Work begins!

Wednesday, April 20

On Tuesday evening, our GC (general contractor) faxed the tree protection form to the city. On Wednesday, he got a message that the fax was printed on recycled paper so the lady couldn't write on the form. Therefore, she requested him to re-fax the form. Sometimes being too environmental can backfire. :D I wonder if they used soy-based inks too...

Only work done on was to get the trees protected. He doubly protected them - wrapped orange plastic fencing around the trees and then set up a chain link fence around each tree. And of course, the tree protection signs from the city.

GC also left his big dump truck on our driveway.

Another guy came by to measure the width of our gates...


Thursday, April 21
Big dig!
Two Bobcats worked all day on digging a hole in our backyard. That's what the guy was measuring - whether the Bobcats could fit through. They removed our gate to get them to fit. Hiring the Bobcats saved the GC 2-3 weeks worth of manual labor and 18 trips to the dump (to dump all the dirt).

Later in the afternoon, they fitted one of the Bobcats with a drill to break up concrete. Part of our patio was taken down this way.

It was deeply satisfying to see the pit they dug in our backyard. :)

Btw, we passed the tree protection inspection in the morning. So by afternoon, the GC had picked up the contract! yay!

Permit pickup? Not yet!

We arrived at the city planning office 15 minutes before our scheduled time in hopes of cutting down our wait time by signing in early. However, our contractor got to the city planning office 45 minutes before our scheduled time and had already signed in. Overall, we waited about 30+ minutes before sitting down with a city worker...the same one that accepted our project for city review!

The building permit is ready but we have to do a few things before we can pick up.
1) Contractor had to submit his information, including license number.
2) Provide an additional copy of our plans for the county tax assessors office. (Thankfully our contractor had brought his plans so we just submitted those while he got a newly stamped copy of the approved plans.)
3) Complete a special inspection form (done on the spot).
4) Protect the street trees and fax over a Tree Protection form to the city. Once they receive the form, somebody will do a drive-by inspection the day after.
Note: tree protection could've been done before this first meeting with the city to save an extra day of waiting - work can't start until the city verifies our trees are protected.
5) Pay fees (brought our checkbook and did it on the spot).
6) Take a form for School Impact Fees to the local school district office, pay the fees, and bring back a copy back to the city.

After these are all done, then our contractor can go pick up the building permit to start work.

So now, we're only waiting on #4 (contractor's job) and #6 (submitting form to the city).

Contractor meeting: First steps

Over the weekend, we called our contractor to inform him of our approval. Had a meeting today to discuss the next steps.

Tomorrow - go to the planning office to pull the permits. He needs to put his name on the permit so that he can take over construction responsibilities as well as schedule field inspections with the city. We need to pay the permit fees.

His crew has been idle for 2 weeks now just waiting for us to get our approval. So thankful he did not pick up another job during this time. That would've meant a delay in our project!

** From another mom that's also undergoing remodeling and about 1.5 month ahead of us: the city's waste collector has put up a fuss about the garbage bin her contractor put up in front of the house for construction waste. Supposedly the waste collector is the exclusive provide of that service to the city so the resident would face fines for not using their services. **

Day after - Contractor will haul and unload his tools into the backyard.

Day after that - Crew shows up for work! :)

Approval!!

March 24 - Architect turned in the plans to our planning reviewer. But because we were changing the outer walls, we needed to submit the revisions to the third-party plan checker for approval. In addition, the building department requested that we get the water/gas department to sign off.

March 28 - Water/gas called our architect back. They had reviewed our project in February and had signed it off with minor red-mark conditions. But for some reason they could not find the approval on the project log. So our architect asked the guy in water/gas to send an email of his approval to the person in charge of coordination of our project.

Btw, the central project coordinator is a new thing in our city planning department! Hopefully it'll help streamline the approval process. :)

April 1 - Third-party plan checker called our architect to inform her that the revisions had been stamped and approved. Since our architect was going to be in the area, she saved us a trip by picking up our plans and delivering them to the city on her way home. When she submitted our plans, she was told that water/gas had approved of our project. So now all we had to wait for is the planning to get back to us!

April 5 - Was informed that we would have to wait the full three weeks for approval from planning. Better than the last time around when the turnaround was four weeks. Also, it's good that your hopes aren't up for an early approval.

April 13 - Approved by planning!!! This means the entire project is approved by the city! We can call our contractor and begin work!
:) :) :)

Setback discussion with the architect

The main reason for the "not approved" from planning is our setbacks on the sides of the house. The building codes had once again changed such that for our lot, we need 6' of clearance on each side. The old code was that you needed a total of 12' clearance on the sides. So we met up with our architect to discuss which rooms to narrow down to meet that setback requirement. We decided not to try to appeal the decision since it would most likely be rejected anyway and just end up wasting a lot of time and money.

She was very upset because she had met with the planning office twice during our design process and there were no comments on the setbacks.

So annoying!
But thankfully, she came up with a good design to minimize the damage of narrowing the house.

Planning Department

On March 9, we contacted the city planning department because everything had been approved except the planning review. The planning review is usually the first to respond but somehow for our project, it still had the status of "routed" since Jan 03. Apparently the guy who was supposed to be reviewing our project was out and it had just been sitting there.

Thankfully, the guy who originally accepted our plans was able to get the planning department on it asap. We got a response in 24 hours!

Not approved...setback issues.

First rejection

Feb 1
Once again, we were not approved by the city...not because of the mass of our structure. But rather, the Public Works department had a thing or two to say. We didn't have a copy of the pollution protection plan attached to our plans. And didn't provide diagrams for how we were going to protect our trees. (Mind you, this includes a tree in front of our neighbor's yard about 5 feet away from our home.) Geez.

Feb 16
Our architect met with Public Works and made sure she knew what had to be done. Submitted revisions.

Now all we have to do is finalize our choice of general contractor while we wait for city approval!