It has been quite the year at Kilo Lima Code. Even pre-COVID, I had been spending a lot of time thinking ‘what do I want to be when I grow up?’. Back in February, my friend Jim and I talked about starting a blog to share some of the Building and Fire Code information we had out to the masses.

Once it was settled we would start a blog, my brain started working over-time thinking of the possibilities. I envisioned a Canada-wide online code community to exchange ideas and resources. As with any ‘pipe dream’ I’ve ever had, I talked about it with anyone who would listen. And by everyone, I literally mean everyone. My 8 year old son knows what BCBC stands for. A few have told me it would never happen as the industry was stuck in it’s old ways. But many, oh so many, were excited that someone was finally doing something about the disconnect that exists!

I have been so overjoyed at the positive feedback, honest conversations, and all around support I’ve received this year as I chase this ‘pipe dream’. So inspired in fact that I took a leap of faith and quit my ‘adult’ job to dive full time into chasing the Kilo Lima dream.

I have also discovered that the more open you are to sharing your story, others become inspired and may want to share theirs too.  And people’s stories are the gold in life. So here is some of mine. I look forward to hearing from anyone that may feel inspired by this and reach out directly.

I have a fundamental belief that when we share ideas and knowledge, we all have more.

Full disclosure, this is not a blog post, it is a novel…maybe even a memoir. It completely got away from me, and does get quite personal. But that is how most things in my life go, so I’m rolling with it.

I’ve broken it down into sections. So if you are here for Kilo Lima Code related information only, feel free to jump to the end! I will cover:

My Previous Work Experience

I often get the question of how I ended up in the fire protection industry. ‘Randomly’ is my usual answer. So let me expand on that…

I studied environmental systems engineering. My favourite work term was when I got to work on various site remediation projects. I was convinced I was going to use my tree-hugger soul combined with engineer brain to save the planet for my adult job!

After graduating, I travelled to Australia for a month with my now-husband (my uncle Brian was getting married in Byron Bay). Because my mom was the second oldest of eight children, and my uncle was the youngest, he was a ‘young, cool uncle’. We left the day after my last final and combined a happy-graduation-to-me trip with standing up as the best-woman for my uncle. I was chosen by default as no other family member was able to make it, but that mattered not…I was in Australia! That was over 11 years ago. I will forever cherish those memories, spending quality time with my uncle and his new wife. He had a smile that could light up a room and a contagious laugh. He would always say he was like Ricky Martin and ‘Livin’ La Vida Loca’. My uncle passed away just over 3 years after that trip in September 2012. Life is so short, and so so precious. Even when days can be dark and life gets tricky, I like to think of him and his big grin. He was the best.

Restaurant Industry

Upon my return from Australia, I worked as a server at Tony Roma’s on south Albert. That was not my first gig in the service industry. I started with Smitty’s in Normanview mall at 16 years old and worked there for a number of years. I have some of the best memories working at Smitty’s. Not because I came home smelling of cigarette smoke and bacon grease…but because I worked with a pack of young women as a team. We spent Saturday and Sunday mornings together (a time when most teenagers were sleeping soundly in their beds) running around covered in sweat swapping out over-easy eggs for over-medium ones. Even though every one of us was so busy working our own section… if you asked someone if they could pour Table 10 a coffee or take them some syrup…the answer was usually ‘yes’. I also had a short stint at Moxies (3 months) where I met my husband. Classic front-of-house, back-of-house love story. I joke that I “got in, got a husband, and got out”.

After a summer of first travelling, and then slinging ribs at Tony Roma’s, I looked for an engineering job. As most new grad positions were filled when school was out, there was not too much available. A friend from university reached out and asked if I was still looking, as they had a position in his branch open at the City of Regina. Pickings were slim for candidates, and I got the job even though I knew none of the answers in the interview. I became a civil servant in September 2009.

City of Regina

I spent 10 years with the City of Regina (almost down to the day!), and I loved it. At the City I was able to be diverse (I worked in asset management, roadways and buildings), and I had the warm fuzzies of serving the community in which I lived. I’ve come to find that I, like most people, am too diverse to do just one job for the rest of my life. If you are in this boat, you should check out this blog post for reassurance that if you also ‘don’t know what your want to be when you grow up’, you are not alone.

At the City I also learned how quickly society as a whole is to judge the work of others. I spent countless hours on the phone with citizens listening to how things were ‘a waste of tax-payers’ dollars’ which was a bit ironic as they were wasting tax-payer dollars talking about how much of a waste things were of tax-payer dollars.

I started in the roadway asset management branch and then moved over to the concrete sidewalk operations branch. In the operations role, I was right in the thick of public works…and all the excitement and crudeness that comes along with it. It is not a place for the faint of heart. I stuck around there for quite awhile…mostly because of two amazing friends I worked with, Karen and Danielle.

During my maternity leave with my second child, I got a call from the then manager of the building standards group saying there was a position posted as a building code plan reviewer. A few thoughts went through my head. One was that “hmm, building code. I never knew there was one but I guess it makes sense to have rules for that”, and two “I don’t really like the way my current boss is running things, so a change would be nice”. Turns out you can’t change your boss but you can learn the building code, so off I went to building standards upon return from my maternity leave in September 2015.

My position as a municipal building official was a steep learning curve. Both with the technical knowledge, and the realization that a culture of non-compliance was very prevalent. I was essentially the thing that stood between industry and a building permit. When I would not approve a permit due to compliance issues….I was not a crowd favorite. The end goal of the building code is safe buildings, and safe buildings save lives, so to me it was a no-brainer that a permit did not get approved until it met minimum Building Code requirements. You can listen to more of that story on a podcast here.

For now I’ll just say that the City of Regina building department has come leaps and bounds since I started there 5 years ago. There is amazing plan reviewers and inspectors, who know the Building Code and are also wonderful humans. A gentle reminder that municipal officials are people too, and please be kind when dealing with them.

I fought the good fight for a while, but when an external review of the building permit process was conducted, and completely ignored the fact that the root issue was that most building permit applications were riddled with compliance issues, I decided it was time for me to move on. There was a team of great people who could continue to work on fixing the problem from the inside….but my soul was crushed enough!

I have ‘proud-mama’ moments all the time when I hear about the awesome work my old crew is doing. The most recent being a conversation with someone from ULC stating they were passed an advisory that the City of Regina put out on CAN/ULC-S1001 from someone in Ottawa. How great is that?

Celerity Engineering Ltd.

The idea of moving to BC had been percolating for a number of years. The night before leaving for a family trip to Kelowna in the summer of 2019 I sent a resume to a Vancouver and Victoria based company, Celerity Engineering. The job ad noted that one of the qualities of the applicant was that they knew the importance that a panda eats shoots and leaves. If you know me, you know I love a good Building Code joke. If you don’t know what I’m talking about, you can read further here.

The job ad also noted it was for Vancouver, but I gave them my pitch anyway of why I would be awesome at the job but wanted to work remotely from Regina and then Kelowna. I sent them an email with my resume attached, and the below picture.

The email was sent to them on Saturday night before our two day drive from Regina to Kelowna started on Sunday. Monday was a holiday, and Tuesday morning I got an excited reply from them. Before my Kelowna trip had ended, I had a new job. I started with Celerity in September 2019 as a building code consultant. Essentially doing everything I did as a municipal plan reviewer, but at the design stage.

It turned out I was not built to be a consultant. Some of the projects I worked on went swimmingly, while others not so much. I came to find that although ‘you can lead a horse to water, you cannot force them to drink’. In some projects, if the AHJ did not “require” a code requirement, it was not considered in the design. As a former AHJ, this was quite upsetting. I knew that not enforcing something did not mean it was not required. It is actually impossible to verify every code requirement at a building permit review stage. As it turned out, the culture of non-compliance was not isolated to just Regina.

I love my Celerity crew, however it was time to move on and focus solely on Kilo Lima in September this year. My co-founder and partner, Brenda, is actually the ‘everything-but-code’ person at Celerity. So I guess you could say I “got in, got a work-wife, and got out!”.

So that brings us to today. I am now self-employed. Being a free bird is one of the best feelings ever!

My Previous Business Experience

I have never had any desire to start my own business. Like, ever.

My only previous business endeavor has been opening up a “coffee shop” on the 9th floor of City Hall with my cube-mate and good friend, Richel (it was called Arvel and Anne’s, after our middle names). Building inspectors would come in to do their paperwork, and the only place to get some snacks was on the main floor. As a result, most building inspectors just went without snacks. I love snacks and the thought of going snack-less seemed unfair, so thought I should do something about it.

The business didn’t last too long as I was not even recovering the costs of supplies, let alone the hours spent getting the snacks, and brewing the coffee. I am a chatterbox, so when someone stopped by to grab snacks I did not have the ability to not engage in conversations if they were started. Work got too busy, and niceties faded away and I would tell people that I did not have time to chat. One of the inspectors noted to me that “if you open a small town coffee shop, you have to expect that people will want to talk”. That was fair, and I eventually stepped away from co-owner of the shop. Richel continued to brew the coffee and keep the snacks stocked.

I was pretty sure I didn’t have a business bone in my body…but my failure at running Arvel and Anne’s pretty much solidified it for me.

Fast forward 5 years, and along comes the Kilo Lima Code ‘pipe dream’. Turns out, I still love chatting a bit too much (or not enough?).  If I were going at this dream alone, I’d still be talking about the idea and how wonderful it is. Thank goodness for my partner in crime, Brenda.  Brenda brings the drive towards organization and implementation and has the ability to grab the best of my million ideas and magically turn them into meaningful and useful content, and an actual business.

I’ve also learned that we can build a business on our own terms, how we want. We don’t need to be cut-throat or plough others over to achieve our goals, and it has been an absolutely beautiful thing to discover.

My Previous Village Building Experience

I have always believed that things only get better when more people, perspectives and ideas are brought in to the mix. Rounding up the troops has been something I’ve been doing my entire life. I loved playing sports as a kid because not only was it a safe space to be competitive, it was working towards a common goal with a team. A finite game where you could be ruthless and competitive on the court, but walk away from the game and still be friends with the competition.

I guess I have always seen ‘business’ as a sport. Sometimes it gets very competitive and people can be ruthless. And that is why I have never had any interest.

I’ve decided that since I now have a business, we are going to change the rules at Kilo Lima Code. Community and collaboration over competition. No ruthlessness, period. Playing ‘the game’ by boosting up others along the way and bringing on any partners with the same culture (scroll down here to see our company values).

Childhood

My younger years can be summarized by my mom’s speech at my wedding. She said “when Kelsey was younger I used to refer to her as my boy. She was the most rambunctious and aggressive of all the girls. She didn’t play T ball because it was boring and nobody ever won – the games always ended in a tie. She gave dancing a try but was more concerned with pulling the others into the correct position than she was of pointing her toes or extending her arms. She was the one who played on a mixed soccer team and held her own against any guy on her own team as well as the other team. I remember one time Marvin (her stepdad), who thinks the only game worth playing is hockey, offered her 20 bucks to draw blood in a basketball game. She tried her darndest, but thank goodness she was unsuccessful”.

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Young Adult Life

My teenage years involved a lot of orchestrating of pre-dance gatherings, bi-annual potlucks, and cabin weekends with my girlfriends.

I also come from a huge prairie family, so every holiday was filled with a huge event of gathering, eating, drinking (perhaps a bit too much) wine, laughing and sometimes, when the stars aligned, impromptu dance parties and karaoke.

A few months into my new job at the City of Regina, I agreed to co-chair the Public Works Day event. I knew nothing about public works but figured why not. I organized a drawing competition where the winning grade 3 student had their picture on event t-shirts which every volunteer wore to the event, along with their classroom who was picked up in a City bus to attend the event. I rounded up a village for that event, and was amazed by the awesome City workers who went above and beyond to showcase their work, and give the kids, and general public an awesome event. All I really remember from the day is running around with my clipboard and million lists making sure everyone was where they needed to be. But looking back at the pictures taken from the event and seeing the smiles of everyone there and the pride in the employees faces, I know that it was worth every second of madness.

Years later, and again a few months into my new position in the building and development group at the City, I took on the task of organizing a team building event. I was told that what typically happened was a pool night, and about 10 of the 90 people in the department would attend. I decided that we could do much better than that. So I again rounded up a village and we planned the first annual ‘Victory Games’. Kind of like the show Survivor, but less wilderness and drama. We did, however, have competitions of eating really gross things. Every group had a team lead who organized costumes and one part of the event. Long story short, it was amazing and so much fun. It then turned into an annual event…and actually built relationships across the department. Working together towards a common goal, even if it is a ‘silly’ event like the Victory Games, works magic. It gives out ‘collaboration over competition’ vibes and breaks down barriers and silos.

Almost Adult Life (Current State)

Essentially, I feel like I’ve been subconsciously training for building the Kilo Lima Code Village my entire life. We know that it is going to take a village to build a national code community, and we have a growing list of passionate individuals from across the industry who are excited to share their unique expertise and point of view. Our blog is almost completely populated by them. Their motivation? This problem just needs fixing and they want to help. Meet all of our current Villagers here. We are also adding a slough of new Villagers in the new year. The more the merrier!

I’ve always marched to the beat of my own drum, so when I was told that building a national code community was not going to happen any time soon…my response was ‘watch me’. Throughout my bajillions of conversations I’ve had this year, I have discovered I’m not the only one who wants collaboration and to break down all the barriers that currently exist. So now that we have a team of Villagers, I would like to formally say “watch us”.

I had a conversation with a colleague in the industry this summer and he stated that “you can’t eat an elephant in one bite”. He recommended sticking to BC and focusing on there. Although I do get where he was coming from, I also know that things are only impossible if you believe them to be. So my response to him is that we will “eat the elephant with a pack of cheetahs, and do it quite easily!”

My wheelhouse is the prescriptive requirements of Part 3 of the Building Code. For everything else, there is an expert somewhere. We are currently working on mining those gems from across the country, and sprinkling their knowledge to our growing audience. Not only are we mining gems, expert gems have also been falling from the sky, wanting to join in on our mission.

So to the nay-sayers out there: I can’t do it. You can’t do it. But we sure as heck can do it.

I look forward to smashing down the barriers with anyone who wants to join along! My previous blog post dives deeper into my thoughts on collaboration as it relates specifically to the Building and Fire Code industries.

My Village

I used to have a real hard time asking for help. It felt like a failure of sorts to admit I could not do things on my own. From the outside one may think I’m ‘doing it all’. Truth is, I have learned to lean into my personal village. We are doing all this, even though they are in the background. So now I’m going to get cheesy.

So thank you to my husband. We have always joked that we are the reverse of the stereotypical couple. Myself as the female engineer and Mrs. Fix-It around the house. And him as the male middle years teacher, and Mr. Homemaker. I used to feel a lot of guilt as he takes on ‘mom’ roles. But I’ve decided guilt is a useless emotion and to ignore societal pressures of what is expected as a mom, wife, and woman. We know what is best for us, and that is all that matters.

Thank you to my mother-in-law, Rosalee. In early November I reached out to her as I had got myself in a bit of a pickle. I had committed to the beta program for our first Kilo Lima course…and then our daycare provider for our 2 year old had a family emergency and was no longer able to provide care. We also have no friends or family in West Kelowna that were able to help, and any daycare I called had a 2 year or so wait list. Rose immediately booked a flight from Regina and stayed with us for a month to help out.

Thank you to my pack. This includes my mom, my sisters, and my close friends. You have all been so incredibly supportive. Know that when Kilo Lima becomes a household name, you were part of making that happen.

What does Kilo Lima mean?

The NATO phonetic alphabet was designed to ensure that letters could be easily understood across language differences and poor connections. At Kilo Lima Code, we want to take the spirit of clear communication and apply it to the complex building code to make it easier for all users to understand.

Kilo Lima also represents my initials and I liked the ring of it. My mom gave me a weird look when I told her the name…but she did the same when I told her the name of my first child so I ran with it anyways.

Throughout this journey I’ve had the same reaction from others to the name Kilo Lima. I kindly remind them that as a collective we now call tissue Kleenex, and that seems a bit odd as well.

Where to Next?

Well I’m glad you asked! In January we are on-boarding a handful of new Villagers. We will be providing weekly posts for both the Building and Fire Code. We have also discovered tech can do a lot more than just run a blog and make online courses possible…and we’re working on solutions to revolutionize the day-to-day of every single Code user.

We are also going Beyond the Codes. Way Beyond the Codes to be honest. Because it is so, so much more important than what is currently codified. We are in the process of recruiting Villagers to bring you posts about best practice for accessibility and inclusivity. I’m also an environmental engineer by training and tree hugger at heart. So the next step after that will be to dive into the Principles of Conscious Construction.

If you have any great ideas to make this community even better or are curious about the above two paragraphs, reach out! I’d love to hear from you.

A Final Note

2020 was a bit much.

Be patient with yourselves and others. Everyone is moving through this in the best way they can. And that is a-okay.

If you are a parent, do not think you have to ‘make up for this year’ with an over the top Christmas. Most children are so happy they have gotten to spend more time around their families. Like, so happy. That being said, if you know of a child who is not one of the lucky ones that extra family time has been a blessing, douse them with extra love/presents this Christmas if you can.

Lastly. Look for the helpers. With every tragedy, there is always helpers.

From my heart to yours. Merry Christmas. Happy Holidays. Happy Hanukkah. Joyous Kwanzaa. Joyeux Noel. Feliz Navidad. Seasons Greetings. Yuletide Greetings.