Still playing the waiting game...

The architect did actually call the next day, and we met with her again later that week to go over a few changes. Then there were some phone calls and then finally last Friday I came home to see this sitting on our living room/dining room table. Yes! Our house, all three levels plus a site plan, cross section and two elevation drawings! Hurrah! But it was Friday, and planning offices aren't open on the weekend so we weren't able to take them down and exchange them for a permit until Monday.

You can't just take your plans down to the planning office, lay them on the table and say "I'd like one of those magic yellow papers to hang in my window that mean that no one's going to show up and complain when I remove the second story of my house, please." It's just not that simple.

They really hold onto those little yellow papers, and they grumble a lot and make you agree to put smoke alarms in practically every room of your house. No problem planning office guy, we love smoke alarms. Then they look at your support beams and the grumble some more and say things like "We'll need the specs on these beams...grumble, grumble." and something about how our rafters were going to lose some of their raftering capabilities because the ceiling cut across them two thirds of the way up instead of at the bottom...blah blah, we need bigger rafters, which means we need a bigger ridge beam....etc. No problem planning office guy, you tell us what you want and we will be happy to oblige. "And we'll need to see the specs on these trusses for your porch roof." By this time I had gone out twice to put more money in the parking meter, and was bouncing up and down on the balls of my feet, repeating under my breath, "just give us the permit, just give us the permit." Which he finally did, after we passed him a big pile of cash.

If we have plans, and we have a permit, then what the heck are we waiting for?

We are waiting, for a dumpster.

We have a very narrow (32 feet wide? something like that) lot and a shared driveway. There are wires over our front yard that would make it hard to for a trailer to drop a dumpster there. Eli met with someone from the city this morning about getting a permit to park the dumpster in the street. The answer?

Not in your street, no way, no how, never.

Which is fine ultimately since it was sort of an expensive permit, but I have no idea where we are going to put this dumpster. The alternative would be hauling all the debris away from the site in trailers or something, but there is going to be a lot of debris...did I mention, the whole second story of our house? So that's not an option. We need a dumpster! We shall have a dumpster. We may not have a front yard, but we will have a dumpster!!

And here's a picture of something that will eventually go into that dumpster.

Wow that's awful looking in a photograph. That's the corner of one of our "closets" upstairs. Water runs down next to the chimney, and seeps into the wall. When we first moved in it was a moldy wet spot, and last summer it became a hole. Daylight should enter the house through windows, not through holes in the backs of closets. Part of the plan is to install a 90% efficiency furnace so that we can do away with the chimney so this problem won't come back. In to the dumpster with you moldy upstairs closet!