Day 1: Prep work

See those black lines? Soon(?) they will be the walls of our new addition. (The bricks are another story which I will get to shortly.)

Where to begin.... Five years ago, our family moved into a house that was truthfully far too small for us. Not only was it small but it was something of a "handy man's special". Well, for five years, we've been renovating, replacing, rewiring, re-everything-ing; and now we're going to try to add on.

We are going to build a 16x20 addition. It will be a master bedroom with a bathroom and walk-in closet. It seems to be a fairly modest undertaking and given the experience that my wife and I have accumulated over the past years; I'm sure we can do it.

That's not to say that we won't be faced with some challenges.

First of all, I labeled this post "Day 1" but in reality we've been at this for a long time already. We've actually had plans drawn up for a few years and even got so far as to apply for a building permit; but for whatever reason, we decided to put the project on hold at that time.

Now our plans have been resubmitted. We've made numerous trips to our county's Buildings & Plans Dept. and we are waiting....

A few days ago we got a letter from Buildings & Plans. We were excited! We were sure that our permit had arrived! We were wrong. B&P informed us that we lived in an area of "international cultural and historical significance". They told us that before the permit process could continue we would have to have an "archeological assessment" done and then several tribes and committees would have to review the findings. We called one of the approved archeologists and he came, dug two 4 inch by 4 inch holes, found nothing, presented us with a bill, and left... You can't see them in the picture because they are covered by bricks but there are two small dirt patches in the black rectangle - each filled in hole is about $350. I'm going to encourage my kids to become archeologists!

I'll get to the pile of bricks in the next post.