Real mistakes.
Real lessons.
Real projects.
A growing library of construction errors, fixes, and fundamentals drawn from condo builds and high-end renovations — so you don't have to learn them the expensive way.
A library that grows
with every project.
We collect the mistakes, oversights, and hard-won insights from real construction sites and organize them so anyone on a project can actually use them.
Real-world mistakes, documented
Each entry comes from an actual condo build or renovation, not textbooks. What went wrong, why, and how it was fixed.
Fundamentals you can act on
Core construction principles explained in plain language. Practical enough for a first-time homeowner, useful enough for a seasoned contractor.
Always growing
New entries are added as new projects happen. The library gets richer with every build, every renovation, every lesson learned.
Understand what your contractor is doing — and what questions to ask before something goes wrong.
A reference for common pitfalls on site. Use it to brief your team or double-check your approach.
Catch the mistakes others have already made before they show up on your site and on your budget.
Construction knowledge
shouldn't cost you a mistake.
Most construction errors are avoidable. The problem is that the people who've seen them before aren't always in the room.
Mistakes get repeated across projects
The same waterproofing error, the same framing shortcut, the same coordination miss — because no one wrote it down the first time.
Homeowners are left in the dark
Most people hire a contractor with no frame of reference. They don't know what to look for, what to ask, or when to push back.
Experience is siloed and hard to share
A senior PM's knowledge walks out the door when the project ends. There's no standard place to capture what actually happened on site.
ByGatera exists to close that gap. One place where real construction experience is written down, organized, and accessible to everyone.
Browse the library →Built from years on real sites.
ByGatera was created by Ken Gatera, a construction professional with hands-on experience across condo developments and high-end residential renovations.
Over the course of multiple projects, the same realization kept coming up: the most valuable knowledge never makes it into any document. It lives in conversations, in post-mortems that never happen, in the memory of the person who was there.
This library is the attempt to change that : to record what actually happened, as clearly and honestly as possible, so the next team doesn't have to figure it out from scratch.