Building Permit

As mentioned in The Beginning, after many months of pointless delays, our building permit was finally filed on June 17th 2016. We were told by Joe that the permitting process would take 6-7 weeks, so we weren’t terribly worried about the timeline as the old house was still standing, and the tenants were still in the process of moving out. It seemed like timing was good for us to break ground sometime in September. I wasn’t terribly excited about the idea of framing over the winter, but at this point, it wasn’t something I was going to try and worry myself about too much as I just wanted to get moving.

It turns out that there were quite a few (to say the least) properties with wetlands in Kirkland. City Hall was ill-equipped to deal with the flood of building permits that were submitted before the proposed wetland buffer changes. They were essentially expanding the setback from 60 to 100 ft for any properties with wetlands. The increased number of permits being submitted resulted in much longer wait times. Our permit wasn’t touched by anybody at City Hall till December, almost 6 months later.

As expected with any building permit, the city had some corrections for the architects and engineers, but those revisions did not make it back in a timely manner.

I began asking Joe on January 10th, after the Holidays, about news regarding the permit, as I had not heard of any updates on it in close to a month. I knew the Holidays meant that very little was likely to get done, so I wasn’t surprised that the updates weren’t out quite yet. I was told when I asked, that they were finishing up a few things, and that they’d be submitting those changes within the week, around the middle of January.

On February 10th, I decided to press again, since I hadn’t heard any news from Joe regarding the permit, and decided to call City Hall, to see if I could get any updates on what was going on with our permit. The person on the phone claimed that they hadn’t received any updates from our builder, so I forwarded that information along to Joe, and was re-assured by him that things were in fact submitted to the city and that we were “waiting on them, not the other way around.” It was slightly concerning that the city claimed they had not received the updates, so about a week later, after not hearing anything, I decided to go to City Hall and talk to the person who was actually reviewing our permit. I got hold of Ron Braun and he confirmed that they had not received any of our latest updates, and it was at this point that I called Joe, with Ron in the background, and told him that the city had in fact not received the updates.

The revisions we were waiting on were finally submitted on February 16th, 2017.

As noted in My Dungeon, we were also submitting a revision to the original plan, where we would be digging out the entire basement under the South side of the house for a workshop.