Building inspector…
The building inspector left us a message saying that the plans were approved (pending the zoning permit which should be completed on Monday). That was really much faster than I expected. When I was in his office on Wednesday, I saw lots of sticky notes in my plans. The only one I was able to read said something about making sure that my under slab ducts drained toward an accessible point (my mechanical room). That was my plan, it just wasn’t specified in the drawings. I expected lots of discussion with him about that or other issues before he approved the plans… But now I expect I will just get the plans back with lots of notes that I will need to comply with in order to pass inspections.
Of course, now we need to pay more than $2000 to get the actual permit. On the whole we have saved about 500$ in permit fees (as I mentioned last week). So we are ahead of our budget… for now. I expect we will start to get behind again later when we need a few extra inspections due to our unusual build. For instance, we will need at least one extra rough electrical and rough plumbing inspection so we can shotcrete the basement (another extra cost associated with the basement) before erecting the walls above it and doing some more rough plumbing and electrical.
The Stakeout
The last thing we need for the building permit is the zoning permit. The zoning inspector’s primary concern is that our property is setback 60 ft from the road. It is a little bit silly because the plans clearly show the house is more than 90 ft from the road and the stakes we put in tonight were temporary (not actually used to build) because we still need to level off the property… But anyway, it was part of the process, so we did it and it was pretty interesting.
The home is based on a circle and uses lots of angles, so I will definitely want to use a proper laser transit for laying out the footings. But at this point, it didn’t need to be very precise. Instead, I used a 2 ft paver and diamond cut the important angles in based on a paper print out (it cracked when I dropped it into position). We knew the distance from two stakes to the center of the house, so we used two ropes measured to the right distance and placed the paver, oriented to North, where the ropes overlapped. Once positioned, the large 90lb (41kg) paver will stay put. Then we measured out from the center and I sprayed my arcs with surveyors spray paint. We put stakes at key corners based on the length of the measuring tape and the angle on the center stone. My younger boy didn’t get excited about it until I sprayed the “S” for South next to one of the key points… Then he got the concept.
The final result was that we could “walk through” the rooms and get a sense of the size and flow in 1:1 scale. On that big hill with the big evening sky, the rooms felt small. We had laid out individual rooms before, but this was the first time we had really laid out the whole house and been able to walk through it. Later, standing on the far west corner of the garage and looking across the field to the far east corner of the bedroom, it looked bigger. My wife was starting to doubt that beds would fit in the rooms, but I guess we need to trust the numbers and doubt our perceptions over rough terrain (or maybe it was my rough survey skills).
I didn’t like the final position of the house. I really wanted the back window of the playroom in a certain location where the view is good and the topology of the site dips for the basement egress windows located below. In order to get that without moving a lot of earth, I think we will need to move the house north and east by ~15 ft. Next time we site the house, I may even start with the location of that window and work backward to the center of the house and then out from there.
My Email
When I setup this website, I also got an email address. Actually, it was the address that helped me pick the final website name. I liked the idea of telling contractors (or whoever) that my email address was “Simon” @ “home in the earth” dot com.
Unfortunately, things have been slow to get started and I did not end up using that email with any contractors. Since I didn’t expect any email, I haven’t checked that account since late 2012.
Well, I checked it last night and there were lots of nice comments and questions there. If you wrote to me over the last year, sorry I didn’t get back to you. I will try to get through those emails over the next few days and I will try to check it more regularly from then on.
Actually I have not told many friends about this site (Other than my wife, I don’t think anyone I know from real life has subscribed (top right column) yet. If you subscribe, you will get an email each time I post.
You can also leave comments on each page. If you just come in to the home page, you may not see the comment window. You need to click on the header for a particular post and then you will see the comment section at the bottom. If you leave an email in a comment, it will not shown on the site, but I can use it to reply.