There was a time in my life where I felt really lucky to be able to build a custom home. That was 3 years ago when this journey started. Things have been anything but smooth over these past few years and I’ve had many moments where I wondered if the pain we were going through was worth the end result.
We naively didn’t dig too deeply when we chose our builder. We found a guy who seemed really nice, seemed to know what he was doing, was very responsive whenever we contacted him, and generally seemed like a good fit since he built the style of home we liked all over Kirkland. I figured that any builders reviews were going to be negative, and assumed that a builder is a builder is a builder.
Things initially went pretty smoothly. We were able to close on the property in July 2015 and had meetings with an architect at Architects Northwest the following month. Site surveys were all completed before September and we had our CAD floor-plans ready for review in November. There was a bit of back-and-forth with some delays related to the Holiday season, but since we were able to rent the existing house, we weren’t too concerned as the renters were able to help us keep costs in check. The main thing we had on the back of our mind was the July 2016, the date when we would have to have our plans submitted in order to be grandfathered in with the sensitive area setback.
Our property has a natural stream running at the far end of the lot. One of the reasons we were able to find such a large lot in Kirkland was the fact that the property was not sub-dividable. The current setback for new developments with sensitive areas was about 60 ft back from wetlands and streams, and the city was changing the rules in July to 100 ft, which would have forced us to have a spit-rail fence pretty close to our backyard which we would have to stay away from and we wanted to have as much backyard as possible. A couple of years before we found this lot, we almost purchased a 1 acre lot in Woodinville, but we ended up backing out of that lot, and in the time since we had Max, we decided that we really wanted to be closer to work, coffee shops, and be able to walk to things in general. I still wanted land, and finding 0.31 acres in Kirkland was amazing.
I didn’t think about it too much till later, but we made the huge mistake by telling our builder that we were not in a hurry to get the house started. At the time we were mostly thinking about the fact that the house was rented, and we didn’t quite have the finances figured out to build the house we wanted. It seems like he took this lack of urgency on our side to mean that he would submit the permit at the last possible moment before it was due on July 1st.
I wish I had known about MyBuildingPermit.com sooner. Our builder told us that he liked to submit the permit in person, so I sort of assumed that there wasn’t going to be any sort of digital trail that I could follow-up with online. We assumed everybody was taking care of things. We did reach out in April to see how things were going, but we were told at this time that they were waiting on an Arborist report and that they were aiming for mid-April to submit the permit. The timeline seemed reasonable still as we were told that it would take 6-7 weeks for the city to review the permit, and we still had tenants till the end of Summer, or so we thought.
On June 9th, our tenants informed us that they were going to be moving to Arizona and asked if they could break their lease agreement. Assuming that the permit was submitted, I told them that it was no problem, and wished them well. I informed Joe that our tenants had moved out before the end of the month, and I was hoping we could move forward with demolishing the old house.
The permit was finally submitted a week later on June 17th 2016.
Custom Kirkland Home 