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We are into the final push at Parkview Mountain House. The radiant tubes are in for the heated driveway and walkway (essential), and the concrete is scheduled to be poured later this week. The kitchen countertops were installed this morning, and the backsplash was templated, with install scheduled for this Wednesday. The finish carpenter is back this week, and then the painters will be coming next week. The appliances and hot tub are also on standby in their respective warehouses and will be delivered to site as soon as the team is ready. As always, things are frenetic. But we're pushing to get occupancy this month. I'm also excited to announce that we just hired an excellent management company. We're in the midst of that onboarding process, and we're looking forward to starting bookings sometime this fall. If you haven't yet added yourself to our list, drop your email over here. We'll be offering a bunch of discounted bookings on a first-come, first-served basis to the people on this list.
Construction is risky. For example, last month a tree fell on top of Parkview Mountain House. The tree was located upgradient from the house and, it was so big, that pieces of it actually landed across the street on our neighbor's property.
If you hang around Park City long enough, you will come across things with the name Ontario. There's Ontario Avenue. There's the Ontario hiking trail at Deer Valley. And I'm sure there are other things.
As a Canadian, I couldn't help but wonder why. So today I looked it up. And it turns out that the mining company that first put Park City on the map was the Ontario Silver Mining Company (see above stock certificate).
Established in 1872, it was a major contributor to Park City's economy (when it was a mining town) and it is usually credited as the mine that generated the most consistent yield in Utah during the late 19th century.
Cool, so why was it called Ontario? Well, according to the Park City Museum, the mine was first discovered by prospectors from Canada (though they later sold off their claim to George Hearst for a handsome $30,000).
I can't seem to find any info about these Canadians, but the province of Ontario did get its name in 1867, so at least the chronology check outs.
Image: Park City Museum
Thankfully, it didn't cause as much damage as it could have. It punctured the roof in a few places, but magically, the bay window that it landed on was perfectly fine. We also opened up the drywall around the window to inspect all of the structure.
Needless to say, we didn't have a line item in our budget for "trees that might fall on the house during construction." We also didn't have a line item to take down more trees behind the house, which is exactly what we decided to do after this happened. We called an arborist and asked them to fall anything that looked even remotely questionable. That ended up being 4 more trees.
We were not expecting this.
But this is why budgets have something called a construction contingency (although, we still have enough savings from some of our other contracts not to have to use it). In the end, we also learned something. If a tree falls in a forest and no one is around to hear it, the answer is -- yes -- it can still cost you a lot of money.
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