Yeah, I know I'm lucky compared to


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Posted by David Sherman on Sunday, June 01, 2003 at 12:50PM :

In Reply to: Re: David, Consider yourself lucky... posted by MoparNorm on Sunday, June 01, 2003 at 10:07AM :

all the places I'd really hate to live. When I built my garage in Everett, I tried to get permits, and after they shuffled it around to enough offices it finally got to the desk of somebody who said I had to build it 20' farther back from where the old one had been. I didn't have room for that so I told them I'd changed my mind and they have me half the permit fees back and I went ahead and built it anyway. As soon as it was done, I got a letter for the historical committee giving me a certificate for building such a nice historical-looking garage (which the planning department had refused to allow me to do).

In Idaho, it's a lot easier. I'm 10 miles from the nearest house, surrounded by forest service land, and there's only one building inspector for the whole county, including all the cities within it. Building permits are still kind of a new thing here, and they don't seem to be too picky about what you build so long as you buy a permit and they can raise your taxes on it. He'll take a free-hand sketch for a "site map" and "plans". I hope I get everything big built before they start require it all to be built to code. I tend to build out of local log poles, and footings are hand-mixed concrete stuffed with as many river rocks as I can cram into the forms. The result is good and stout but it's not UBC. There's only one local redi-mix company and they told me if they could deliver at all, it would only be half a truckload at a time due to the steepness of the road and probably a 4 hour trip one way at $65/hr, plus the cost of the concrete. And they won't drive across the river to where I built that latest garage. It's amazing how building plans change when you can't just order up 20 yards of concrete. I'm not looking forward to hand-mixing a floor slab.

But yes, you guys who are trying to build something interesting in a jurisdiction with a "complete" building department have it real tough and expensive. Sometimes it seems like they make it harder on the guy building a garage or a mother-in-law apt or splitting off one lot, than on the big-time developers that come into the planning dept with stacks of drawings several feet high for their 200-unit tract house subdivisions.



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