Building Permits

TREE's DIARY:

We’re finally going to start tearing down the house this weekend. We’ve been doing a lot of research this past month to ensure that we don’t knock it all down only to find out after the fact that we made a huge mistake. Good thing because we discovered that we need to leave one wall up in order to call it a “remodel” instead of a “new construction.” New construction means higher taxes assessed and who wants to pay higher taxes?

We also decided to get all the permits required, which we were not planning to do initially. I don’t know if I mentioned our permit situation in a previous entry, but basically the entire house is unpermitted. We found this out during the disclosure phase of escrow. I called the Building & Safety Division for our area and asked them to fax me all the permits they had on the house. They faxed 2 expired permits and one pending. That was it. I called them back and told them I only received part of the fax and the other valid permits did not come through. The lady there laughed and said that was all they had on the house. I asked her what about the existing valid permits and she said, “Honey, if I didn’t fax it to you, it doesn’t exist,” which means there are no valid permits for the house!

Fortunately I’ve been living in these mountains for 9 months and have, by now, become accustomed to the laid back way things work up here. Had I still been in Los Angeles, I would have freaked out and canceled our offer immediately. Anyone who owns a house in LA that has any kind of work done on it knows how merciless & expensive the permit process can be. But here in the mountains, unpermitted structures are pretty common. In fact, I don’t think I looked at a single house during my search where I didn’t notice at least one thing that was not up to code.

The rules are a bit more lax up here than down where the “flatlanders” live. It has to be, the lifestyle is completely different. It’s a different world up here. We mountain folk (notice how I put myself into that category already?) spend our summers gathering wood for the winter, not sunbathing in our new bikinis on the beach. We are more in touch with our survival/animal instincts up here… something we don’t pay much attention to in the city simply because we don’t have to.

All summer, I watched as everyone around me gathered & hauled truckloads of wood home. Every time I saw a neighbor, it seemed they were always unloading more wood onto their piles. Most of them had stacks and stacks of wood that spanned their property line and I wondered just how much wood a person really needs! I figured they were being paranoid and saving up for the apocalypse or something. I looked at my big pile left from the previous owner and thought it would take me years to use it all up. So I gardened all summer, took long afternoon naps in my hammock and went for day-long exploratory hikes in the forest while everyone else scurried about hunting & gathering more wood.

Well, now we are 5 months into the cold (our winter started with a big snow storm in early October) and I realize now that the apocalypse they were saving for is here and now! It is one single winter in Big Bear!

I am out of wood and it is COLD!!!! Good thing all those neighbors I once naively laughed at are nice enough to share their hard-earned-summer-gathered wood with me. Next summer I will be more in touch with MY survival instincts and become a gatherer too.

But I digress. Back to our permit situation. When I was living in LA, my friend was adding on a room in the back of his house. One of his neighbors called the Bldg & Safety Dept. and told them about it. The Dept. went to my friend’s house, halted his work & fined him for building without a permit. He never found out which neighbor called but it was a very costly call, not only financially for him, but also the extra time & energy he had to put in to hire a contractor, apply for the permits, and go through each phase of the inspection process.

When I was in escrow with my current home up here, I called the Bldg & Safety Dept. and asked if they could go out to the house and tell me what was not permitted. I wanted to know before I bought it. They said they could only go to a house at the request of the legal owner and no one else. I asked them if the owner thought there might be an unpermitted structure, why would he or she call them to come out and face potential fines? They simply said, “He wouldn’t.”
I understood. It’s the unspoken code up here. Don’t ask, don’t tell.

Michael & I decided when we bought the Z-Tree house not to get permits for it, since no one seems to care up here, not even the permit enforcers! But now that we are tearing down the entire house, we figure we should start on a clean slate and do it right. Spending a few thousand dollars now to be safe may be well worth it in the long run. If the unspoken code happens to change after we build it, we may be faced with fines a lot more than a few thousand dollars.

So we have an appointment with a Bldg & Safety inspector on Tuesday. It’s called a “pre-inspection” and is free of charge. We intend to pick his/her brain for any and all information he/she knows about building & permits. And I’m sure that’s quite a bit.

We also heard that we need to have our plans signed off by an architect and a structural engineer, which could cost upwards of $10,000! That sounds ludicrous to us!!! $10,000 just for a piece of paper!? Could they at least include some lumber with that, maybe some building materials, tools, nails, anything?

We are determined NOT to pay that much or even close to it. Someone told us we could get a set of pre-approved plans from the county. I went to the Bldg & Safety office up here and asked them if I could look through their pre-approved plans. They said I could only get them at the main county office which is an hour away (down the mountain), however, the plans they have do not apply to us on the mountain due to our extreme weather conditions and the snow load requirements for the roofs. Why they don’t have available plans for houses that were built up here is beyond me. I guess we’ll find out on Tuesday.

In the meantime, Mike will be here tonight and tomorrow we’ll start tearing down the interior, ripping up floor boards and trying to avoid any retaining walls until we decide which one wall to leave up in order to do our extensive “remodel.”

Stay tuned for another entry tomorrow along with our sketches of the new house design.