Peeling off the walls

The stucco destruction continues. They made much more progress today. I suspect as soon as they've done everything they're going to do to the upstairs outside, they'll then rip up the deck. As I mentioned in my last post, my theory is that they're doing a lot of work to the outside work now while they have the deck in place, because it will be easier to work from the deck than to work from scaffolding. Once they've done that they'll take the deck off and will start the foundation.



Which brings me to... building permit. We have our demolition permit, but we don't yet have our building permit. I think we're supposed to have it today or Tuesday, but to be honest, I'm not really sure! They can continue to take structures down, but they can't actually start to put anything up until they get the building permit. We've already paid money to the city school districts based on the amount of space we're adding. We now have to pay I-don't-know-how-much based on the value of the construction. Everything seems to be based on an increment over whatever else you're already paying, so as your construction costs go up (because of regulations that the city puts in place), so do your costs for the building permits. It seems like there's a bit of a conflict of interest at work here, doesn't it? All I know is that at certain points it feels like everyone's got their hand in your pocket.


Tonight I walked from the old house to the scraper. I walked down our really steep hill, and up the adjacent very steep hill to get over to the cross street to our temporary abode. It was quite a pleasant evening and quite a pleasant walk indeed! A lot longer by foot than by car, but still very pleasant. The dogs enjoyed the walk too. Maybe we'll walk over to the house from the scraper tomorrow morning, and then walk from there to downtown.