Finalizing

As if the finish work were not enough to think about at the end of this process, there are certain people we need to get approval from before moving into this house. People such as Salt Lake City and The Bank.

Our fair city requires not one, not two, but EIGHT successful, separate inspections before issuing a certificate of occupancy. (Slap hand to forehead here.) We have passed all 8 of those 8. We are scheduled to pick up our certificate of occupancy from the city tomorrow morning.

The Bank requires a certificate of occupancy (see the dominoes lined up?), an appraisal, approval by the loan committee, and closing of the loan before we can move in. Our appraiser completed most of his work yesterday afternoon and will be back for a quick check today. Loan review will take place tomorrow and we are scheduled to close on the loan Thursday.

In the meantime, we will be continuing to clean the house (windows, bathrooms, floors, etc.) and will continue packing the condo in prep for the blessed move-in date.

The sealed floors look amazing, our kitchen is awesome, and everything else about the house is done and ready for us. It's going to feel so sweet to move in.

A tale to warm your heart

We have spent many hours griping about the bureaucratic city permitting process, both in public and in private. Here's a two-part tale to warm your heart and brighten your day.

Tai received a phone call from public utilities (our least favorite city department from our bruising, protracted permitting process this summer) about a week ago. The person on the other line informed him that he could now come down to their office to pick up our house plans — they were all approved and ready for a permit. This was a surprise to Tai since our house plans were approved, stamped and permitted in July...he couldn't do much but laugh at the caller's sincerity and earnest helpfulness. "Look! I'm doing YOU a FAVOR by calling to tell you that your house plans are approved! Look at how great we are!" We think that this person found an old copy of our plans laying around the public utilities office and took it upon himself to review and approve! What initiative! Five months late!

I love bureaucracy.

Then, we had to jump through some hoops to build a garage. We didn't think that we were going to have the budget to build a garage, so we had just put in our initial plans that we would pour a large parking pad (called a monument pad) and build one in the future. We didn't include it in our bank budget, we didn't have a design for it, and we didn't have a permit to build one. Enter Davido, who has cruised so quickly on our construction and saved us so much money along the way that we can now build that garage. It will still be really tight to fit it in the budget, but we are really used to that at this point. (Tears of joy for the frozen fingers I won't have scraping a car this winter!)

We started to tinker with a design and in the meantime, we expanded our dimensions for the monument pad beyond what was approved in our initial plans, so as to allow for storage space in the garage (us lacking a basement, you see).

We were getting ready to pour the pad that we showed on our original plans and assumed was approved. An inspector to the site last Friday refused to approve our concrete forms in advance of a scheduled pour. He said that he needed to see more detail. This necessitated a trip to the city where we realized that because the plan said "future garage over new monument pad" they had ignored it because of the word "future," even though it was what they told us to do in order to get our off-street parking and still be able to build a garage some day without pouring new concrete. So, we needed a permit for the pad, and since we were there and paying for new permits we might as well get a permit for a garage too. Tai had played around with a design, which is a basic shed-style building using similar siding materials as the house. He had drawn a site plan and floor plan already, and Davido took out a piece of paper and drew a framing plan and a detail on the monument pad and its footings.

It took about 2 hours to sort through everything but at the end building and zoning stamped the plans around 4:30 p.m., and the boss at building and zoning called down to the public utilities office to make sure they would stick it out to 5 p.m. so Tai and Davido could dash down with our plan and get approval, thus allowing us to remain more or less on schedule for the concrete pour and to work around the snowstorm last weekend.

Here's the miracle: public utilities did it. They stayed in the office when they said they would, they approved our garage plan in a matter of minutes, they gave us the green light to build this thing and were very friendly and happy about it. I'm still in awe even as I type this.

Elevations

It occurs to me that many people reading this blog (are there many?) are seeing the building coming out of the ground without any idea of what it is designed to look like. In the beginning this was deliberate and then I guess I just got lazy. Since our house is quite modern and permitting was stressful and painful enough on its own, we wanted to avoid the possibility of someone trying to slow down the process for us at the city because they didn't like our design. We were actually very careful to design the house completely within the zoning requirements without any variances. This was to avoid giving anyone else any input into the design of our house. Though it would have been nice to try to get some extra height, we have seen too many examples of modern home designs seeking variances get squashed by neighbors who would seem to think a nuclear waste facility was being put in next to them.

With permit in hand and building well under way, we now unveil the elevations of our home.

East Elevation

South Elevation

West Elevation

North Elevation

I colored these myself, so the colors aren't probably very representative of what it will actually be but the silver sections are two different profiles of 12" wide galvalume siding. The light brown areas are horizontal cedar 6" tongue and groove siding and the areas that are a darker brown are bronze window and door cladding and matching metal panels.

We really love the design that Kenner and Matt came up with for us and we really love watching the Davido bring it out of the ground and make it a reality.

The long version of the permitting rant

After weeks of gnashing our teeth, we finally got a permit from Salt Lake City on Wednesday, July 29. The road leading there was a long and painful one that started many weeks prior.

We initially sketched out a pretty ambitious and aggressive design, permitting and construction schedule. Part of that is because we just want a new house to live in, and the other part is because the duration of our construction financing is finite. The bank put a timer on our construction loan that will expire in mid-January 2010 regardless of how finished we are with the house at that point. We knew this from the moment we closed on the lot back in March, which is why we did a whirlwind design phase with an eye toward submitting a permit application June 4 and construction beginning in early July.

Design was a blast and moved along quickly. We ate up a couple of contingency weeks fairly early in the design process due to vacation and travel scheduling conflicts, and we ate up another week or so with missed connections for engineering/contractor/architect/owner discussions. That pushed our target plans-submittal date to about June 15.

A quick note about how you get a residential permit in Salt Lake City: your contractor must submit full plans for your house. Various city departments review those plans, either stamp them "approved" or note revisions they'd like to see you make on the plans. If they require revisions (and every city department that reviewed our plans did require revisions from us), then you have to satisfy their comments, re-submit the relevant portions of your plans and wait for that golden "approved" stamp.

On June 15, we tried to submit plans but did not have a complete enough set. We were missing a mechanical plan and a detailed engineering plan. It had been a while since our architects had gotten a permit for a house in Salt Lake City, and last time around the city allowed deferred submittals for a lot of those things. Not so any longer. The city turned us away on June 15, and we spent the next 8 days scrambling to get a more complete set so that we could at least log our permit application with the city and get the process started. (We were able to log our plans with public utilities in June 15, though -- which makes the end of this story all the more frustrating. Oh, but wait for it...)

We finally were able to log our plans on June 23 (already a stressful moment because we still had a June 4 deadline in our minds). Then the waiting -- the horrible, horrible waiting -- began.

The first comments we got back were from the city's zoning plans reviewer on July 1 -- a quick turn-around. We had a few mistakes on the plans (including an oversight on the building height) that she caught for us, and she also made a comment to the effect of, I need to see the grades on your lot in order to properly process these plans. We had not ordered a topographical survey (cost: $5,000 or more) because 1) the city did not require it, 2) we could not afford it, and 3) the lot we're building on is relatively flat. But us vouching for the lot's relative flatness wasn't going to cut it for the city. They wanted numbers and grades.

How were we going to get grades? How much would it cost? Did we even have the correct property lines? Oh #$%^, we didn't order a property line survey -- can we even build on this lot?!? Would the city believe us if we shot our own grades? Would they make us get an expensive topographical survey even though their code didn't require it? Could they even do that? How much would we have to redesign the house? How long would that take? How much would that cost? What is the contractor willing to help with? What are the architects willing to help with? What can we do ourselves? How are going to pay for this? How far off schedule will this put us? How much more review will zoning require after our resubmittal?

And so on, and so on.

We ended up ordering a property line survey (cheaper and less involved than a full topographical survey) and shooting grades on the corners of the property and the planned corners of the house to satisfy the city requirement for numbers. Based on those numbers, we discovered a bit of fall in the property (the street end of our lot is higher than the alley end of out lot), which necessitated a redesign of the first floor (farewell 9-foot ceilings -- we never knew ye), the site drainage plan, and the footings/foundation plan. It has also necessitated a redesign of our mechanical system since our previous solution for air conditioning will no longer fit on our first floor. Lots and lots of ripples.

Remember public utilities? Remember how they got our plans on June 15? Well...three weeks later, Tai finally made a casual and extremely friendly phone call to inquire about the status of our application review. Oh, those plans? they asked. Those plans are still on the pile, but we'll get to it. And what's more -- you'll be lucky when we get to it when we do. (I'm paraphrasing the general front-desk attitude at the public utilities contracts counter. Public Utilities is known the city over for a lack of interest in public service.)

We got the public utilities review a few days later and again scrambled to make changes based on their revisions. The changes we made based on the first review didn't pass, so we had to go back and make even more changes. Complicating this entire process was a short week due to a state holiday, a sick public utilities plans reviewer, and the unwillingness of anyone else in the department to look at our plans in this reviewer's absence. Each of these tiny little conditions would have been manageable in sequence, or spread over a long period of time, but compacting them into each other and on top of each other created a stress that I have a hard time describing. There's nothing like knowing that your hopes and dreams hang in the balance of a couple of ornery and over-worked city employees -- it's terrifying.

Meanwhile, we got comments back from a building plans reviewer. Our only complaint there was that submitting on June 23 instead of June 15 put us at the bottom of a pile of applications that piled up on that reviewer's desk while she was on summer vacation for a week. I kid you not: our house-building process is now delayed because a city employee went on vacation without anyone covering for her. Other than that, her comments were pretty straight forward and required only a few changes.

We had pushed, pulled, prodded, and shoved this process nearly to its bitter end last week. We had submitted all our review comments and received approval from zoning and building departments. Public utilities was all that's left. We satisfied their requirements and were hallucinating a building permit hovering over our heads when the public utilities plans reviewer said, "oh, so has anyone talked to you about a fee schedule?" (Hence, this rant.)

Two very depressing days later -- I did not believe that we were ever, ever going to get a building permit...only that we would continue halving the distance between us and the permit without ever actually reaching our destination -- we finally satisfied the myriad requirements for a permit. And, got our permit. (Which, as it turns out, are two different things.)

So, here's what I have learned from this bruising process:

• If you're new to this, go to the city and get a punch list of what you'll need (we didn't and were immediately sorry).
• Have an explicit conversation about the city punchlist with your architects/engineers/contractors.
• No request from the city is too small. They WILL withhold your permit until they are satisfied.
• Sometimes the city will make you do stuff that is not required by law.
• All the time the city will make you do stuff that is required by law.
• City employees will screen your phone calls and not call you back.
• City employees might, if you're lucky, return your emails.
• If they say they want the plans redrawn, then it means they want the plans redrawn.
• Keep the controlled substance of your choice handy -- you will need it.
• Public utilities needs some nice pills.
• Venting helps.
  

So, thanks for listening/reading/sending cookies/your moral support. And thank whoever you thank that we are finally underway and building. This is such a nicer place to be.

Under Way

As we posted earlier today, we have a building permit. I'll save the gory details of that struggle until another post, but we were able to finally pull the permit this morning at 11:00 a.m.

Never one to let grass grow beneath his feet, our builder went straight to the lot and started laying out the building for the excavator. We will eventually live between the spray painted lines.

Because we had been really hoping to have pulled our permit by the end of the day yesterday, the excavator delivered his track hoe to the lot last night. This turned out to be great because once Davido was finished with the layout, the excavator showed up and got going right away, hence our construction began in earnest at about 2:00 this afternoon.

I had to run somewhere at 3:00 and when I came back at 4:30 they were done and had displaced a LOT of dirt.

I can't even imagine what it would look like if we were digging out a basement.

Oh, whew.

We have a building permit.

Still no permit

I am so deflated.

And, time for a mini-rant:

Really, public utilities, REALLY?!?!?!? In the last eight conversations that we've had over the past week about OUR #$%^ING HOUSE PLANS you could not, at any point during those eight conversations, mention the fact that your @#$%^#% department would not provide plans approval to zoning withour first attaching a fee schedule to our application? You had to mention this at 4:45 p.m. on the very day when we finally satisfy all your requirements to redraw our site plan (instead of accepting plan notations, like you have for all other residential plans up to this point) to mention casually WHILE WE'RE STANDING AT YOUR $%^&ING COUNTER, "oh, so has anyone talked to you about a fee schedule? Oh, no? Well, we can't release these plans to you until we have a fee schedule for your plans. And since so-and-so was out of town, things got backed up, so we'll add you to the pile." And then the kicker: "We might be able to get it to you on Wednesday."

And now I'm off to search craigslist for firearms and large-scale explosives.

Waiting for the book deal

In the meantime, we're trying not to jinx ourselves more than necessary by revealing information that might come back to bite us. 

Things are stressful, but things are moving. Now, just offer me that tell all and I'll unzip my lips. Soon -- I promise.

Itching to start

Tai is at the lot right now clearing brush from some pretty nasty overgrowth on our sideyard. If the weather cooperates, we'll be cutting down some trees tomorrow. If the weather doesn't cooperate, then we'll doing tree removal two-by-two during the evening next week.

As often happens with me these days, my earlier Tweet about applying for a building permit today isn't going to happen. For many reasons (with many people at fault), the permitting and bid sets of drawings won't be finished today in time to visit the Salt Lake City permit desk. We're hoping that visit will happen on Monday morning, which puts us about two weeks behind when we originally thought we would start the bid process (again, many people at fault).

Our current circular pinch point is that we cannot start construction until we get a full set of construction drawings from the architects. We can't get a full set of construction drawings from the architects until they are, rightfully, paid for their services. We can't pay the architects until the bank releases money from our construction loan, and the bank won't release any money until they have a detailed cost breakdown. We can't give them a detailed cost breakdown until we have completed bids from the contractor and his subs...which takes us back to the permit/bid sets of drawings that will be done by Monday morning. Stay tuned.