Back at the turn of the year I said one of the projects on the table for his year was a design build project I’d be calling the Cove House. Well, the project hasn’t gone away. We signed the contract the end of January, but didn’t get started until the first of March. And, as the first few months of any project like this are fairly boring, there just hasn’t been much to say. Happily, now there is.

This is my first project in this area of the county. It’s over a hundred miles from my office (one way!). I was told when I started that they kind of had their own rules in that area, and boy ain’t it the truth! I’ve been around the area all my life. In fact, when I was a wee lad my dad and I used to hunt just a few miles away from the northern edge of the development area. It’s a beautiful area, which is probably the only reason they get away with some of the stuff they do:

• Utilities hookups: $36,000 (recently up from $15,000), and for that breath taking sum they won’t even provide a construction drop for your contractor! If PG&E did that, they’d have the PUC down on them so fast their head would swim.
• Setbacks: The standard 20 ft, but there’s a twist. Off street parking within the setback doesn’t count as “off street” parking. They claim that this is a California Coastal Commission rule, but that’s bogus. Drive through any housing project in the coastal zone (there’s one less than 5 years old in Fort Bragg that’s so close to the ocean you can hit the surf with a rock) and you’ll see a 20 ft setback with cars parked in the driveway — in the 20 ft setback.

  I’d never heard of such a thing. But I’ve worked with enough bureaucracies and elected bodies to understand what they’re doing. They’re almost childishly transparent about it: They want the property owners to develop the right-of-way adjacent to their property at their expense. That way the county doesn’t have to pay to pave it over. So, if you pave the county’s right of way adjacent to your lot, that automatically meets the requirement. If you try to avoid that by parking on your lot, they admit they’ll be very picky. And since fighting town hall, so to speak, is a lot more expensive and time consuming than paving sixty odd feet in front of the property, they get away with it. The City of Fort Bragg did the same thing to my grand parents in Fort Bragg back in the seventies. It made residents pay out of their own pockets to put in sidewalks adjacent to their property. Side walks that had to be built to City specifications, of course.

• Community standards: All cities have some kind of set of standards how a home must look. They don’t want a three story four thousand foot McMansion being built right square in the middle of five a hundred one or two story, two thousand square foot suburban project. But I’ve never been asked to take pictures of all the houses for several blocks around the building site, and to fill out a form describing each house. Most building and planning departments actually know what’s in their jurisdiction. That this one doesn’t… Well…

On other fronts, the “design” part of the job has turned more into “modify”. The client found a stock house that they really liked, but they wanted to make some changes to it. And of course, meeting the above requirements (the parking silliness, mainly) has caused some other changes, as has the site and the local weather.

First, in order to meet the height requirements the roof had to come off. The roof shown in the picture is an 8/12; we replaced it with a 4/12, which is fine for this area. That also means the little dormers came off. The client doesn’t want a fireplace, so that’s also gone. And though it’s not really clear from the picture, the ground floor garage is cement posts separated by lattice. That would work for someplace like Florida, but we needed a walk out basement, we needed four parking spaces beneath, and we’re in the middle of a temperate rain forest. So we’re re-doing the foundation to hold the bank, and pushing the garage out to the edge of the porch on both front and back. Of course, since we’re opening up the garage for parking, that also means changes to the floor joist system. It has to be able to span the entire building without any center support.

So far it’s been a really fun project. On the one hand, blatant attempts to pick the tax payer’s pocket for more money than we’ve authorized always annoy me, and bureaucratic requirements are often silly (and sometimes expensive). On the other, I’ve done my time, know how the system works, and enjoying shepherding projects through. The design changes have also been a lot of fun. Even the architect that did the stock drawings is interested in the changes I’m making. The plans are old (designed to 1991 UBC standards), and some of the changes we’re making are green, which he is also interested in.

As we get a little further along on the interior changes and I’ll show you the before and after.

Technorati Tags: design build, California Coastal Commission, new construction, building standards

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When [building] code enforcement goes a-roaming, with guns and backup, what’s it really after?

That was howThe North Coast Journal’s Heidi Walters opened her article Fear In The Hills back in April. The article covered an incident back in February when:

. . . a convoy of Sheriff’s deputies and a county code enforcement officer wandered up and down the private roads and into yards, surprising the rural residents of homesteads scattered among the trees.

They were armed with flak jackets and carried automatic weapons and marched all over people’s property like they were some Nazi gestapo or Soviet government troops, storming all over the southern end of Humboldt County.

You could make the argument that the whole fracas started a month earlier when code enforcement got into it with some residents of a place locals call Yee Haw up near Trinidad, who live in what they call “free form” houses. Naturally, the hard workin’ bureaucrats saw it as their business to “get the buildings, water and sewer systems permitted and up to county codes.” In fact, they issued them an eviction notice. (North Coast Journal Codes, Damned Codes, Feb. 28, 2008)

Of course, the gestapo had its reasons. Like all good bureaucracies, its really looking out for its citizens. In an article published on March 25th, in the Redwood Times Claude Young of the Administrative Code Compliance section of the County Counsel’s office explained that “bringing houses into compliance with building laws will stabilize property values.” And of naturally, “the county will have to begin enforcing the new fire safety standards developed in the wake of the San Diego fires.”

Ever notice how there’s never any lack of creativity when it comes to a bureacracy finding reasons to justify their jobs and their budgets, or ways to spend your money for you?

Down in the Shelter Cove Development Area the County Planning Commission found a really nifty way to pick new builder’s pockets by making it nearly impossible to meet the off road parking requirement without paving the county’s road right of way adjacent to your property — at your expense, of course. If you do that, you’re almost guaranteed to meet the parking requirement even if the right of way isn’t technically big enough to do so. But if you try to meet the requirement by putting all the parking on your property, the Planning Department is very open about the fact that they’re “very strict” when it comes to measuring spaces.

Now, as a professional builder I fully understand the need for reasonable rules and regulations that ensure that I and others in the profession build you a safe and quality structure. But we’ve gone way beyond that. Building codes and inspection requirements are now more about turf protection and job justification than they are your safety or my quality of workmanship.

This point was made very well twenty years ago when Strong-Tie lobbied the (then) UBC over the improved safety of its connection hardware over the old toe-nailing method. Fire departments all over the country went ballistic. Metal heats much faster than wood. It gets so hot, in fact, that it burns the ends of the frames off, destabilizing the structure must faster than nails driven into wood that are therefore protected from the heat of the fire by the wood. Well, the firemen lost. And many good firemen lost their lives as fire science experts struggled to come up with new methods of dealing with buildings constructed using these metal joist fasteners that are now literally the standard in the building industry.

Now this isn’t to say that all the regulations and codes are bad. Of course they’re not. Like most things, it’s a mix of good honest public servants trying to do their best for society and greed and turf driven people and corporations who are only out for themselves.

In any event, the results of this rather crass attempt to raise money for the county by harassing citizens who are harming no one has led the Board of Supervisors to create a task force that’s held a number of hearings on the issue. In fact, as of today, according to the Eureka Reporter, they’re still holding hearings.

Hopefully cooler heads will prevail and we’ll get back to where we were a few years ago: Building officials and code enforcers and building professionals all on the same page, trying to design and build you the best, safest building we can.

Technorati Tags: building codes, building code enforcement, regulatory abuse

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I must apologize to loyal readers for not posting here for over a month.

I have been working on The Cove House since the end of February (among other small jobs) and have been hoping to get a post in here about it. But on the personal side, my 91 year old Grandmother has been terminally ill the last few weeks. Today I got word from my father that she died. And while this was not unexpected, it has been something of a distraction.

A few weeks ago she was taken to the hospital after suffering what looked to be a stroke. It turned out a brain tumor had progressed to the point that it was interfering with — well, I guess just about everything. She had sat in her chair at home for hours before remembering she had a life line button that would bring the ambulance forth-with.

Thankfully, with medical attention she was coherent enough to make her own decisions about her future. The doctor offered her the usual unpleasant choices when cancer is at work. She flat refused. At 91 she wasn’t about to try and hang on just for the sake of hanging on when the best of prognoses were gloomy.

Not 48 hours later she had a massive brain hemorrhage that left her in a semi-conscious state. At 9 pm last night she finally got her wish. Peace and release.

Gwenlynn (Gwen) A, Wyant-Matson 1916–2008 :: May you rest in peace, Grandma.

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Okay, so you want to build green, but you’re on a tight budget. You can’t afford to have a custom house designed for you, but those McMansions in the house plans magazine are also way out of your budget. Well, somebody finally noticed that there’s a market for smaller homes: Check out The House Plans Shop. Not only do they have some nice smaller house plans (houses for real people, rather than Briney Spears), they’ve also taken notice of the growing desire to incorporate green building technologies into the plans. Here’s a link that will take you to a brand new page on their site about green building.

Now, keep in mind that these are stock plans, so you’re not going to find plans on their site that use green building methods such as structural insulated panels (SIP) or insulated concrete forms (ICF), or even engineered lumber (which usually requires different frame spacing to be an affordable option to sawn lumber). But that doesn’t mean stock plans can’t be “greened up” in many other ways. In almost any house you can:

• Choose any of several types of recycled and/or natural fiber insulation.
• Choose an energy efficient heating and air conditioning system (HVAC). (Here on the North Coast, install a high efficiency wood stove, which has a carbon neutral footprint. See my article: Is Wood Heat Green?)
• Choose energy efficient windows, and get the type that open so there’s good natural ventilation.
• Choose low VOC or no VOC coatings. (I really don’t recommend the all natural paints made from flax and what not because they don’t hold up at all!)
• Choose flooring systems made of natural, or sustainably grown materials.
• Install an on demand water heater, rather than a tank style water heater.
• Install a rain water recovery system. In fact, while you’re at it, capture all the drainage water from the property and use it in your garden.

There’s a lot that you can do on a budget, even with stock house plans, to build green. And it all starts with picking an appropriately sized house. You might want to give The House Plans Shop a look see before deciding which stock plans to buy.

Technorati Tags: house plans, green building, ICF, SIP, engineered lumber, high efficiency wood stoves

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