oceandoggy.com

Well, shit.

We’re fifteen days into construction and there is absolutely NOTHING going on. After months of permit process and hot on the heels of years of amateur design work and even more amateurish dreams I just can’t seem to push this baby off the cliff and make her fly.

The contractor that’s gonna do the site work promised he’d start on the 6th, or maybe on the 7th at the very latest. When neither happened, I called him repeatedly but cell phones with caller ID are fun things and pretty much guarantee contractors are gonna talk to you when they’re damn good and ready.

And that’s what’s happenin’

Mr. Site Work finally returned my plaintive calls last Friday promising he’d be there toiling away on Monday the 13th. Tuesday latest.

Again nothing. So. More plaintive pleas, more unanswered calls and he finally called me this morning to say that he’d DEFINITELY be on-site tomorrow, machines and dump trucks humming. Boy Scout’s honor.

You know, unless it snows.

And, ya baby, you guessed it- it’s supposed to snow tomorrow.

So now I’m thinkin’ Mr. Shithead Site Work Dude won’t start this week and then next week is Christmas and gosh golly can’t be starting anything THEN and after that it’s New Year’s and holy cow give me a break and then before we know it, it’s January.

And I’ve lost another month and, you know, maybe I’m just one step closer to homicide.

Effin’ unbelieveably, we’ve somehow, some kinda way, run the beast to ground and trussed it up and made it give us what we want.

201001382. My new tattoo.

This is what went down.

On Monday while I was working I was working with Jason, my new best buddy NC building inspector, trying to work through the exposed rafter thingie. Finally we worked it out that if I supported my goofy rafters with an additional beam, he’d sign off on it and issue the permit.

I flew to Office Max that evening to fax the updated drawings to my new best buddy Jason, feeling close to a beginning.

Then.

That night I proudly showed Miss Carol what I’d done, how I’d rescued her exposed rafter ceiling.

She looked at the revised plans for a minute, sniffing the air, and then pointed imperiously at them and shouted WHAT ARE THESE?

um. they’re posts that’ll support the beam that’ll support the exposed rafters. I said.

NO, NO, NO fucking way. she said. POSTS in MY living room? she said. WHAT IS the matter with you? she screeched.

I’d thought they’d be kinda cool. um, guess not?

CAN’T WE JUST GET THIS DONE WITHOUT ALL THIS BULLSHIT? she cried.

So anyway.

I called my new best buddy Jason The Inspector early Tuesday morning so’s he wouldn’t spend any time inspecting the drawings I’d faxed the night before and I told him I’m over it, that I’d fought the good fight, that I’d gone down swinging and cursing and that I was just gonna build the house to  NC IRC code and give up on all the other stuff.

When he called back, I could almost hear him smile. Can you come in tomorrow? he said.

Yup, and I did, and we hashed it out and I paid more people more money and I got it. The Building Permit is officially MINE.

And as I cradled it, rocking back and forth softly and chucking it’s cute little laminated chin, Jason snorted and told me I needed to man-up and stormed out of his office leaving me alone with my Permit.

Whatever, baby.

Bring it on.

When last we left my quest for the Holy Building Permit, I really thought that I’d put the hard part behind me, that all I had to do was wait patiently for the NC bureaucracies’ wheels to slowly grind out its grudging acquiescence to build a house.

I was wrong.

It’s nearly three weeks later and I’m still without a permit. And the thing is, it’s such a little fly-in-the-ointment, burr-in-the-saddle, sand-in-the-bikini thingie that’s holding everything up that I’d be tempted to let it go if it weren’t important.

But it is.

What it boils down to is this- we want to have exposed rafters in the ceiling. Period. Originally I had drawn the house with a simple A-frame cathedral ceiling utilizing 4×6 lumber as rafters. Nope. Can’t do it. NC code dictates R-30 insulation in the ceiling. (Or actually, supposedly it’s R-30 overall but nobody’s quite sure what that means or how to achieve it.) Whatever.

So I re-drew the plans (which means re-drawing all 5 pages because you have to show elevations and typicals and blah, blah, blah) with an attic space that’ll allow for the R-30 installation and duct work, which we were going to run exposed in the cathedral ceiling scenario. Nope. Sorry. NC code doesn’t recognize or even address 4×6 lumber.

And this is the sand-in-the-bikini thingie. By code you can span 15’6″ with a 2×6 (we’re spanning 14′) but because there is nothing in the regs about 4×6’s, the county wants me to shell out an additional thousand bucks to have an architect draw up the plans and have an engineer stamp them to ensure lumber that’s TWICE AS BIG AS SPEC is OK to use.

Can we say it together?- WTF???

I could just, and maybe I should just, give up and re-draw the plans using puny 2×6’s, or have an engineering firm bless the 4×6’s, but I can’t. I just can’t. It’s something we want and something whose underlying logic should be a foregone conclusion and something which, in my mind, brilliantly spotlights everything that is wrong with bureaucracies and their inability to cope with common sense.

So.

While I try and figure out a way around this latest obstacle and not succumb, time speeds by. I was planning to be coming out of the ground mid-October, now I’m hoping to get started by mid-December.

Is it possible that the permitting process will end up taking longer than the actual construction?

Holy mother jesus.