Category: Plans and Permits

Developing floor plans, getting permits, working with our architect, and figuring out timelines

Permits!

December 31, 2012 / / 2 Comments

permit

Some good news to report. Finally past Zoning, our permit was approved by the remaining departments and our architect came by with the paper to put in the window. We are official, legal, and in a few weeks our stamped, approved plans will be delivered.

The process, from hiring the architect to receiving the piece of paper (not including time I spent designing the  plans we gave to the architect), took approximately eight months. In yet another “best in show” accolade for our house to put with “worst cockroach infestation ever seen by our exterminator” we have added “longest permit approval ever seen by our architect” thanks in no small part to the two months of waiting around while the city decided whether we could have a green permit or not.

We gave up waiting for the permits back in August when we demoed the first floor, so at this point it doesn’t make a ton of difference, but it’s one more thing behind us and it clears the way for us to demo the foyer and front stairs and start making a proper mess of things without fear of some city official putting a stop work order on the front door and sticking us with a fine.

Looking forward, our immediate focus is still the beam project. Once we have our new beam, columns, and footings, we’ll get another dumpster to clean out the piles of scrap wood on the first floor and demo the foyer. Then we can start work on the LVL beam and columns in the first floor and the new first floor subfloor, followed (eventually) by new framing, windows, and the previously discussed first inch of spray foam. With Sarah going back to school in just a couple weeks, it’s hard to estimate how long any of this will take. I can’t plan anything past the structure work until I get a sense of our rate of progress.

Time is the Missing Ingredient

November 15, 2012 / / 1 Comment

When we started this project we had an idea of how much work was involved and how much time it would take to do it. The plan was this would be a part time second job. We would work on the house in the evenings and hopefully keep our weekends mostly free. With this approach we’d spend 15-20 hours a week on the house, ideally both of us. With that kind of time commitment, we projected we could have the first floor refinished in about a year. Today, seventeen months later, the first floor is mostly demoed but a long way from finished.

Looking back, I still believe our time estimates were fairly reasonable, but they completely failed to account for a double whammy: having a baby and Sarah going to grad school. If it was one or the other, one of us could still work on the house while the other was occupied with school or the baby. Both means that while Sarah is writing papers and attending class, someone has to watch the baby. Both means there’s not much time to spend on the house.

While the time available to work on the house has plummeted and progress has ground to a near-standstill, we have gotten a few things done. I got the first floor bathroom window removed, the last of the hardwood floor is up, we’re sorting through the room full of lath, and we’ve filled the garbage toters with debris at least a few times. The problem is this progress has been over the course of the last several weeks. I wish I had a solution, but short of paying someone to do the work the only solution has been my mom coming once a week to watch the baby while I go downstairs and work for an hour or two and getting some work done on the weekends.

Things are slow on the permit side, too. We’re still waiting for Zoning to decide if we can have a front porch across the front of the house. We got them the new plat of survey with the neighbor’s building setbacks, more recently I sent them color photos of the front and back of our house and the neighbor’s (the two houses to the North and two to the South). Even though Green permits are supposed to be “expedited” they’re apparently backed up. The way things are shaping up, we won’t be done with the first floor for a very long time, and that’s just the first part of the project.

Permit Process

October 5, 2012 / / 2 Comments

I haven’t spent a lot of time talking about the permit process, maybe because it happens mostly via email and I can’t take pictures of it. However, it’s an important facet of our project and it’s been going on in parallel to what I’ll call the “actual work” on the house, so I’ll go into some details now.

After I developed floor plans that we liked, we went through a process of selecting an architect. We asked several to come to the house, see the plans we’d drawn up, and provide a quote. We even went to visit the home of one of the architects, since he’d done his own remodeling project similar to ours, and it was a good example of his design. In the end, we selected Jesse McGrath, of McGrath Architects due to the right combination of flexibility in working with us and our “phased” remodel, his experience with Chicago Green Homes and the green permit process, as well as being “self-certified” with the City of Chicago and quoting us a price that didn’t make our jaws drop.

Jesse met with us once a week, converting my Sketchup drawings into plans. He (like all of the architects we talked to) pushed us toward using spray foam and rigid exterior insulation in lieu of a double wall to achieve our high insulation values. While he worked on the plan details, we met with contractors to find the ones we’ll need. Even though we’re going to do most of the work ourselves, the City of Chicago requires certain things to be done by licensed professionals, including plumbing, electrical, and HVAC. We needed to get a “letter of intent” from each contractor as well as an electrical application, complete a bunch of other forms, and sent it all over to Jesse so he could in turn submit it to the City.

Unfortunately I didn’t get a concrete mason lined up, so I had to scramble to find one. We got some outrageously high quotes to lower the basement floor, but finally got a reasonable price from one. Now I just need to get the letter of intent from him, which for some reason is taking far longer than expected.

Site Plan (I don’t know why it calls for Japanese Yew Shrubs)

We’re now in the byzantine workings of the permit review process. Currently we’re held up on Zoning. Our plat of survey is from closing last year, and the City requires a survey no more than 60 days old, so I’m getting a new one done in the next few days. Because we’re putting on a new front porch, and Zoning wants houses to all be roughly the same distance from the street, the survey also needs to include the “setbacks” of the two properties in either direction to determine the average. If our plans put the porch ahead of the average, then we’ll have to go through additional hurdles to try and get approved. I went out last night with a tape measure. The houses to either side of us are about the same as ours, but the house two down and the apartment building two up are both closer to the street, depending on how it gets calculated. I guess we’ll see.

Once we’re through Zoning, the plans will be reviewed for structure, electrical, plumbing, mechanical, as well as all of the green elements. This process can take a couple of months, but assuming we don’t need to redesign the front porch, hopefully we’ll go through quickly.

Project Review

September 17, 2012 / / 3 Comments

Sometimes it helps to take a moment and look at where we’re going and what we’ve done so far. At the moment I’m thinking about a bunch of different projects either in progress or upcoming, so to keep everything straight I’ll lay it out. It also helps for any random or occasional visitors to this blog to know what’s going on.

So, to recap, we bought this house in June of 2011. In addition to the first and second floor units, there was a basement apartment that was like something out of a horror movie. We spent two months fixing up the second floor unit so that we could move into it. When we moved in we put the laundry on the first floor where the kitchen had been as well as stored a bunch of our stuff in one of the bedrooms. Here’s the second floor living room before and after painting.

 

We knew that the support beam and columns in the basement needed to be replaced, so our first major project after moving in was to gut the basement unit. It was a moldy, disgusting mess. Here’s a picture of what it looked like before and after we gutted it.

 

With that done, we got some quotes on replacing the wooden beam and columns with steel, including new footings. The quotes were a lot of money, so we held off doing it right away. Our son Derek was born at the end of November, which interrupted some of our work on the house. I started using Sketchup and came up with a floor plan we liked. I even made a whole 3D model of the house, inside and out.

 

Then we found an architect and got him working on plans and permits with the city. We also started working on selecting contractors, including electrician, plumber, radiant heat and air conditioning installer, and concrete mason. Getting our plans together with the architect took longer than expected, so we decided not to wait until we had our permits before demoing the first floor. After moving the laundry and storage to the basement, we threw a demo party last month and gutted the whole first floor. Here’s the before and after gutting the first floor.

 

Along the way there have been a lot of smaller projects, like moving gas lines and plumbing, re-routing electrical, getting a new electrical panel installed, exterminating cockroaches and disposing of at least a dozen rat carcasses, checking the depth of our foundation footings, and a lot of planning.

So what’s next? Our immediate steps are to select a concrete mason, since that’s the only thing holding up our permit submission. Once that’s submitted we should have permits in thirty to sixty days. ComEd will be installing our new electrical service in the next few weeks. I have to remove the electrical running along the  beam in the basement, since we can’t replace it until I finish that, and the seemingly interminable cleanup on the first floor will need to be completed, including our room full of lath.

Once we have our permit, the beam and column replacement in the basement can take place. We may wind up doing that ourselves because it would save us a ton of money. Once that’s done we can demo the foyer and replace the bearing wall in the first floor with an LVL beam and columns, and close up and replace windows. We can start replacing the plank subfloor with plywood.

Next spring we’ll put in a new high efficiency hot water heater and boiler that will direct-vent, allowing us to remove the chimney. We’ll take out the front stairs, demo the second floor office (where the new stairs will connect), and frame the opening for the basement stairs. Then we can finish the subfloor and install the new stairs.

Then and only then can first floor construction really start: new front and back doors, framing, plumbing, electrical, and the first floor radiant system (all big projects themselves). Then it’s insulation, drywall, flooring, cabinets, doors, trim. I honestly don’t know how long that will take, but I’d be very surprised if it’s finished by the end of 2013, and that’s just the first floor.

Some of these pieces may move around. We were hoping to have the new radiant system in by this fall and that didn’t happen. We thought we’d have the basement beam in last fall. Things that cost less like replacing the stairs  may happen sooner –maybe even this winter– while replacing the windows doesn’t happen until later. Some things are fixed in order. We can’t frame until the subfloor is replaced, and we can’t do that until the beam and bearing wall are replaced, the chimney and radiators are removed, and the stairs are replaced. The chimney can’t be removed until we have the new radiator and hot water heater. It’s a very big jigsaw puzzle.

With my full time job, Sarah’s graduate school and job, and a 9-month-old baby, it’s going to be a long process. If you’re considering taking on a project like this yourself, make sure that firm timetables are something you can live without or that you have a lot more free time than we do. Make sure that if you’re doing it with someone else that you both have clear expectations. I still think that working on a two flat is the perfect way to do it. One of the things that makes this project so bearable is that when we’re done working we can just go upstairs where there’s no dust or debris, cook dinner in a real kitchen, relax on the couch, and sleep in our bed. A lot of home improvement projects aren’t so lucky.

Scattershot

June 24, 2012 / / 0 Comments

We’re on to the forms and paperwork stage with our architect, which means that applying for permits isn’t too far off. We’ve identified all of our contractors, but we still need to get letters from them acknowledging they’ll be completing work on our property. The electrician needs to fill out a whole form as well. We’re meeting with him on Monday, as well as another structural contractor. I have to transfer my work on our Chicago Green Homes checklist to the official application and sign on several dotted lines.

Sarah planted some marigolds in the front yard, not because we particularly like them but because they supposedly will keep the neighbors dog from sticking his snout through the fence and trying to bite us. In any case it looks better than the weeds that had previously occupied the space. There are some hostas, rose bushes and a couple of other plants to put in so that it doesn’t look completely bad.

Bathroom Light Fixture

I took down the drop ceiling in the first floor bathroom. This means the “light below a light” has finally been removed. I also took out the sink and disconnected the toilet. At some point a couple months ago I ripped the medicine cabinet off the wall, so that was already gone. Still a lot to be done in there, but bit by bit we’re making progress.

We got our shelves up in the basement and moved the boxes and bins we’d been storing in the back bedroom of the first floor to the basement. We need to clean up some of the mess down there before we can get everything else relocated, though. There’s a deadline on that now, though, but I’ll get to that.

Basement light switch

I also started working on the latest basement electrical project. First, I removed a lingering light switch from the “kitchen” area. I added an outlet where the laundry will be and removed a bunch of conduit and wiring from the first floor panel. It is now completely empty except for the garage and the one circuit we’re using on that floor for the current laundry and lights. Of course, now I’m contemplating moving all of the circuits from the second floor box over to it, because it’s bigger, newer and doesn’t have a scary spliced main connecting it to the meter. I’ll talk to the electrician about that on Monday.

The larger basement electrical project is moving the conduit away from the beam. That will be involved, since they actually used some rigid conduit down there. The one place flexible would have been really convenient is the one place they didn’t use it. There are also a couple of junction boxes with countless circuits snaking through them mounted to the beam. That will all need to move, the ease of which depends on how much slack there is in the wires. I’m guessing not much.

Finally, in order to remove a couple of the old flexible lines from the first floor panel, we ripped out the back wall of the first floor bedroom, which is directly above the panels. Demo is so much fun. I pulled the disconnected lines out, leaving one circuit that goes up to the second floor through that wall. We made a huge mess, and also discovered a window hidden in the wall, glass panes still in it. It makes sense; the space used to be a pantry off the kitchen and pantries usually had a window on the end. We’ll probably find one in the same place on the second floor.