I have a Permit

I wrote my last blog post about 'setting goals' just a few days before getting a letter from City Hall. It seems they'd noticed that my Development Permit, taken out over a year earlier, had lapsed and, since I was still under a Stop Work order, I'd have to get my ass in gear and get the permit application finished.

So out the window went my previous goals. Time for a new set. Now I HAD to get all of my building permit drawings finished, and no more extensions would be afforded me. I had to renew my Development Permit immediately ($500) and then I had until absolutely no later than Aug 1st to get my Building Permit application in.

The Development Permit application process, which I did back in 2007, was painful, primarily because I'd chosen to do all of the drawings myself and was unfamiliar with how the bureaucracy at City Hall works. A development permit is needed as soon as you do anything that changes the dimensions of the outside of the house - either larger or smaller. However, since I was only making minor changes (adding on a few inches to the main floor and making the decks slightly larger when I rebuilt them), I was hoping that I'd be able to do a subset of the work required for a full development permit. A full DP, after all, requires about 90 pages of documentation. Unfortunately, every time I went in with my drawings, they thought of something else they wanted, and more detail on the drawings that they'd somehow missed telling me the last time I was in there. In the end, after no less than 7 trips into City Hall, I'd amassed every document that a full DP would need - it was no different than if I'd been building a house from scratch.

I was quite worried that the same thing would happen with the building permit and given that I'd only been given just over 2 months in total to finish, I couldn't afford the time to keep correcting mistakes. Most of the drawings were reusable from the DP to the BP - the only new drawings I had to create were the construction detail drawings - basically blown-up views of anything new that was being added so that they could see how I would be building it. In my case, that meant drawings for the new back foundation wall, the new decks, roof around the upper deck, and rear staircase.

I had my drawings finished by July 1st and took them in in small format to have them reviewed before plotting them out on 42" plotter paper.

Throughout this whole process, one thing I wanted to avoid doing was having to hire a structural engineer to approve my plans. This is actually standard practice for any sizable renovation, but since I was quite sure that what I'd already built wasn't going to fall down, and since I was building everything within the standard construction methods outlined in the residential building code, I felt it was unnecessary. And the person I saw at City Hall in early July agreed with my in principle. She said that the application would be reviewed by a permit processor at City Hall and if it was deemed necessary, I'd have to bring in an engineer at that point. But at least the application would be in!

So a week and a half later, I went back with the full size drawings. This time I saw someone else. The response? "Where's your structural engineer's certificate? Sorry, we won't accept any plans without engineering signoff. Come back when you've got it." Damn did that piss me off. And as it turns out, it's not so easy to find a structural engineer who will work with a DIY'er who's already..err.."Done" it. Luckily I did manage to find a guy, but not so luckily, he lived in Maple Ridge. At a hundred bucks an hour, including having to pay for travel time, the bill to have my plans rubber stamped? $900.

But now it's done. The application went in and was approved just two days later (by contrast, the development permit took 9 months). The bill for the building permit? $950. And I'm not done yet - I still have to apply for the electrical and plumbing permits. They'll total at least $500 each. So in all, to have City Hall rubber-stamp my work, took three years of my life and about $3500.

So far.