Day 51
This is what our house looked like on this day last year. We have come a long ways in a year. In August 2018 the City of Seattle Department of Construction and Inspections (SDCI) added a requirement to our permitted project. Little did we know it would be the beginning of a nightmarish, months long saga to develop and build an extensive drainage system under both our front and back yards. A decision to replace the basement floor triggered newer building code that required drainage system when removed and replaced hard surface area exceeds1500 square feet. The purpose of the code is to reduce storm water volume directed to the sewage treatment plant, which is known to overflow at times into the Pudget Sound (yuck...yes we appreciate why this is undesireable).
If you are considering a remodel in the Seattle area, this is a very important number. Crossing this 1500 square foot threshold cost us tens of thousands of dollars in drainaige engineering, strucyural engineering, delays, rent, construction and inspections. We literally threw money into this pit. It took about 7 months to come to a resolution with the city. SEVEN MONTHS. The city would not accept the professional opinions of civil and structural engineers that determined certain city preferred drainage systems were infeasible due to the nature of our renovation. (The individuals reviewing our proposals were not engineers). Requirements mounted with requests for additional experts including a geo tech engineer, though there was no documented threshold of expertise to satisfy proof of infeasibility.
Round and round we went. Everyone seemed surprised by this requirement. No one involved in our project ever acknowledged any responsibility for missing this very expensive detail. The threshold for proving in feasibility proved to be an elusive moving target. I am confident that as homeowners, it was not our responsibility to understand all the building codes.
What is extremely frustrating is that the plan finally approved by the city was not even an option in the code. And their objective was not, it seems, to minimize environmental impacts of storm water. The plan they finally approved puts more storm water into the system than the original plan we proposed two to three weeks after the requirement.
This was a very unpleasant part of our construction experience. If you are considering a project of your own, I hope you can learn from our very difficult lesson.
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