tms wrote:
Today, I spent a not entirely frustrating, and not entirely satisfactory, half hour with a city building department permitting “coach”. She very patiently and diligently explained why I couldn’t do that I wanted, and what I would need to do to pursue my ideals in the future;
would you have preferred the type of service in those jurisdictions where you get told "these plans are no good, come back when you've fixed it"? At least she told you what needs to get done. And you said she was patient and diligent. Yes, it's disappointing that you didn't succeed on the first visit, but would you prefer to live in the sort of "anything goes" place (think Houston) where your neighbor can build any sort of monstrosity next to you because there are essentially no zoning laws? Do you want to have to hire an engineer, a plumbing inspector, an electrical inspector, and god knows what else before buying a house because there are no code inspections, or worse, no building code at all?
tms wrote:
Should be easy, right? Yeah, sure. Actually, the building itself should be pretty straight forward, but my first foray into the byzantine ant colony of downtown Seattle was pretty discouraging. It seems that my free plans, downloaded from the internet, didn’t include the required engineering calculations for sheer loads on embedded posts, snow loads on trusses… etc. You get the idea.
At the risk of seeming unsympathetic, why is it the building department's fault that you show up with plans that don't show it meets engineering requirements? Why not blame the website that provided the plans?
I live in one of those places where building permits are "optional", at least in practice. (I know a licensed GC who built his house without pulling a single permit. While you or I might get our hand slapped, a week delay or so, he's risking his livelihood, or so one might think.) Anyway, I figured who needs a permit for a garage, if nobody else ever gets permits for anything. After all, it's a pre-fab, fully engineered building, and the guys assembling it had done lots of these before.
Well, here's what happened:
Seems I didn't ask the snow-load design level and the vendor, in spite of knowing where he was shipping, didn't think to ask if the design load was high enough. Would the building department people have saved me from this? Don't know for sure, but I do know the house, for which permits were pulled, has a design snow-load of 40 lbs per square foot, vs. 10 for the garage. I ended up having to install posts and I-beams, so it's not an open span inside as it was supposed to be.
Those plans you downloaded - what seismic zone are they for? What happens if you're having a pig-roast and the ground starts rocking and drops the roof on your friends because it was designed for the sort of ground movement seen in most of the rest of the US, not the left coast?
Yeah, dealing with city hall can be a pain in the butt, but it can also save your life. Everyone bitches about the former, never remembers the latter when the big one comes.