Shared Interests

I spent several hours on the phone last Thursday checking the status of my building permits. (My remodeling project requires two separate permits and each one was being held for a different reason.) Sacramento County has a handy [permit status tool][], but the “Active Hold” descriptions are somewhat cryptic–it’s reasonable for *me* not to know what “TR – Sac Cnty W Dist” means, but when the people at the building department don’t know what it is that’s pretty bad. I didn’t find out what I needed to do and whom I needed to speak with until late afternoon on Thursday, so I had just enough time that day to run out to the county branch center (off Bradshaw Road) and pick up my plans.

On Friday afternoon I left work early and took my plans downtown. I finally got both of my permit applications cleared right before close of business, and I could have had the permits issued then and there, but while discussing my project with the plan checker I discovered that there were some foundation walls on our plans that were not required by code. This wouldn’t have been a big deal except that these “extra” foundation walls would have to be built under the existing house, and I didn’t want to tear out our hardwood floors just to install spurious foundations! So the plans have to go back to the draftsman for revision. Hopefully that won’t take more than a day. On a brighter note, our first revision cleared the building department in less than a week, and I expect our second (final?) revision will clear at least as quickly.

There are several people at the building department who’ve been extremely helpful to me, and I’ll be sending commendation letters to their supervisors. I’ve been especially impressed when I dealt with these folks face-to-face. If you go in with the right attitude they are almost universally a pleasure to work with. The key thing to remember is: what is the objective of the building department, and what is the typical attitude they have to deal with? Plan checkers and inspectors are almost exclusively concerned with fire- and life-safety, yet they have to listen to a bunch of whining from developers and contractors who are trying to cut corners on these very important issues. It’s no surprise that somebody in this situation might develop a surly attitude. I’ve run into a few such people in the building department, and I’ve been able to get on their good side simply by convincing them that it’s in my own best interest to build my family’s house according to code. If I have questions about the building code, I make a point of conveying my desire to *understand* the code rather than quarreling with it — I know that there *is* a reason for every code requirement, and if they explain the reason to me I will be able to implement it more effectively.

Anyway, that’s my rant in defense of the building department. Now on to the status of the project…

Our plans still have to be cleared by the fire department. (Sacramento County doesn’t route the plans to other entities, so you need to do this yourself.) Since our house, garage, workshop(s), and porch (and all the eaves!) will eventually cover more than 3,600 square feet, we probably either need to upgrade our street’s fire hydrant *or* install a fire sprinkler system. Fire sprinklers are probably less than $1,000 more expensive, but considering how effective they are I think we’ll go this route. (My conscience twinges at the thought of not helping my neighbors by upgrading the fire hydrant, though.) The ideal solution would be for the fire department to consider the house and the outbuilding as separate structures, neither of which is large enough (by itself) to trigger the hydrant upgrade or fire sprinkler requirement. (/me crosses fingers!)

We found a good lead on a tree trimming/removal contractor. The [remaining “junk” trees in the back yard][junk trees] will be removed in about two weeks. I’ll write that up when the job is finished.

We’re going to bury our electrical and telephone lines, so I need to call [SMUD][] for their requirements. Hopefully the telephone conduit can run in the same trench as the power! Once we have this information, we should be able to make preliminary arrangements with the foundation contractor. Then it’s time to pay for our building permits and start construction. Woo hoo!

[permit status tool]: http://www.bldginspection.org/permitinforetrieval/PermitLookup.aspx
[junk trees]: http://sonicchicken.net/blog/wordpress/2006/10/27/tree-removal/
[SMUD]: http://smud.org/

I haven’t posted much about our remodeling project lately, because nothing much has been happening. But last week I got our plans back from the draftsman and resubmitted them to the Sacramento County Building Department about 10 minutes before close of business that day. Unfortunately this was right before a 3-day weekend, but hopefully plan checking will proceed relatively quickly since there were only relatively minor issues with our original plans. The first round of plan checking took about three weeks, so I think we may get our plans back in about two weeks this time. We’ve already paid our impact fees to the school district (about $2,400), and I think we have one more hold that we’ll have to clear before we can get permits.