Time to Hammer Away

We have been working on the possibility of putting an addition on our house since February this year and as the time ticks closer for us to move home this addition seems virtually impossible until last night. Since our house was built in 1954, before zoning came into existence in our town, we do not meet the towns current zoning laws even today. Try to put an addition on and you really won't meet local code right...right. Last night I met with our architect in front of the Town's Building committee to present our case as to why we need variances and the rationale why we should be granted these 4 variances. A little background on this. We had to put forth our drawings to the town for review, receive a denial letter for our plans since we would require variances which needs to get approved by the board, paid $410.00 for the application fee, receive and mail letters to all neighbors within 200' and let them know we are going in front of the board and what work we are planning on doing to the house and finally appear in front of the board last night.

Fastforward now to last night. I walk into the room dressed in my work clothes (business smart) and all of the men are in suits, great. The meeting starts and we find out that we are the only agenda on the meeting that night which is wonderful and none of our neighbors are there which is even better (meaning no one has a complaint about the work we want to do). The board starts their regular business which is to approve the prior minutes to the meeting last month and then on to us. We are called up to a table with microphones and are sworn in for the record. We start to describe everything we plan on doing and why then the questions start to come from the board. Where to the leaders lead to in the new plan? What is the new distance from foundation to foundation to the neighbor to the west? What will the new stairs on the front be made from? Are you changing the siding on the whole house or reusing the existing and adding new? It was a bit intimidating at first but eased into the whole thing once the Chairman addressed one of the other board members as Mr. Fischback when his name was Mr. Backfisch. Everyone started to laugh a little bit and that really lightened the mood. We got unanimous approval from the board for our addition and all variances which was GREAT!!!! Now the hard part starts, we need to figure out of all of the "Dream Home" what we can actually afford to do with the contractors bids that should come in next week. That will be very disheartening but hopefully we can get the ideal home that we want for the next 5 years or so.

Hopefully next week I can post some new plans as to what we will finally be doing to our house and we know that we will not be moving directly into it in December since it won't be done but it will be well worth the wait!