E-Newsletter from ZED WOODS - June 2014
WOODS WATCH EDGE OF CLOSURE OF ALL WORK Greetings from ZED.
closure of all work at ZED Woods.
The last edition of Woods Watch was at the peak of summer with the humidity and heat hovering at uncomfortable levels. Come May, which is the second highest rainfall month usually in Bangalore, the heat was broken, but not quite.
While, of course, there are those persistent challenges with the windows and doors (with one of the residents wanting us to replace with frames in aluminum).
As we set about making this edition, we re-read the contents of the last edition, to understand what we could add to what was presented the last time, considering that we are on the edge of
A lot of things that have already been stated in Woods Watch May at the larger level of the campus -- which includes not just ZED Woods but ZED Collective -- need no recounting here once again.
One large community It is useful to understand that by the sanction of the Bangalore Development Authority of the plan for this campus, ZED Collective and ZED Woods is considered one entity. We had named them separately in order to see that they each acquire a character and identity of their own. However, it is time we all got to thinking of how we will be one large composite community of people, to get the best of management of water and power in your homes as well as of other values that you can secure over the very long term as a larger set of homes.
The ZED Collective relation Before we go into the update of developments over the last month, it will be useful to rst state that we had had a running challenge for long months with ZED Collective. It is only natural. Any owner of a home, no matter where, brings a certain sense of possession and apprehension as well as anxiety on how a builder has to be viewed with distrust and suspicion. The builder, in this case BCIL, unfortunately, has not helped by making it any di erent, with the delays in delivery matching those of other builders.
Going beyond the norm Usually you hear of stories of how the builder company has walked away after the legal process is done. In the commercial sense of the term, one must be fair enough to admit that it does not make sense for the builder to continue to do things and to invest in people and costs if there is no revenue to match it for the builder. However, at ZED, we have not come from that context. We have been more than a bit 'naĂŻve'. This has also meant, of course, that we have to take the pain of the misunderstandings that usually come from such persistence that we bring on wanting to get things right in the ZED communities that we have created. As we have said in the last edition, and consistently before, it is not like we have been without blemish. But then we have never
quit from any of the challenges that have come our way. And cost has been no object when it comes to setting things right, as many of you will readily admit. There have been challenges, mostly extraneous, as many wellwishers among you have pointed out in the past to our colleagues. The challenge lies in the fact that the vision statements of BCIL are so well articulated that any mismatch in delivery disenchants. One ZED Woods resident said it memorably, "if this sort of transactional behaviour from sta , or delays in delivery, came from a regular builder, one wouldn't even question it. But from BCIL?!"
A large uniďŹ ed community We are looking at how the entire community of 60 homes at ZED Woods and 68 homes at ZED Collective, making in all 128 homes, can be one uni ed community with infrastructure cost shared between both. This is a few months ahead of us. It will be premature at this stage, for there are initial challenges of settling down of ZED Woods that we are working on closely with the new association members. We have to also get the ZED Woods part of the
community to settle down on its maintenance processes. We are working on this. The rst 4 to 6 months from here will be time when our housekeeping sta will be moving in to see what they can do to set right very basic things at each of the homes, as things settle down on every home's various elements. Eighty per cent of the challenge will come from wood. The rest of them are pretty usual.
Power and its erratic supply Some of the 'complaints' from the residents who have lived in, has also been to do with electricity and its inconsistency. This is because of the vagaries of the electricity board, as well as the fact that the ZED Woods community is still on temporary power linkage. The transformer has to be set up and is part of the target
for this month, as reported in the last Woods Watch edition. We are looking forward to certain clearances in a way that we will be able to complete the transformer erection process before mid-July.
Waste water management The waste water systems will also be streamlined by then, by connecting it to the larger campus grid as originally designed for this project, with the approval of the BDA. In recent years, you would be aware that it is mandatory to have a tertiary sewage treatment plant. However, in most cases it's a lip service. Here we have installed a state-of-art system that ensures quality of water treated is way beyond the regular norm. We've been pioneers o ering such infrastructure many years before it was made mandatory.
As for other completion elements at the campus, the handing over of homes has been going on. Over 24 more homes were delivered in May-June. We have only the last bunch of 12 homes to be delivered. The reason has been again the challenge with wood in this season of steep di erences in temperatures. Many hope to move in. Most of the residents hope to move in depending on either their work convenience or their location in town or the needs of their children and school.
For those who have not visited For those of you who have not visited here for some time, it might be helpful for us to recount the work elements that are currently going on toward the last 10 per cent completion of the campus. The east-side retaining wall has only another week's work to complete. The west-side retaining wall work has started, and will take about 20 days to complete. The rains have slowed the work schedules a bit. But we don't see a serious challenge there. The south side retaining wall is now looking to be pleasant with the plants that have been mounted as vertical scaping goes. Over the next 3 to 4 months it will acquire a green character of its own. Over the next few
years the entire ank walls on the east, west, and south will assume a lush green visual form. The basement has been spruced up with the painting of the roof and the sides completed. The basement mess has been cleaned up to ensure that it looks pleasant and inviting. There are only a stful of families who have moved in. And they have had to take the brunt of the early settler's challenge of living with the evolving infrastructure and facilities. Even that has been more or less taken care of.
Wood and Rude Reminders The May rains brought a rude reminder of how wooden frames and doors can still not have water stopped from coming in if the behavior of the wood is not settled down. Wood expands, contracts and eventually settles down after a couple of seasons or a couple of years. We noted this in the last edition, too. Our colleagues have either not explained it well enough or have not communicated the challenge regularly. Besides, what is a natural phenomenon is construed to be lack of attention. We are working on it with a bunch of 10 or 11 dedicated carpenters working to see that these things are sorted out one by one in each of these homes. It means needless cost, as many of you have reminded us. But the challenge is one of leakages and sees pages as the rst pre monsoon rains came down heavily. You have to remember that most regular apartments do not use wood for this one single reason of its erratic behavior. Nearly all of them go for fenestrations that are with aluminum or with
UPVC. We decided to give wood, at a much higher cost, in order to see that your home acquires a certain elegance and warmth over the longer years of your living. Unfortunately, despite the higher cost, the initial unpleasantness of the experiences of residents has only made it ironic for us who have spent more in order to give a better value. We have had the consent of the residual set of owners for switching over to engineered window and French window options, with wood con ned only to the doors. Having said as much, the errant behaviour of wood for doors and windows, we can't resist telling you of a ZED Woods member who said, "I have lived the last 3 years in a house in another apartment in Bangalore where I had the exact same challenge for 2 years and it settled down later. My reason for staying in ZED Woods is the great green expanse & the quality of natural light that the entire campus receives. I will live with the so called 'snags' that wood is currently posing.
Greening the Campus The C block mezzanine oor landscaping is yet to start. We have acquired all plants and are nurturing them at a nursery for some months. We will bring them over in late June and make the podium just that bit greener. The external painting of a certain texture form for the C block is nearly done, and we should have completed this over the next week or 10 days. Blocks A and B are of course looking neat and completed. It is only the C block work that has been going on. Some of you will
recall that the C block approval took time from BDA about two years. That is the reason for the late completion of C block. Those are factors beyond our control. After completing the ank walls, the work on the roads had to be taken up. The west side road is completed, but the east side road is still a mess for the earth consolidation and the topping work has to be done. We expect to complete that before July 10. We would have hoped to complete it before June end, but the moistness in the earth, thanks to the rains, have slowed the process a little.
Car parks and Basement The marking for car parks in the basement and the signage for car parks apart from the installation of re extinguishers, that are mandatory, are all to be collated before June end.
White rooftops that cool All ZED enclaves have a certain heat-resisting thermal coating on top of the roofs. This has been done and completed in all the three blocks. If you step out to the terrace of any of these blocks, you will see a nice white coating. This is done in order to ensure that the heat ingress in the top- oor homes is dropped by at least four degrees. As part of global warming, one of the larger challenges that city urban planners have been trying to take up
is the white surfacing of all homes in any city. ZED is only one aspirational example of such thermal coating. We wish all homes and apartments everywhere did this. That will help cool the city a little in terms of the microclimate challenge of heat islands in cities.
The last leg of work on windows If you took a walk around the C block, you will see it still looks unkempt and untidy. The basic reason is that the windows and the doors for the last batch of apartments are yet to complete. We have had a challenge on securing the right type of wood and the right type of nishes with the vendors. Beyond ZED Fabs, the in-house wood nishes center, which has been doing
a large amount of the work at ZED Woods, we have outsourced the work to another reputed vendor who does such work, in the interest of saving time. There are not too many such people in the city who can do this kind of carpentry work that we expect for our homes.
Power back-up plant The gen set is yet to arrive. The supplier had some challenges. The last lift from Schindler has had the same challenge, but the senior heads in the company have agreed that they will complete the commissioning of the lift before June third week.
It should be completed anytime now. We are yet to secure some of the play material for kids in order to see that we create a simple bay for children of the ZED Woods community. This should be done in the next 2 to 3 weeks.
We move out. You move in. ZED Woods is set for us to be moving out in the next 2 maybe 3 weeks. The housekeeping team has a charming lady, Kavita, who will spend a chunk of her working hours managing these needs and slowly understanding what needs to be done in order to make the simple maintenance challenges easier on you all. She'll be spending time at ZED Woods from this week on. Residents will see her around, and she'll get acquainted with those of you residing.
Are more moving in? Do we expect more residents to move in in the immediate future? We don't quite know. We have been asking, but their plans are not clear yet. We expect some of the owners to nd tenants. The Shrishti School, Manyata Tech Park, o cers of the airport authority or of airlines, o cers from the outlying industrial estates, are typically the sort of people who look to
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see if they can nd a place at ZED Woods or Collective. We are doing our little bit to see that owners are helped to nd tenants. Our objective is to see that the community builds, that more people live there, and we are able to get the place to be alive and throbbing.
Harikrishna President ZED Communities
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