I have been having a hell of a time with my building inspector lately and he dam near pushed me too far today. It actually aint just me either. There are two major contracting companies that refuse to do any type of work in our municipality.

Please post up some of your issues and past stories cause I need to hear some real crappy ones to make my 4 month battle feel a little less painful.

I'm too worked up right now to get into details but I will later. Once I settle down I will probably realize it aint as bad as it seems. But there sure is steam coming out my ears right now.

 

"best" one I ran into was in a little town I had never heard of before...... I was there delivering trees that we were going to be planting in the next week. well as I was reaching for one of the last two on the truck to roll off this little beater car pulls up by the entrance to the driveway and I said hang on, I'll be just a few minutes ...... driver says ok, rolls his window up, and is writing something down...... ok no biggie. as the last treee hits the ground and I get out of the truck bed the guy in the car reaches out the window and slaps a red sticker on the mailbox ! I said "whats that for " he says " this job is shut down, you denied me access to make an inspection" I said " no problem I am out of here any way "

 

We fought one for 2 years before we got him fired

 

I don't really have a inspector problem more of a planning commission ,I have owned my shop for the past year,bought it from my parents who bought it from my grandparents,the shop was built in 76 and has had heavy trucks and equipment around since it was built,here is where it gets interesting,I started trying to get a motor vehicule safety inspection station opened in my shop 5 yrs ago in apr. ,started with a letter going around to all my neighbors asking if they opposed the shop and none opposed it at the time and signed my letter,after 2 yrs. of fighting the comm.asked me to get another letter because the first one was too old for them and everybody signed it again,then they put it to a town hall meeting and come to find out 4 neighbors who live past my home on a dead end street sent letters to the commission opposing my shop due to the traffic that I would bring to the road,one of the complainers have a shop and is open all hours of the day and night bringing more traffic in a week then I plan on doing in a month,the other neighbor does sleigh rides all winter bringing heavy traffic of drunks every weekend, the main reason I want to open my shop is to do my own safety inspections,I am a licensed tech, due to the cost ,heavy truck is $150/yr ,car/pickup/trailers are $30/yr ,the licensing cost for the station is $100/yr and $7/sticker/vehicle ,I own 3 heavy trucks ,3 4x4 , van,2 cars,7 trailers not including my families vehicles, my safety bills to other shops is $840/yr but if I did it myself it would only be $212 ,I am not done fighting this it is in the hand of my elected official who has been a family friend for the past 40 yrs,but he is with the wrong party till the next election then he will be in power for sure

 

I get along with the main inspector here, but I have dealt with some real winners down in Colorado. In Boulder, the inspectors were told that if they didn't fail every job on the first visit that they weren't doing their job. I'm not kidding you, they would literally make up stuff just to fail the job and being home rule, you couldn't do anything about it. After trying to fight this, we went along with the flow and would leave something very simple,obvious, and easy to come back to "fix" and explain to the homeowner what was going on. Talk about stupid.

 

It's all about the money, we have one local government, going back to check on all permits not finished out to check to see if it was finished and not inspected, with a lot of little jobs they just wanted you to pay a fee, replacing a window or door didn't change a thing on the house, so didn't really care if you got it inspected.

So to create a money flow they are making all those jobs they didn't care if they were inspected then, pull another permit so they can come out and say it's good.

 

There was some property my bf really wanted, so we went to the court house to get the list of restrictions for that area, and later, signed the papers for and finally, the day of closing came and so we went happily. The realtor said, "I just got some bad news-you can't build on this property b/c of a new law that was made 2 months ago." The damn court house or whatever people DIDN'T tell us about it! We were and still pissed off about it! They are trying to fight it but the contract ends January 1st. The law is you can't build on less than 1 acre unless you're hooked up to city sewer. The lot is right by a lake and this law SUCKS!

 

and this is why i work for someone else......

 

man im glad we dont have to deal with permits around here in the country.

 

Well my trouble all started when I bought a house off my mothers friend while I was out of town under her(mom's) word that this house was in good shape and no major issues as she had been in it numerous times over the years. Well it turns out that my mom only said that cause her friends would give her their old crap sunfire if she got their house sold for them.

Well I saw pics and that was about it, I took my mothers word for it and bought it sight unseen, so I could rent it out. Well when I got home I went there to check it out and it was F****D to say the least. Squirrels in the ceiling than when I tore that off to get at em found nothing but mold. Anywho I tore the whole addition off and had to start over.


Thats when the damn inspectors with nothing to do were driving around the middle of nowhere looking to **** ppl off and found my place mid tear down. Well they made me open a permit..... whatever, no biggie. Than I start talking to people at home and they say how much of a dick this new guy is and that he is 10x worse than the last..... who I thought was bad.

So I rip the slab out that was there and go to put piles in to do the addition right this time. As the drill is going we hit the Canadian Precambrian Shield which is pretty much a giant one piece of solid rock that stretches across central canada. It happens to be 7' deep where I am drilling. The code is piles need to be 8' deep where I am and he wont pass them even thought the giant rock the piles would be sitting on has been there and is hundreds of miles long and hasnt moved since the ice age... now I have to send the drill home and get a backhoe and dig the back out for a crawlspace.... more money.... I do a rebuild of the original building which is just one bedroom and half the bathroom. He tells me I need an HRV with venting to all the rooms in the house. It took me a few weeks to finally prove him wrong.

After I get that done one bad inspector looks at my roof and says 'do you have a third layer under them singles?'.... i says 'no, the other inspector said that since the pitch was 3'8"x11" it was close enough to the 4:12 requiremnt he wasnt going to make me head back to the city and get more material since the rain was comin at the time'....
Insp goes ' well I'm not going to pass it you'll have to redo it all'....by this time it is not july anymore this was a week ago it was -20C. So whatever I go do that.

So he comes to look at the roof and says 'well there is snow all over it how am I supposed to know you actually did the work?' I swiftly turn around with a death look upon my face and asked if he was saying that after spending $40k on renovations I was lying and trying to save myself 1k....... he agreed I probably wasnt lying.

So he goes to the back yard now and says the grade isnt enough away from the house.... agian it is now -20C . So I shovel the snow all back and ask him if he still thought so, he said yes. So I chip all the sod out and chisel out a yd of soil from the farm and bring it over to the house and grade it away from the building. I call for another inspection he say the insp. fails grading from house. I ask him if the slope wasnt enough he said he needs better grade away from the house. So I clearly ask ' so all I need is a better slope right?' he says 'yes'

So now I'm getting really agitated as the house is due to change hands to the new owners in a week. So I go rip it all up again and now this time grab 2yds more soil and make a real exagerrant grade from the house. I call for an inspection. They are busy till the day before the keys are to change hands. I figure no big deal since there is definately a good grade there. I am still being polite at this point and holding back my tongue and ask if they could please call me if there were any issues and explained that the sale was to go through the next day and a condition of the sale was that I would have the house clear of the outstanding permit. He said he definately would.

So thurs goes by no call... cool fri comes, possesion day. I call the insp's office just to make sure, no answer leave a msg for him to call me back. I get a call at 4:25 in the afternoon, 5mins before the insp is done for the weekend, from my lawyer saying that the insp just called saying I did not comply to the permit, and said she has to hold $5000 back until the permit is done.

I promptly call the insp he actually answers and I ask what the problem is (still politely). He explains that the grade is still non compliant. I ask how since there is easily and 8" difference from the grad at the house to 10' away which is how far there needs to be a slope. He says now that the soil all around the addition is too high and that is now the problem....... I lost it! How the hell does this come up now after I made sure we had an understanding of what he was requiring and even how this was an issue. He said that he decided it was too high and that the material below grade is unsuitable to be so. Well I explained to him in a not so nice tone that I happened to be holding the framing inspection paper that he personally signed stating that there was blue skin in place 48" above grade which covers all material that is deemed unsuitable to be under grade. That now means that I can have dirt piled 48" above the original grade which I am obviously no where near. So I asked him If it was the vinyl siding that he figured would rot being barried. He said 'no', so I asked him what the problem was. He said nothing as long as I actually did have blue skin on, and that he would need to see photographic evidence. I, barely holding any type of composure explained again how I was holding a framing inspection with his signature on it that clearly states him acknowledging the use of Blue Skin around the entire foundation as well as 48" above grade.

He than asked if I could get the contractor to call him and that he would stick around for him to call the office. I immediately got a hold of the contractor and had him call the inspector within 2mins. I also just so happened to be on my way to town and was just about to pass the insp's office and I see his car pulling away.

So that is where I am at!