Seal of Approval

(The Negligent Blogger part 1)

Based on my recent posts, one would think that we haven’t been doing any work on the house. On the contrary, the house building project has been consuming our lives. In an effort to catch up, I am committing to a series (which I am calling the Negligent Blogger), where I will post a house update each day for three days.

John and I (but mostly John) spent months finalizing the plans for the house. Even though we had already completed our floor plans and figured out all the external details for the Historic Review Board, there was still a ton to figure out. Moderately important components such as trusses, the breakdown of each wall, plumbing, the roof interface, water and air circulation, electrical plans, foundation footers, etc, still needed to be defined. The final plans ended up being 89 pages long.

The 3-D model of the house with all the framing.

John met with the city of Chattanooga for a pre-submittal meeting in order to figure out exactly what we needed to do before officially submitting our plans. He came home from the meeting frustrated and discouraged, after being told that we were doing basically everything wrong. Here are a few snippets:

• The arborist, who when approached by us months earlier told us “Go ahead and cut. I don’t care. It’s residential R1”, came down on us for cutting down trees without his approval.
• When we first started excavating, we got our ground disturbance permit approved one day before starting. However, since we didn’t come to physically pick it up (we figured the verbal approval was enough), they never cashed the check. During the meeting, they chastised John for digging without a permit and claimed we never paid. He made them go through the records, and lo and behold, there was our un-cashed check.
• The fire marshall told us that under no uncertain terms would we be able to move into the house until we had a fire hydrant nearby. Currently, the nearest one is 2,000 feet away, and he had no idea how our neighboring houses got past this regulation.

Despite all the negative feedback, we decided to officially submit the plans the next day, expecting a rejection but hoping it would provide clear information about what we still needed to complete. Shockingly, we were approved in less than 5 minutes, with the feedback “You were really prepared yesterday”.

Moving forward. Slowly.

A page out of our plans.

One of our 52 walls. This one raised a few eyebrows with the historic board…