Big Picture: Where are we?
stuck in a holding pattern (tap-in permits)
I haven’t published a written status report in quite a while- I was doing almost all video status reports. However, I’ve gotten behind, and it’s difficult to get back through everything to produce a video, so I’m doing a written report instead. (Also, I have a lot of still photos, and those don’t lend themselves to video status)
Corp Update
Construction on the shop started on Sept 9, but rapidly hit a stalling point. What we’ve done so far:
- Excavated the entire site. Before it was paved over, there was a house on this site. When they demolished the house, pretty much all of the brick and stone ended up in the basement, so we ended up excavating a lot of that out as well. (Consulted with a geologist to determine what needed to come out, what we needed to do). Also, recall from the video status reports that we have to go all the way down to the footer of the basement on our left. That ended up about 7′ +/- deep.
- We located the old sewer line that ran from our house to the sewer main. Unfortunately, after some camera work, we learned that it has collapsed and is not usable. I have agreements with both of the houses behind me that we can dig between them to get the sewer out to the main in the alley behind us, so we will get to do that as soon as our tap-in permit is approved by the local sewer authority (more on that below).
- We poured all of the footers (36″ wide around pretty much the entire perimeter, with 3-4 pieces of #4 rebar in each section.)
- We then laid up the block on all of the footers. The block comes up to “ground level” around the building. In the front, that means it’s at street level. In the back, it extends up a couple of feet, as the lots behind us are higher than the elevation of the street in front of us. The foundation is wrapped in 2″ of pink insulation, to keep the slab warmer during the winter. It has been back-filled with gravel to get ready to pour the slab.
- The real drama is the plumbing, specifically getting authorization to connect to the city sewer and water supply. We were hoping to reuse the existing lines, but those have all proven to be “not good”, so we have to start from scratch. We submitted the initial draft of the plan back in late August, but we’ve gone through some iterations. There’s plenty of responsibility to go around here:
- I should have initiated the process sooner, rather than hope we could reuse the existing plumbing.
- The civil engineer working on our plan has been less than stellar. The first submission had a bunch of silly errors. Subsequent iterations have taken a lot of time to get ready- meaning we lose a lot of time while she’s updating the docs.
- The local water authority is not helpful at all. It takes absolutely forever to get answers from them, even to understand how they view our project. It takes an unreasonable amount of time to review corrections, too.
- If we are lucky, we’ll have the tap-in permit within a week or so. Then we can finally get digging on the sewer and water lines.
- We are absolutely racing the clock at this time. We need to pour the slab while it’s above ~40 deg. It is early fall here, but it’s getting cold at night. If we don’t get a warm spell, it’s going to be hard to pour a slab this big without having cracking problems. Stay tuned for that part.
- Meanwhile, I’d been working with an off-shore engineer to come up with framing drawings. Sadly, that has not panned out well. Although I’ve done this before with other engineers, this particular engineer is hyper-conservative. She has specified a lot of extra structure that my local engineers deem completely unnecessary. At this point, I’m working with my local engineer to identify what is “over-engineering” and can be safely removed from our framing plan.
- On an unrelated note, I’m working on acquiring another parcel. I’m in verbal agreement with the owner, and now we’re in the “paperwork” stage. Once that is inked, I’ll share more, but it’s a complicated situation.
Entropy Properties LLC 