Janusz Grelecki has been sleeping in the car outside his Central Okanagan home for the last two weeks, awaiting a wrecking ball’s arrival.
He learned late last month that the house, long deemed unsafe and unsightly by both neighbours and City of Kelowna officials, was finally slated for demolition through an eviction notice.
“It’s devastating, what they do,” the 73-year-old said Monday as he scrambled to remove his property from the home while people hired to take it down were out of view.
Its impending demolition may have been an obvious conclusion to many, but Grelecki thought he had some more time.
Letters from his lawyer Shane Dugas to engineers to city officials and back show that right until the end of last week, an effort was being made to slow the standing order to take down the house and allow Grelecki to keep moving ahead in the way he’s been doing.
That illusion of more time, however, is what cost him in the end. Even his lawyer said his plight wasn’t much of a surprise, albeit an unfortunate conclusion.
“He’s been given a lot of time and rope to work with and at the end of the day, if he’d followed through with some of the things even when he had a building permit, he would have been successful (in keeping the house),” Dugas said.
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Dugas said, however, that there are two separate lawsuits dealing with the city in the works and they’re still going to carry on. It just won’t likely save the house, unless the city has a significant change of heart.
“We exhausted virtually all the efforts that we can at this point,” he said.
Grelecki said he is struggling to come to terms with that.
“It is tragic. I feel like killing myself because they take everything now,” he said. “I lost thousands, easily $100,000 inside.”
Grelecki’s home is a hodgepodge of unsightly projects that, even to an untrained eye, look amateurish.
According to city reports, however, they are unsafe. Among the issues are an unfinished deck and a retaining wall with several pieces of rebar sticking out of it. Piles of lumber litter the property. More detritus of a work site can be seen there as well.
According to a summary of Service Requests from the City of Kelowna, bylaw officers started going to the property in 2008 to resolve the issues that still exist today.
A file was officially opened in 2010 for having “unsightly premises” after Grelecki failed to respond to multiple letters.
By 2022, after the demolition order was made, there were 17 files for the unsightly premises “all with extended resources actioning these files over that period.”
On Dec. 19, 2016, the Kelowna Fire Department, BC Safety Authority and City of Kelowna Safety advisers attended to complete an inspection and, according to the city, many deficiencies were located.
On July 24, 2017, geotechnical engineers were required to complete a structural assessment of the home and a geotechnical assessment of the grounds and retaining walls.
On August 6, 2017, structural building assessment completed by RJC Engineers deemed the property “unsafe.” Many deficiencies were found because of non-compliance with the structural requirements of the BC Building Code.
Notes of this kind carried on for years but Grelecki still found engineers who said that the property was safe and worth saving, to no avail. As of Tuesday, the home was still up as workers addressed concerns about asbestos, though its future is certain.
What Grelecki will do next remains to be seen. When the building goes down, he will have to foot the bill.
It’s the second blow he has been dealt in the last year.
Last May, Grelecki went to court to contest the will of his recently deceased former common-law partner, claiming ownership over the property she left to her children.
The decision, blocking Grelecki’s claim to her estate, was posted online by the BC Supreme Court at the time.
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