It has been several weeks since the last blog post about the Fowler House but we are finally getting somewhere. Once I finally got the Certificate of Appropriateness from the Historic District, which is the OK from the Historic District allowing us to do what we want to do with the house, I had to work on getting my building permit. This comes with another set of frustrations. Since this is my first full restoration, I am having to learn a lot about the process along the way. The next house will be much easier and I will know what to expect, but this one I had surprises all along the way. My designer, Noelle from Studio Boise, was working on getting all the info together for the building permit to submit. Once it was all submitted they asked for a Manual J from my HVAC guy. We than got back the following that needed to be corrected as well as other Manuals.
There is more that needs to be submitted for the building permit and also a couple corrections they have asked for to the Manual J:
1) The Manual J does not show the the ground floor.
2) They want the knee high wall in the attic level to be called out on the Manual J as well.
3) The CFM design for cooling is too high.
4) They also want a manual J, D, and S for the lighting/electrical from your electrical sub.
5) We are also having some issues with using the existing attic stairs and making the attic habitable space. I will call today, but I think we will need to keep the attic as storage space in order to leave those steep attic stairs as they are. We can insulate and finish it to look nice, but not count it in our livable space. I will let you know what they say.
Not being able to use the top floor as habitable space is not the best news but we will still fix it up and put some fans to cool it. No heat or AC allowed. Once all this was corrected we were back to the waiting game.
As we continue to work on getting bids we started having some contractors telling us that the house was not attached to the foundation. I ask Josh, the old owner who said that it was not attached yet and he was going to use 11 7/8 BCIs and 3/4 plywood to build new rim joists. I am now meeting with Tony from the city tomorrow to make sure that is all that is needed in order to continue with the rest of the house. In order to get my permit for the foundation I had to get a $10,000 bond.
With the neighbors continuing to ask my Realtor, Karla Garner with Amherst Madison, when we are starting I am excited to actually get going. We have told all our subs to get there permits and will be ready to go once the house is attached to the foundation and has passed. We should be able to have several subs on the job everyday to get this project done. Stay tuned for pics and updates!