Officialdom Conquered

By John Leeke

	Illustration Courtesy of James Noel Smith

Not long ago, I had a student intern helping me restore a porch. As we started, it quickly became apparent the job wasn't going to be a simple repair, but would involve rebuilding the whole deck structure.

Now ordinarily, I might have thought about just proceeding with the work, but since my young student was right there tracking everything I was doing, I figured I'd better stick to the letter of the law and apply for a proper building permit. So off we went to city hall, to fill out forms at the building codes enforcement office.

As fate would have it, the porch was just over the size limit allowed to proceed without architectural plans, so our little project now required drawings. Well I didn't want any further delays, so I stood right there at the counter and sketched out a set of plans and details free-hand, which took me about an hour. Even I was surprised at how well they came out.

The clerk seemed pleased, and smiled as she called her coworkers over to see the drawings. Just then, the chief enforcement officer bustling through on his way somewhere else wondered what all the commotion was about and stopped to investigate. When he saw the drawings and heard that I'd just whipped them up right there at the counter, he simply didn't believe it. He studied the drawings with a grimace, then said he would need a detail showing the nailing pattern for the joint where the floor joists meet the girder.

I could see his blood pressure rise as I explained that I wasn't planning to use nails. Instead, I told him, I would mortise the joists into the girder using traditional carpentry. Red flowed up his neck and onto his face as he started quoting one applicable code guideline after the other.

To backup my claims, I sketched out the required joist detail right in front of him, indicating how the load would flow through the joint. He took a glance, then began to smile. He looked around, held the sketch up for everyone to see, and announced, "Approved! Furthermore, I put you on Self Inspection. Just let us know when you are done." Waving a thick file in his hand, he added, "Which ought to give me enough time to deal with this!" then wheeled around and stomped out.

That was one of my finer days at the building codes enforcement office. It's always better to make peace with officials before you start a project, than to first meet when there's a problem down the road.

John Leeke is a long-time contributor to Old-House Journal.


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