A year late(er)

My previous post teased with a "Part 1", seeming to indicate that a "Part 2" would come soon after. Well, here it is a year later and no Part 2 ever came..

What happened?

Well, lots -- and then nothing at all. I got busy last year - very busy. I put in a new sewer line, a new foundation for the back of the basement, and new walls around the back of the house. I cut the back deck down to its smaller size - from 12' x 22' to 4' by 22'. And I ripped all of the old stucco off the sides of the house. Now that was a dangerous, back-breaking job. Dangerous because some of it was done at the top of a 30' ladder. Back-breaking because it all had to be done by hand using a 3 foot long crow bar to pry off the stucco

I put new cedar siding up on all of the new construction. And, when it was all done, I painted the whole house. Well, not quite - I didn't get done before the rain came, so one side of the house still needs to be done. But it definitely looks a lot better

So what happened? I moved out. I won't go into the reasons why, but I won't be living in the house anymore and so work on it has slowed to a crawl. I hope to still get it finished, but I don't know when at this point

But I learned a lot along the way, regardless. And sometimes I even enjoyed it (not very often unfortunately).

If you don't care about building permits, you can stop reading now.

Google tells me that a few people have landed on this page looking for info on permits. That's not surprising - I've certainly had some experience with them! As I said in my previous post, the City of Vancouver Development office was a bear to deal with, but the inspectors in the Building Dept (which includes, Building, Electrical, and Plumbing Inspectors) were excellent. They didn't believe in bureaucratic red tape and knew that in the Real World renovations were rarely "black and white", but various shades of grey. They just wanted it to be safe.

But guess what? I got my property tax notice last week and my taxes had gone up by 20% over last year? Why the increase? I know Vancouver housing prices have skyrocketed, but my house hasn't really gone up more than other houses in Vancouver, had it? Well it turns out it had, thanks to my permits. It seems that even though my permits were just for repairs (rebuilding the decks) and for reducing the total square footage of the house, the city still decided my building had increased in value by 60% (compared to my neighbour's house, which increased by 20%). Of course the land values for both houses were the same, so the net effect for me was an unexpected $500 hit (and remember, that'll be every year) on my property taxes.

All of this leaves me very leery about ever dealing with the Development Office at city hall again. I'm just about done my reno, so it shouldn't be hard for me. And I'm probably done with large renos for life. If you can avoid it, it's worth considering.

When do you actually need to deal with them? Well, I'm not a lawyer of course, but in my experience, you need to get a Development Permit when you:

• Change the dimensions of any exterior wall
• Make any new openings in exterior walls (e.g new doors or windows)
• Change the usable square footage of your house (e.g. finish your unfinished basement)
• Change the usage of part of your house (e.g. convert your basement into a secondary suite)
• Add or change the dimensions of a garage

All of this work will almost certainly require a full set of permits (building, electrical, and plumbing), but smaller jobs may only need these permits and not the dreaded Development Permit. Building permits require less work to get, and I don't think they appear on the radar of the tax assessor. You'll need a Building Permit when you:

• Add, alter, or remove any walls, floors, ceilings or stairs
• Make any changes to your foundation
• Add, alter, or remove a deck or exterior staircase
• Add, alter, or remove a garage

You'll need an electrical permit if you add or alter any house wiring, other than just replacing plugs and/or switches. If you need to move a plug or switch box, you need a permit for that too

A plumbing permit is needed anytime you change the DWV (black drain pipe) piping beyond the trap that attaches to the fixture. So you can replace your sink or toilet without a permit, but not relocate them. You'll also need that permit to alter the hot or cold water piping. There's often a flat rate for a plumbing permit for a "bathroom set" which includes a tub/shower, sink, and toilet.

In Vancouver, you also need a plumbing permit to make any changes to the exterior drainage around your foundation

If you're touching your gas lines, of course you'll need a permit for that. Even if all you're doing is replacing your gas range, since it involves breaking and remaking the seal of the connecting gas pipe, you'll most likely need it inspected

So what's left? Well, you don't need a permit to build a fence, as long as it's 6 feet high or less. And you can generally do landscaping without a permit (as long as you're not removing trees with a trunk larger than 6 inches!). You can install cabinets permit-free, as long as you're not converting a non-kitchen area into a kitchen (and it seems that every department at city hall has a different definition of what constitutes a "kitchen")

Of course, if you don't want to deal with City Hall, you can always hire a professional to deal with it for you. There's a reason they charge so much!!

2010 Update Pt I - Dealing with City Hall

It's been over 9 months since I last wrote in this blog - not because I haven't been doing anything on the house, but just the opposite. I've just been too busy to write.

I'm now starting a month of "vacation" from my regular day job in order to focus on finishing the house and I'm determined to track my progress here. But first, I need to catch everyone up on what's happened so far. So much has progressed since last year that I thought I'd better do several postings.

I wrote in my last post that I'd just received my building permit. To get the development and building permits, all of my dealings were with the Development Office. They demanded numerous drawings to illustrate the work I was going to do. They didn't much care how I was going to do the work (but did demand that a structural engineer sign off on the "how" part). They really only cared what work would get done. If you're just applying for a building permit, the scope is limited to the area being worked on - they can't demand changes to other parts of the house. But if you make any change to the perimeter of the house, you need a development permit. And once you open the door for them by applying for a development permit, they'll walk right in and demand the world of you. Got a kitchen in the basement that's not part of the reno? Doesn't matter, they'll demand it be removed or that a full suite be put in. Maybe you've got one too many bathrooms in the basement? Whoops, sorry, that looks too much like a suite - you'll have to rip that out too. Or maybe they don't like how much concrete you've got in your backyard - better break it up and put in sod. Don't want to? No Permit For You!

But the inspections dept is different. They don't care what you're building, as long as it's done to code. And they're not ones for bureaucratic red tape - while the city's fee schedule demands extra money for multiple trips on-site by inspectors, the inspectors don't enforce that. They just want to make sure the work's done right, and if that means doing it a room at a time and getting each room inspected as you go, that seems to be fine with them. Inspectors spend just 45 minutes a day at their desks at City Hall. The rest of the time, they're in the field. I don't know how they manage to answer their email and phone messages in 45 minutes!

I've now had visits by all three of the inspectors who're dealing with my project - building, electrical, and plumbing inspections. The inspections are always extremely fast. It takes them all of about 2 minutes to inspect a room

The most recent inspection was yesterday by the plumbing inspector. It was actually a "field review" - the inspector comes out and gives you advice on how to deal with a situation that could be a 'grey area' of the code. In my case, it was a sewer line that I discovered runs right through where my new foundation needs to go - and had been badly damaged by the previous idio^h^h^h^hOwner. The inspector gave me suggestions for how to fix it and will even let me do the repair work under the existing permit (which will save me at least $200 in extra permit fees).

I've got a whole blog post to write about the sewage adventure, but I'm confident the inspector will be working with me, not against me. I definitely got the impression that the development office was working against me. If I hadn't already been halfway through this project and forced by law to take out permits, my experience in the development office would probably have been enough to make me walk away from the whole thing.

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.

Setting Goals

With a project as large as a full house restoration, it's useful to have goals. The obvious end goal, "A finished house", seems so far away and, at times, unattainable, that smaller achievable goals are necessary to give something to work toward.

For the past few weeks, I've been considering what it would take to make my house suitable to rent out during the 2010 Olympics. Not the whole house - just rooms. Actually, the City of Vancouver says I can't rent out more than one room, and not to more than two people, without paying a fee and taking out a license. I don't think I want to get into that. So really, it's just "a room". I do have one room that, save for a couple of closet doors, is done:



So my goal is to make the house as presentable as possible, at least in the areas where guests would travel, to make it suitable to rent. All, of course, without crossing into work that needs the permits.

I don't know whether I'll go through with a rental, but I'd like to at least have that option. I'm setting a target of this fall to get things cleaned up and ready.

The two areas most in need of attention are the front hall/stairwell, and the front of the house. See for yourself:






And of course there's also the front yard! That won't matter though, because it'll all be under a blanket of snow in February, right? :)

Even if I get the house cleaned up, I'm not sure whether I actually want to rent it out. I have dogs and cats, so I'd pretty much have to stay at the house for the entire two weeks to ensure there are no problems between the renters and pets. And then there's the cleaning service, and I guess I'd need to supply a TV and cable - since they're here for the Olympics, they're probably going to want to watch events that they don't have tickets for.

What about you? Any Vancouverites thinking about renting out? And if you're visiting, would you consider staying in someone's else house (while they're there)?

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!

Been a long time..

It's been a very long time since I've written anything here -- almost two years in fact. I'm going to try to get back into it and write some more. Although I still don't have any permits, I intend to write more about the experience of trying to get a permit, and about some of the things I've been doing around the house to keep myself busy.

Busted!

I guess I really should have written this blog entry way back on October 23rd, just a few days after my last entry. That's when the City of Vancouver decided to pay me a visit, decided they didn't like what they saw, and decided I couldn't work anymore. I was doing repairs without permits, and even though I was restoring the house back to the way it was before it had been chopped up into suites, that really didn't matter.

It seems I needed building permits for the interior work being done, and development permits for the exterior work. As I soon found out, development permits are a serious pain in the butt. The documentation required to substantiate ANY development work is no less than what's required to build a new house from scratch.

I found this out through what seems to have become an endless stream of trips back to City Hall (5 so far), each time being told "Oh, well, you're missing this document. You really need that as well for the work you're doing".

None of these are simple documents to put together -

• detailed floor plans for each floor, with all dimensions, rooms, appliances, etc marked, including existing and proposed work;
• lateral and longitudinal cross-sectional diagrams of the house
• elevation drawings (side views) of all 4 sides of the house with existing and proposed work (so far they're letting me do just 2, as the only exterior changes were on the back (that new roof), but I fully expect that at some point they'll decide 2 isn't enough);
• a site plan, showing all dimensions of the entire property (including heights), floor space ratio calculations, and site coverage statement
• a landscape plan, showing the location of all bushes and trees, both existing and proposed;
• a street plan, showing our house among the others on the block
• an exterior materials sample board, including final exterior colours
• an aeriel view, showing setbacks of our house vs the neighbouring houses
• photo montages of the rear & front view of the houses on the block, and the view out front and back from our house
• scaled-down drawings of all of the above to be sent to neighbours for approval

In total, it's about 80 pages of documentation. And of course there are the fees, still unknown at this point, as they're decided by the city, based on how much work they say we're doing.

Assuming our development permits get approved (all of this for a stupid little roof around the back of our deck!), we then have to submit detailed building plans before we can get a building permit and only then can we start work again.

Needless to say, after 6 months of working at this, the entire family is pretty frustrated by the whole process.

The moral? If you have to work on your house, make sure no one else can see you!

The rain cometh

The cold wet weather is now upon us, but we did a remarkable job of getting the house sealed up and weatherproof beforehand. In early September, I built a new back deck on the main floor. The deck is about 200 sq ft in size and has a solid railing around it.

Soon after the deck was framed though, the weather turned cold and wet and I didn't expect to get the fibreglass coating on. But in late September, we had another warm spell that lasted long enough for me to get it completely finished! What a relief - 3 decks rebuilt and fibreglassed in one summer. I then really surprised myself by managing to throw together a set of stairs and a small deck around our hot tub, all out of old wood salvaged from the wood pile in the back yard. The stairs and hot tub deck aren't meant to be permanent (we intend to build a nice cedar deck around the tub), but I really didn't expect to get any of that done this year, so it's a nice treat to be able to come into the house through the back.

I also managed to get enough vinyl siding onto the front of the house to keep it dry (and probably please the neighbours, since even old vinyl siding is better than raw plywood). I scavanged the siding from the side of the house that butts up against the next door neighbour's house, so it won't be missed. That side of the house can't be seen and never gets wet.

Now that the weather is decidedly colder and wetter, and the days shorter, it's time to move the work inside again. I still have to get heat wired up in most of the rooms - right now, only the dining room has a working heater. I also have to finish putting the drywall mud onto the family room and living room. And I have vowed to put some effort into the attic - Arielle has been living in a 1/3 finished room for far too long!

Winding down

For the past 6 weeks, since my last post, it has been pretty chaotic at the house. Our 'drop dead' date, of course, was the arrival of our french exchange student on Aug 20th, and we were working right up until the minute she walked in the door. I took two weeks of vacation prior to her arrival and worked 18 hour days almost every day. Wendy took some time off as well and worked equally long days (including a couple of all-nighters). In that time, we got everything on our "to do" list done except the front porch and front door

Here's a before & after shot of our dining and living room:





We are finally starting to relax a bit now and enjoy our half-finished house. We actually have a decent dining room that we can eat in, and a functional kitchen to cook in. Here's a shot of our kitchen - it took two days to throw together:



Of course, we're by no means able to sit around doing nothing! We spent our summer fixing up the inside and doing very little outside, which means we now have about a month to get the outside waterproofed before the cold wet weather arrives. In that time, we have to install the new front door, build the new main floor back deck (or figure out some other way to waterproof that area) and put up some of the missing siding.

Non-stop action

The rate of change around the house now is far greater than I ever anticipated. Six Degrees of Renovation continues, sucking more jobs into the mix. We are now in the process of refinishing ALL of the floors on the main floor, but since we don't want to come back and do little patches of floor in a few months or a year when we move walls into their final locations, we're doing all of that now! So up went the new wall for the living room, where it originally went when the house was built, and down came the massive beam that had been put up in its place. And down came the closet in what used to be my bedroom, because it'll now be the dining room.

There's pretty much nothing left of the main floor now at all. We decided (begrudgingly) that we really should pull all of the plaster & lathe off the wall now, before finishing the floors, the avoid the risk of damage. So by the time I get home from work tonight, the main floor (except for the bathroom) will be pretty much devoid of walls.

The drywallers are almost done - they say they should be completely done by the end of the weekend. And that's a good thing, because in just 4 weeks, our exchange student arrives. And our house has never looked worse. Ugh. Boy do we have a busy 4 weeks ahead of us.