whew!

A friend of mine recently posted an update on his Facebook page: "The longer I go without updating my blog, the more "substantial" I feel like the next update needs to be, which makes me put it off more..."

So, we have had a couple of crazy weeks.  Let me explain.  In Coventry, the town gives you two sets of building permits, one after another.  The first is the foundation permit.  The town inspector  comes and checks the following items:

1. The foundation footing,
2. the foundation walls,
3. the sewer tie in,
4. damproofing,
5. and any pipes that will be going into the slab.

After these items are approved, the surveyor comes out and creates a new drawing of where the house was actually built. They call this an "as built". The town needs an as built before approving a building permit.

This is where things get interesting.  Apparently when I originally went to the surveyors, I was unclear regarding how I wanted the garage on the blueprint moved on the site map.  Apparently...

Well, when they moved the garage on the sitemap (the sitemap can be seen from an earlier post) they miscalculated how long the house was.  On the site map, they had it figured as a 48 foot long house while plans actually called for a 52 foot house.

So on the day that the foundation guy is ready to pour the surveyors come out to make sure the foundation forms are situated correctly.  According to the cement guy, a surveyor came up to him and said "your forms are 52 feet, and our plan shows 48.  Again, according to the cement guy he replied to the surveyor, (pulling out his blueprints) "I have the blueprints here that say 52"
"My sitemap says 48" said the surveyor, and (I guess walked away at that point). 

Because the cement guys tells me that he "wasn't to cut 4 feet off of this guy's house" and pours the foundation as called for on the blueprint.

BTW, I found out all of this WAY after the fact as you shortly see.

Everything is great.  Foundation poured, cured, dampproofed, insulated, etc...  The surveyors come out to measure for the "as built".

The next day I get a call from Tim our electrician/GC.  8:30 in the morning.  With an urgent tone of voice, Tim tells me that I have to get down to the town hall...Right now.  He won't tell me what is going on.  When I arrive, Tim tells me that the garage is 3-4 feet over the setback line.  The setback line is the line over which no permanent structure can be built with out a special permit. In the lake area, the setback line is twenty feet from the edge of your property.  The tip of our garage was seemingly over this line and more like 16 or 17 feet from the edge of my property.  This might not seem like a big deal, but in the area of construction, it is huge! No work could continue until this was resolved.  I had several options, frankly none of them good.

1. I could ask for a variance from the town- answer wouldn't be until mid to late September
2. I could try to buy a strip of association land that rings all lake properties- again no answer until late September
3. I could knock down the part that was over the line, and have a shorter garage.

We opted for option three.  It sucked, but we just couldn't wait a month or two for other remedies.  The exact measurement over was 3'2".  This would mean that one side of the garage was only 17.5 feet long, severely curtailing what kind of car would fit in it... Major bummer.  Also the planning and zoning comittee frequently denies these kind of requests.

I will attempt to finish this tomorrow.


Thanks for reading.