Actual rubber stamps

 We finally demolished the house in mid November, after a few annoying but fairly minor delays.  It was quite thrilling to see that flimsy little shack torn down. Here's one of the last walls coming down.

Here's Penelope knocking on our old front door.

And the digger, left on site in anticipation of starting work within a week or two. 

No such luck. We are still waiting for our plans to be formally approved. In mid December the City engineer confirmed on email that the plans are okay, following a series of queries and comments. That whole process had been pretty painful, with a new query appearing to arise every time an earlier one was resolved. But eventually we got there and now it's just a matter of paperwork. Literally, rubber stamps. Hard copies, wet signatures, various notarized and recorded covenants and agreements, and a stack of 'c-sheets' (technical, structural plans) going from one desk to the other in City Hall to be stamped.

In the past the City allowed builders to start digging before they had formal plans approval, but they don't anymore. So we can't pull our shoring permit, and start digging and shoring, until we have those stamps on the plans.

It's beyond frustrating. The goalposts - whether a particular document needs to be notarized, or if a soft copy will do - change frequently. The requirements are unclear, with different names being applied to documents, so when the City ask for 'the agreement' I have several forms that might fit that description , and heaven forbid they could just put an identifying number on any of their interminable forms. And the roles and responsibilities of the people at the City are really opaque, to the point where I don't really know if the engineer I'm corresponding with is in Public Works, Community Development or Planning. Or if all three of those departments are really the same thing. Which sounds minor but when you're dropping off a precious, notarized, hard copy of a - not previous requested but now critically urgent - document at an unstaffed City hall, it'd be nice to know where to address it.

Gah.

Well, writing this was therapeutic. That's all the update I have for now. I think I'll just refer friends who ask how the build is going to this post. I really have no other words for how the build is going. I'd love to say 'watch this space' but that could get tedious. The waiting game is really no fun.

PS for a flavor of this week's correspondence, here's a sampling of emails from this week. You get the gist.