This day has been a long time coming: we’ve finally gotten a full set of plans into the city for final approval.

Our initial PAL Review in 2007 was for a stick-frame house with a proposed forced-air heating system. The final plans call for an ICF house with a radiant floor heating system. Several key structural members were also changed in the roof truss design.

While everything has been signed off on by the appropriate professional, we won’t know for certain that the plans are approvable for 10 days. I’m especially concerned about the Plumbing form which the clerk just accepted and said “the plumbing guy will figure it out.”

In addition to our concerns about approvability, we don’t yet have the final budget numbers from the various trades and sub-trades.

At this point we are tentatively looking for places to rent during construction, but probably shouldn’t sign any leases until we receive final approval from the city and finalize the all the significant budget numbers.

I picked up the final plans from the Architect this afternoon and signed over a final cheque for their services. We started our contract with them as a variable rate with the cost of the project, but with the plan to switch to a fixed-rate contract somewhere along the way.

Since we decided not to have the architect oversee construction (our Project Manager is an architect himself and we decided it would be a duplication of effort to have them both overseeing the project) it made sense to close the contract with them at this stage. We may still bring them in (just paid on an hourly basis) to look at the project if we encounter any unforeseen issues.

After leaving the architect’s offices, I tried to submit them to the city today, but ran out of time.

I arrived at the City Planning office shortly after 3pm and the appointment sign-up book was already removed from the counter; There were more people signed up than they felt they could see by the time they closed at 4:30pm.

But if I chose to wait, I was second in line for a ‘stand by’ appointment. My patience paid off.

While there wasn’t enough time to complete an application when I was seen at 4:20pm, but the clerk there reviewed what I had brought. He provided me with the 4 forms for the demolition permit and 5 forms for construction and mechanical permit that I had not brought with me. I also only had 2 copies of the site survey, but needed 4 (2 for construction, 2 for demolition).

AND, I didn’t have additional copies of the tree-removal permit or the Final Binding Decision from our visit to the Committee of Adjustments in 2007.

I completed most of the forms this evening, but the Plumbing form was fairly confusing. I completed it about 3/4 of it based on what I could discern from the plans and with some feedback from the Project Manager. I hope to ask for a little more guidance from the city clerk when I submit the plans tomorrow.

The person who was handling our account at the truss manufacturer left the company and somehow took our designs with him. We’ll have to wait a week or so for them to re-engineer our roof.