Permitting, round 2

well, this week has been another emotional roller coaster ride. Gerard and i raced to get all the drawings together, copies made, signatures, and answers to comments together and tuesday afternoon i re-submitted the permits.
we were pretty happy because we felt we had discussed everything with the city, and knew it would only take a week or so to get the revised plans approved.

that unfortunately all changed with a simple neighborhood walk.

i walked over to city hall to hand in all our documentation: signed drawings with lots of notes on them, answers to Building and Planning comment letters, and various other forms. once I handed in the plans, i asked Planning, why did you need the interior of the cottage drawn?

simple question, i thought, since it seemed to have nothing to do with the house remodel.

however, i learned they were looking at all zoning requirements. apparently changing the house from a 2-BR to a 3-BR meant that we needed to increase parking spaces to 4, and 80% of them needed to be covered. in this case, that was 3 spaces, and our current garage only covers 2! oops. OK, well what if we cut down the plans to a 2 BR? that works, but the other hitch is that our remodel was going to cover more than 50% of the existing structure, and that would also trigger the need to meet all existing zoning and codes!

needless to say, my heart sank, but i did learn that if we kept the 2-BR plan, and kept changes under 50%, we could grandfather in our existing parking. in talking with Building, i learned the engineer needs to review the current plans and make a judgment call if we are above or below the 50% threshold.

OK, so the plan of attack this week is to figure out how to shrink down to 2 BR, but keep the layout flexible so we can modify to include a 3 BR in the future. I really didn't want to add a carport, since our long term plan is to create an entirely new 2 or 3 BR house in the back in place of the cottage. the carport would end up getting torn out in that case and that would also be more expense. plus, we hadn't anticipated all the zoning requirements so that would take yet more time for Gerard and the engineer to add in a carport, which BTW also qualifies as an accessory structure!