Posts Tagged house plan

Permit Sticker Shock

In exchange for nearly a thousand dollars in bribes protection money fees, the City of Seattle and King County have graciously permitted me to make improvements on my own damn house. Assuming, of course, that I do every last bit of work myself, because apparently if a contractor even looks at the house, they’re responsible for pulling the permits themselves.

Really, about the only upside here is that I’m covered for all the work I do for a solid year (18 months for the building/framing permit), and as long as I can squeeze everything into that timespan I don’t have to go back and give them more of my money.

I was somewhat nonplussed to find that only the building permit people actually cared about what my plans were. The plumbing and electrical just totted up the number of fixtures or switches/receptacles/lights/dedicated circuits and charged me a fee. I suppose it’s entirely up to the inspectors to certify that I’ve done it all right.

Speaking of plans, a spiffy new PDF showing all the structural changes to be done is here:

House Plans for Permit

This doesn’t show the plumbing or electrical plans graphically, but the scope of work describes what we’ll be doing to those systems as well.

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Basement Plan

House-Plan-Basement

And here’s the basement plan. I have absolutely no idea why the builder put in all those internal concrete walls (in black) when beams and pillars would have done just as well and left the space a lot more open. The concrete walls in the long (up-down) direction are especially unnecessary since that’s the direction of the joists. (Gray walls are 2×4 framing.)

I kinda hope they’re removable, since they’re really in the way. So is the drain/vent stack, which is right smack in the middle of that room (it apparently goes up right behind the first floor toilet). I’m hoping it can be relocated over next to the outside wall.

Ceiling heights are 6′ 7.5″ from concrete slab to bottom of joists. I’m pretty sure that since the house was built before 1979 we’d be grandfathered in if we wanted to make it into legally “habitable” space. We’d really like to be able to add a bedroom, but I’m not sure right now where we’d be able to fit it without major re-routing of utilities.

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House Plan Is Up

House-Plan

I’ve posted the house plan for the first floor. Window and door sizes and placements are approximate since I didn’t get all those measurements. I’ll be adding the basement and site plan to this in the future, fine-tuning the measurements, and adding notes as necessary.

The PDF version is mostly for us to be able to access and print out to doodle on whenever the mood strikes us.

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