Demolition is very exciting and it certainly looks like visible progress. But you may be wondering what else we’ve been up to for the last month and what comes next.

Well, as we said in our last few posts, we finished salvaging anything worth keeping and we filed mountains of paperwork for permitting. Then things got a bit stalled (which I’ll get into in a moment) and so in the meantime we did some finishing work on the new garage.

The garage door openers turned out to be an ordeal. When we installed the doors themselves the instructions clearly say you need 14″ of clearance above the door. No problem, as ours had 16″. The fine print at the bottom of the page says “if you plan to use an electric door opener add three inches.” It wasn’t referenced in the table above, and was in the footer below other information, so I glossed right over that little subscript. When I went to install the opener a few months later, sure enough, its 1″ too short. After trying several different solutions I finally ended up ordering a second new opener rather than reusing the 7 year old one from the old garage and I installed them both rammed up against the drywall with about 1/4″ clearance to the door. A little nerve-wracking, but they seem to be working fine.

We also made some progress on the siding, doing the entire back side in one afternoon of blistering 95 degrees in full sun. We have one piece of trim on the back, a few small bits on the front, plus the high triangular gable end on the North end still to do. (The South end won’t get done til its tied into the house).

Getting the money to build has been a major priority. After trying 20 different banks – no joke – I found only two that would do this loan.  (Thanks subprime mortgage crisis, love you too!) So in the last month a significant time commitment has been hounding my useless loan officer endlessly to try to get our loan closed. The appraisal of our proposed house was one potential hiccup. Having submitted the full budget as if we had to bid out every bit of work, and including a 10% contingency on top, we were asking for $376K. That would require an appraised value of $470K to ensure the required 20% down.  It actually came back $440K, which is still great. I just dialed back the contingency line to get it to 80% value and we should still be plenty safe. (And yes, I still owe a full budget post which I still intend to do!) The loan process has been really nail-biting in a few places where I feared it might not go through, but we now have a closing scheduled for Friday July 6, so that’s a huge relief. Not only will we have a hole in the ground, but the available cash to fill it back up again.

Permits are turning out to be a headache in a different way than I expected. After finally submitting my mountain of paperwork, I got the expected calls from a few different city agents. I was able to modify some things to satisfy the guy who approves right-of-way and sump discharge. (Apparently if you try to set a dumpster on the city’s easement they charge you a rather shocking daily fee… best to move that elsewhere on the lot.) I got past the drainage and erosion lady considerably easier than expected. But the building permit itself was stopped stone cold. Our friendly and helpful building inspector said rather apologetically that there was nothing in the 2015 International Residential Code describing how to secure a brick veneer 5″ away from the wall structure behind it. Because of this, there was no way to get to code compliance on certain aspects of the design. Thus he suggested we get an architect or a structural engineer to design all the walls to meet specified load requirements. They would have to stamp the entire plan with their official seal.

That was disappointing, but we dutifully went about trying to find someone to do it. My consulting architect came and spent 90 minutes going over things with me and had several smart ideas, but he said we’d need a real engineer to do all that math (he is retired, after all). It turns out there are very few engineering firms that want to do a little rinky-dink residential project like ours, especially at the tail end of the design. Those that would consider it were going to take weeks to get around to it and charge a stack of bills that definitely wasn’t in my planned budget. After two weeks of dead ends, I was at about my lowest point psychologically so far in this project.

I spent last weekend in very cozy consultation with the full text of the 2015 International Residential Code. I completed detailed wall bracing calculations (riveting stuff, I assure you) and documented the exact lines of the code that could cover various aspects of my design. For example, section R703.8.2.2 covers how to suspend that second floor brick on the East wing of the house over wood structure below. Don’t you feel enlightened now that you possess this knowledge? Me neither, honestly. Meanwhile Amy also dug up a certified Engineering report for Thermomass, the product we’re using in the foundation.

Armed with these I was able to convince the inspector to review the plans as they are and identify any specific issues that needed to be addressed or professionally engineered. While this still means waiting a week for plan review, only to have him come back and ask for probably 25 more things, it at least means that progress is grinding forward again, and without me having to spend the equivalent of our Hawaiian vacation on an engineering stamp.