Tuesday, May 01, 2007

Derailed, then back on track (we hope)

George, our project manager/construction guy called yesterday morning to say he was quitting the construction company where he works. It's called Bob's and we have never seen or talked to Bob in all the dealings we've had with the company. Bob, it turns out, is a little short on character and was ripping our guy off.
So George came up this morning to discuss our options.
In the meantime, I did some measuring and was stunned to discover our back property line is way closer than we had thought. The back of our property is bounded by an imaginary alley. It was platted back in 1903 when the three-lot subdivision was created, but it was never built. To look at it, you would think it's just two neighbors' lawns meeting.
The planning regs require a 10-foot setback from an alley or a street. The concrete pad that was poured a couple of weeks ago, it turns out, is 11 inches from the property line - 9 feet 1 inch too close. I completely misjudged where the property line was when we laid out the footprint of the building. This revelation completely freaked us out and plunged us into a very deep funk, worrying that we were hopelessly and irretrievably screwed and that we had just committed a blunder that would wipe out the proceeds from the sale of my parents' house.
At the same time, we dug a couple of three-foot-deep holes next to the concrete pad so as to be able to show the building inspector that the pad had the required three-foot footer. In both cases, the footers were only about two feet down. So the concrete guys fucked up too.
After kicking arond the various scenarios with George this morning, we opted to have him rip out the brand new concrete pad, which gets us back to square one with the local planning authority.
Then, with no unauthorized construction in place, we can go before the planning authority in a couple of weeks and be reasonably sure of getting our building permit, since the new garage footprint will be well within the setback requirements.
The neighbors are going to think we've gone stark staring mad when they see a perfectly good $10k hunk of reinforced concrete jackhammered into bits tomorrow.
Fortunately, since George is no longer partnered with Greedy Bob, the new contract does not include the "Bob tax," i.e., the outrageous markup that Bob required. Therefore, George can build the rest of the project for significantly less and we'll end up spending about what we had originally planned, even with the added expense of doing the concrete twice.
George estimates we're about a month from completion, which is pretty close to my original expectation before we ran into this forest of snags.
More demolition photos to follow.

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