Going it Alone

It's been well over two years since the City of Vancouver issued me a Stop Work notice and told me I couldn't proceed without a set of permits. In that time, a few things have changed in my life. I sold my car and switched to cycling. I got a promotion at work (to IT Architect). But most significantly, 'W' moved into her own place with my daughters. Although we separated very soon after moving into the Vancouver house (four years ago now), we continued to share the house - one of us living upstairs with the kids, the other in the basement suite - while we worked to restore the house. I don't think either of us was really sure what would happen once the house was "done", but we still shared the passion for restoring the house.

Since the work stoppage, that passion dwindled - especially in me. The bureaucracy of dealing with City Hall wore me down quickly, and the process of assembling (read: making!) all of the documentation for a permit application was certainly nowhere near as rewarding as restoring flooring, building new walls, or re-plumbing a house. I'll do a separate blog post on just what goes into the permit process.

So now I'm by myself. My son lives with me part-time, but the rest of the time, it's just me. It's taken a personal toll on me, but it has given me more time to work on the house (at least, when I feel like it), unfortunately with a drastically reduced budget! And of course, I still can't do "substantial" work - just painting and trim work, mostly.

Our original plans for the house called for significant interior renovations. Besides undoing the "carving up" of the house into suites and insulating all exterior walls, we had also planned to add three new bathrooms and tear out the existing main floor bathroom to incorporate it back into the kitchen. This was going to cost a lot of money, and it was really going to make the permits more complex and expensive. We couldn't really just 'leave it off' the permit application because we'd have to finish everything, get the permits signed off, then tear everything up again -- oh, and it would be illegal, too.

Now, the demand for those bathrooms has..well..moved out. And I can neither afford nor particularly need a gourmet kitchen. That means I can scale back the interior work, reduce cost, and get the city off my back sooner. It also means I have to redraw all of my plans.

Of course, I'd have to have done that anyway because my development permit application expired two weeks ago!