this house we were working on in Point Grey,” says Wurmlinger. “One day he came by as the bricklayers were cutting to see what all the noise was about. He asked, ‘Can you do that any quieter?’” Wurmlinger jokingly told him that the only way he could do that would be to build a separate enclosed building in which to cut the bricks. “And he goes, ‘Well, how much would that cost?’”

Wendy Hudson is clearly conscious of her new neighbours in Deep Cove. “Do you think we could move that John Deere into the driveway?” she says to Wurmlinger, nodding at the 80C Excavator parked curbside. Has Hudson had complaints since construction began? No, she says, they’re a pretty friendly bunch, “particularly the lady who lives at the Dollar Mill house. She’s 93 years old. She’s seen everything.”

She may also be deaf—not such a bad thing during a renovation boom.




Read more in the Real Estate Survival series:

Busted: The cautionary tale of a renegade reno. By Guy Saddy

Budding Entrepreneurs: The highs and lows of buying a former grow-op. By Marcie Good

Feng Shui Revival: Why Feng Shuiing your house pays big dividends. By Kevin Chong

Strata Hell: Condo owners who threaten murder. Treasurers who steal cash. Welcome to the weird world of strata councils. By Steve Burgess