It would also be a HUGE help if you would come to the planning commission meeting on Tue Sept 14th at 7PM, it’s at the assembly chambers (155 S. Seward):

Anyone that wants to should be allowed to speak, but even if you don’t speak we understand that packing the room with supporters will go a long way in our favor.

For more info on the details of the situation, read below..

Since we got the Stop Work Order for the reconstruction I’ve been on the phone and email countless hours: talking with builders, developers, architects, engineers, lawyers. My strategy is to listen to as many smart people as possible, do my homework, and then take a best guess.

I’m confident I have a good idea of the landscape we’re operating in, why we’ve arrived in this circumstance, and what our best course is.

The city Community Development department recognizes the building code is vague as it pertains to post-conflagration homes in a legally non-conforming setback. Knowing this, it’s no wonder when they got a letter from an attorney that they reneged on the original permit issued months ago. Their reaction is understandable, and in light of what I’ve learned about their inner-workings: predictable.

In one sense, this is what the Planning Commission (PC) is for. They’re members of the public and their mandate is to handle decisions the city can’t. The city wants us to apply for a Conditional Use (CU) permit from the PC so they won’t be responsible for having made or not made such a significant error.

In another sense, it’s all just so ridiculous. No one would have said “boo” if the neighbors hadn’t hired an attorney whose scant, non-applicable claims don’t hold water.

After a long year of working with the insurance company we have little faith in bureaucracy. They make you jump through hoop after hoop after hoop, and they don’t show you the next hoop until it’s time to jump. In this case, the hoop is also flaming and rimmed with poisonous spikes. We’ve been living in limbo over a year, all our money wrapped in the rebuild, and when your family’s future is on the line, no matter how good the odds, you just can’t rest peacefully. The stress is taking a toll, but one we’ll recover from. If the PC doesn’t approve our CU application, we’ll have to re-design, re-engineer, and re-build everything we’ve done so far. Which, as you can see from the photo gallery, is significant.

The relevant criteria listed in the CBJ Code which the PC will use to judge this case are whether there are any:

• Excessive blockage of views
• Excessive loss of light or air
• Other deleterious impacts (EG: property costs in the neighborhood)
• Negative effects on neighborhood harmony

We think it’s pretty obvious that none of the above are the case.

As you can see in the pic above, the complaining neighbor to our north has a large open space between our homes and has both southerly and northerly views of the mountains on Douglas. This can easily be seen by walking the neighborhood or looking at the pics in our letter-petition packet (linked below). Light and air aren’t affected for the same reason: even though it’s downtown, they’ve got plenty of space on all sides of their home. On the other hand, our southern neighbor’s home, where the fire began, is more affected by our reconstruction than the complaining neighbor. Even though she’s dealing with her own insurance nightmare, she agrees with our project, isn’t cranky about it’s effect on her house, and plans on writing us a letter of support.

There are no deleterious impacts on the neighborhood. Rather, we believe our project will increase property values. We also think our project will increase neighborhood harmony, as the size and style are in keeping with other nearby homes, and everyone I’ve talked to agrees life in the neighborhood will be better with our house built and family settled back in.

We’re preparing to present our case to the PC as best we can, addressing the above. The main weight is what the community thinks, and for that we need your help. Here’s what you can do:

1) You can send the Planning Commission your thoughts on the matter and make your voice heard. A simple “I approve and support Ryan Stanley and Laura Hosey’s Conditional Use application” is enough, or you can feel free to expound based on any of the points we’ve illustrated here or ones of your own.

• Email: PC_Comments@ci.juneau.ak.us
• If you email, please CC ryan@freeryan.com as well
• Call them regarding the “817 Basin Road permit”, make sure they take notes and add them to the “staff report”: (907) 586-0715
• Send a written letter to: Planning Commission Comments | 155 S. Seward Street | Juneau, Alaska 99801

2) You can sign one of our petition-letters to the Commission voicing your support. These letters include the house design, specifications, and photographs of the current (approved) in-progress construction. One is for residents in the immediate area and the other is for Juneau citizens in general. If you want to sign one of these please email or call me I will bring it to you: ryan@freeryan.com | (907) 723-3938.

Also, we could use help getting signatures. So if you want a copy let me know or you can download a PDF of the letter-petition packet here, then let me know and I’ll come pick it up.

3) Finally, and possibly most important, on September 14th at 7PM you can come to the Assembly Chambers to be counted. It’s a public hearing so you’re all welcome to attend. We’re hoping to pack the room. If you want you could even stand up and tell the PC why they should approve our permit. We need as much support as we can garner.

Incredulous at their opposition to our plight, I asked if they wanted me to put a miner’s cabin back on the lot and their reply was “well, that’s what you bought.” Even if I tried, the city wouldn’t let me. The old house had 7ft ceilings and a shallow sloped roof that wouldn’t pass modern code.

Their view was such that they could just see the water over our old house, when standing at their window. Bringing our basement and main floor alone up to code is enough to alter their view. Here’s a pic taken from their living room window, you can see our dormer and their view which still includes plenty of sky, mountains, trees:

It’s been a rough year for my family. One thing after another. When my neighbor called at 7AM last week, I didn’t tell him that Meadow had fallen on her head and we’d spent half the night at the ER.

I also assumed he’d be human enough to have a concept of our overall situation since the fire burned our home and all our possessions: broke; descending deeper into debt; house-less; over-stressed; trying to navigate the wiles of the insurance company, bureaucracy of the bank and city, and overall complexity of new home construction. He didn’t. Our conversation began semi-civil and quickly devolved into confused emotional blustering on both our parts. We hung up unresolved. I got in the shower, and came out to find a voicemail from him in which he told me we need to “figure something out before push comes to shove”.

I didn’t return his call, but did do some research. Everyone I talked to, including officials with the city, said we were OK. We had a permit and were following all the rules. The city’s planning department issues permits for just this reason, to make sure everything is as it should be. Indeed our neighbor had gone to the city and reviewed the plans, told them of his concerns, and they turned him away saying there was nothing to be done since the permit was issued.

So instead of continuing pointless emotionally-charged “conversations”, we wrote our neighbors a letter. We tried to explain our family’s necessity for a proper house. We tried to appeal to them to put themselves in our shoes, and then make a gracious decision to let us continue.

We were relatively confident that nothing would come of it other than grumpy neighbor relations, until today when my builder informed me the city issued a stop work order on the “west 10ft of 3rd floor”. Our neighbor’s attorney had sent a letter to the city, causing them to go back over our house plans with a fine tooth comb. And… they found something.

As anyone would, Laura and I are trying to turn this lemon of a situation into lemonade. Our design calls for the addition of a long desired dormer to the top of the house. For financial and structural reasons this dormer will extend from the center of the house all the way to foundation’s edge in both the front and back. Our designed house is the same height, and our dormer the same style, as found on many other Basin Road homes, like this one:

As it was explained to me, the code for our area says you can build up to 35ft so long as you’re 10ft back from the front property line. It’s common for old downtown houses to be directly on the city property line, and the code (written decades after the house was built) says that if your house burns down your rebuild is grandfathered in at the same footprint. The code doesn’t address height very well, but as it was explained to me, essentially, the front 10ft of our house above what previously existed isn’t grandfathered.

When you want to do a “projection” on an existing/grandfathered house you have to get a Conditional Use permit. This is done through a public hearing where the Planning Commission hears testimony from the public, reviews evidence, and makes a decision to allow or deny.

The city failed to catch this when they reviewed our plans back in May. They stamped them and gave us a permit. Had they flagged it, we would have gone through the conditional use process months ago. But they didn’t. In the meantime we’ve been ordering and building in a tight deadline before winter. The windows are paid for. The custom trusses will be here in two days.

The city would probably have let the permit stand as is if it weren’t for the letter from an attorney. So I went to talk with my neighbors. At first it didn’t go so well. I tried to keep myself in check but my entire body was vibrating with rage and I may or may not have used some choice words.

What it boils down to for them is that they can’t just “roll over” and let their view be taken away. They feel they should’ve been part of the design process and that the neighborhood should have a chance to chime in on the dormer. Had the city told us this was required back when it was feasible for us, we would have been happy to oblige. As it is now this ordeal threatens our entire project. If the Conditional Use is denied our entire floor plan has to be redone.

I went back over to the neighbors this morning to plead with them to just let us have our house. They won’t budge. So, another chapter in the Pink House saga begins. Looks like we’ll be having a public hearing in front of the planning commission. I’m curious what the community and other neighbors will have to say.

Not pictured: cedar shingle siding. As you can see from the latest pics in the slideshow. Things are moving right along!

Now we’re looking on to framing the internal walls, the roof, siding, windows, and then some.

Also, I’d just like to say for the record how wonderful it is hearing from everyone who walks on Basin Rd everyday and is seeing the house built first hand. Laura, Meadow, and I aren’t alone in our excitement at seeing something physical after the past year’s turmoil.

Once the buttress wall and lingering foundation repairs were squared away, Alan’s team was able to put up the main beams. One runs the width of the house and many more form the perimeter.

Beams in place, the builders were able to create a plumb and level square on top of a wonky foundation. Once that square was made, they wasted no time getting the floor joists in:

Once the old foundation was cut according to plan, plumbing was laid and concrete poored over it. Talk about installations you can’t adjust once they’re done!

Then the real fun began:

This buttress wall serves multiple purposes. Since it’s perpendicular to the rear foundation retaining wall it will help keep the hillside at bay. Since it’s pretty much right in the center of the floorplan, it will be the support on which much of the main floor sits. The previous floor in the pink house was held up by columns, which broke up the downstairs space in an odd way. This buttress solution was designed by our engineer and our draftsman designed around it so it will flow with the floorplan. The cutout you see in it will be where the staircase descends from the main floor to basement.

This list contains over half of the items lost in the fire and represents hours of time. It really only begins the process of claiming our policy coverage for possessions and we still have the other half to finish, but as Mary Poppins says “well begun is half done.”

For nearly a year now we’ve been using a spreadsheet to list everything item by item, line by line, estimating costs and recording important details in the correct columns (so Allstate doesn’t confuse a $400 Milwaukee drill with a $4 Milwaukee beer).

Progress has been painfully slow since we got our permit almost two weeks ago, probably because I’ve got ants in my pants and my sense of time (and reality) is warped. We had to get logistics dealt with like turning on the water and getting electricity. And before each phase the city has to come up and verify that what is being built is the same as in the plans. Since the first phase is pouring concrete, it’s important that things are done *just so*. So the ball is for the most part in the court of our builder (Alan Wilson of Alaska Renovators). Alan is working to get all his ducks in a row so that we can proceed properly.

It’s times like these I remind myself to just relax and let the experts do their work. And in my mind I hear the old adage spoken by Max when Inigo needed his help resurrecting Wesley so they could go rescue Buttercup and kill the six fingered man:

You rush a miracle man, you get rotten miracles

Amidst an endless series of hurdles over the past year since the house burned, this is a big one. It means not only are we legally allowed to start building, but the experts at the city agree the house we’ve designed is structurally sound.

Our submission to the city included floor plan and layout, architectural and structural specifications, heating/plumbing/electrical systems, and engineer calculations. Our excellent engineer (Jodie Pessolano of North Star Design-Build) was able to design a solution that lets us put a modern strong house on our existing foundation. The pudding that holds the proof is greek to me. Here’s an example of the 12 pages of sheets of calculations the city approved:

So, with faith in people smarter than me, and depending on (you guessed it) more hurdles, we should be starting work next week!

Here’s some footage I shot during the fire and the morning after.

Hearing my voice sounds so weird. It belies the real emotion, instantly suppressed during the fire and the following weeks, but slowly leaking out through the cracks over the last year. Mostly it comes out as anger when dealing with petty time wasting bureaucracies. Sometimes it comes out when remembering lost things, especially BeeDee the cat.

One year later we’re still a ways off from being whole again but we’re able to view the loss a bit more objectively. We’ve been through a lot, have gotten a lot of great support, and in general are really, REALLY, lucky and thankful.

Looking back at our time since the fire–almost a year now–I’ve done some math and estimate we’ve spent 300+ hours on house fire administrative chores (not including the 3-4 weeks we took off last summer to recover and shovel ashes). All this time we’ve either taken off from work or arranged for weekend childcare for Meadow.

And for some reason, it seems every Saturday or Sunday we spend working on our mind numbing bureaucratic pile, the weather outside is gorgeous.

Our big time sink is listing out and organizing receipts for every single little item that burned. Most individual items are worth between $5 and $15, a relatively small amount. But add them all up and it’s a big chunk o’ cheese. Cheese that we can only get by first listing all the items, and then sending in a receipt corresponding to each item.

With thousands of items and already hundreds of receipts, it’s a mounting task that grows the more we ignore it.

I’m convinced the Allstate counts on people getting fed up with the laborious process and if not outright giving up then at least cutting corners. This is illustrated simply through the fact that the forms they send for listing out the contents are designed for hand writing. I can’t imagine hand writing and organizing 6000+ items without a spreadsheet. I wonder how many people in this same situation start writing their lists by hand, get fed up, send them in prematurely, and get gypped by their carrier.

If you add up all the man hours we’ve spent, plus all the staff time Allstate will spend processing the list, it would surely be cheaper for them to just cut us a check for the amount of our contents coverage.

Silly huge corporations, tricks are for kids.

Having actual architectural plans, with actual details that builders can follow, with an engineer’s embossed stamp on ‘em, and pages of calculations… is a pretty good feeling. It means we reached a milestone and get to turn the page to a new chapter. After our meeting last night with draftsman and engineer we were elated. Not quite cloud 9, as we’re reserving that for when we have a house again, but certainly cloud 4 or 5.

Our new found optimism carried us right into the city permit center first thing this morning with our stamped plans in hand. 1.5 tiring hours and $2,300 later… we’re back down to earth.

BUT reality feels pretty darn good considering we have marching orders and are exiting the limbo-like state we’ve been in since last June. Provided we can iron out all the kinks, we should have a building permit in a few weeks.

The intake process for the permit covers a lot of ground. They look over the plans to make sure the basics are there, as well as some other random things. For instance is the water main big enough to support the number of faucets in our design, are the calculations for snow and wind load present, is the property in a landslide zone. So many of the regulations are seemingly arbitrary, and it’s a roll of the dice for many if we pass or if we have to go out and get more signed/stamped letters from more experts.

All in all we did OK, and they accepted our plans. So we’re relieved, and excited, and of course leery of what other bureaucratic hurdle lies around the corner.

But that’s not all. They’re a ways off from being ready to submit to the city, but we’ve started drawing up *actual blueprints* for the house we want to build.

Last fall Laura took a residential design, codes, and standards course at UAS. The students in the course planned out a theoretical house. Laura used our real one. Students drew up theoretical floor and foundation plans. Laura drew hers from our existing foundation. Students had right angles and square dimensions. Laura had our existing foundation, which is anything but plumb in the mathematical sense.

The product of her course left us with a basic design for the house. Since the foundation isn’t a standard rectangle, Laura had to make a number of considerations to come up with a plan that would work. She did and we’ve begun working with Ken Huse, a draftsman who is helping us hammer out the nitty gritty details and produce the official prints.

The design is pretty much the same as before with a few required changes in the floor plan. We’re also hoping to add a dormer to the attic and of course are looking forward to having a properly insulated and efficiently heated home. We won’t have enough money to finish the whole thing, but our HOPE is we can finish enough so it’s habitable by winter.

We’ll be taking two copies of the finished plans to the city for combing through within the next couple weeks. They’ll check all the calculations for load and weight and support and beams and angles and codes and a seemingly endless pile of mumbo jumbo written in a huge book.

Once the plans are approved (2-4 weeks after submission) we’ll be free to put hammer to nail. Which brings us to our next hurdle: lining up all the muscle to get the job done.

We’re still working with an uncooperative budget, so the future is… interesting. But in the midst of what’s been a busy/stressful year, it’s really exciting to see and be a part of *something* productive, even if it is still theoretical at this point.

“In the box, of course”. We’re packing up the Yellow House in prep to move to the Blue House this week, which (while a big hassle and slightly upsetting for the little one) we’ve been able to spin as an exciting adventure to a cool new home!

You may remember this post of Meadow’s first impression of her new room at the Yellow House. She was very excited about her new room and thankfully she is even more excited to move again. She’s also fully aware that we will hopefully be moving yet again back into the pink house. We’re grateful to have a little girl who so easily accepts adventure and change.

• Bad news: we have to move out of the rental house we’ve been calling home for the past 9 months.
• Good news: we’ve found an excellent new rental house downtown that Meadow is very excited to live in.
• Bad news: we have to pack everything we’ve acquired since the fire and move it.
• Good news: Allstate will pay for movers to move the furniture.
• Bad news: we’re sad to leave the cute lil yellow house.
• Good news: the blue house has a great view!
• Bad news: we have to change our address with everyone, setup utilities, and again adjust to new surroundings.
• Good news:  we only have to move 6 blocks and are even closer to the pink house ‘work site’.

Onward and upward!

The pic above shows all the receipts we’ve saved so far. These essentially equate to money for us, since we’ll be sending them in to Allstate for reimbursement. This is just the stuff we’ve needed to buy in the last 9 months like clothes and household items. So it’s actually a fraction of the total receipt pile we’ll end up processing. The pile above does not include our big things like camping gear, ski gear, travel gear, jewelry, craft supplies, fabric, my tech studio, and of course art and amenities.

I’ve been going on about our “dreaded” contents list for a while now. Actually, we’ve been working on it since August ’09. In case you haven’t read the prior post, it is essentially a list of all our possessions destroyed by the fire.

Here’s the way the contents portion of our insurance policy works:

1. We were told to make a list of everything. Allstate sent us some forms to fill out for this. The forms are designed to be filled out by hand. By hand! I actually asked our contents adjuster if people submit handwritten lists and he said “oh yea”. Not us. We’ve reimplemented their format in a spreadsheet to make our lives easier.
2. Allstate spends a couple months with the list, depreciating everything on it, then sends us a check for the depreciated amount. We’re expecting this first check to be tiny since Allstate’s depreciation tables are fairly ruthless.
3. To recover the rest of our “contents” money up to our policy limit, we must send in actual physical receipts for items we replace. The items on the receipts must cross reference the unique line numbers of items on the contents list.

Sounds pretty simple, right? Wrong. Turns out most store receipts aren’t very friendly. Take our friendly neighborhood organic grocer for example. This is where we buy some rather expensive vitamins, spices, produce and other items. The receipt the store gives doesn’t use specific names, but instead categories. So a $15 pack of organic cinnamon sticks shows on the receipt as simply “Grocery, $14.99″.

The insurance company, of course, loves this. They’ll reply to our receipt with a note that it doesn’t say what the item is and that we need to go back to the store and get a detailed receipt. When you consider we’ve spent 9 months accumulating receipts for items we’ll want to get reimbursed for, it’s a huge ordeal.

So, for those of you going through this, a word to the wise. Pay attention to the level of detail on your receipts and if possible save yourself some hassle by using stores that provide good receipts.

The other mountain we have to climb, now that our list is nearly done, is to begin matching up the items on the receipts with the items on the list. As you can see from the picture above, it’s a lot of receipts. 10 months worth to be exact. Our list currently has over 5000 items on it. If it takes one minute to find and notate the item on a receipt, that comes out to 5,000 minutes, or about 80 hours. In other words, ten 8-hour work days. And that’s not including the receipts that don’t list clearly what the item is and will require calling stores and asking for better detail.

Anyone want an unpaid clerical job?

Thanks to our stalwart neighbors I received a phone call at 5AM this morning and was able to snap this pic. I drove up to “the work site” and met a nice gentleman who was turning around on the street but misjudged something and ended up with (at least) a broken axel. The good news is we have renewed faith in the strength of our foundation!

We’ve been meeting with a draftsman and trying to get some process in motion for a rebuild. There’s an endless stream of issues.

In no particular order, here’s a rundown of what we’re tackling now so we can move to the next step:

1) The Foundation. This has turned into quite a complex issue. Due to the hillside right behind the house we can’t simply swap out the foundation. So instead we’re looking at ways of using parts of it so that we don’t have to get into the retaining wall song and dance. It seems every engineer we speak with has different ideas about different ways we could handle it–all of them making sense in their logical way–and I suppose they’re all right–to a degree–but it’s going to be up to us to decide what to do.

2) Financing. I’ve contacted a few lenders about construction loans and they’ve all said no, citing the economic downturn and the fact that our house will cost more to build than it would sell for. I guess they call that a bad investment.

3) Insurance. Allstate, god bless their black little heart, is being typically difficult to get straight answers out of. But even more so, they just won’t go to bat for us. We’re now on our fifth adjuster and all they can do is quote BS policy to me, rather than get involved in our situation and look out for our interests. They’re telling us now that since we’re under insured, our course of action will be to get a construction loan *in addition* to our mortgage, which is so out of the bounds of reality for us it’s laughable.

3) Rules and Regs. There’s a whole suite of rules and regs and hoops and permits and we’re beginning to familiarize ourselves with them so we can best prepare for whatever the city may throw at us.

What’s next. Once we get a handle on financing and our options for the foundation, we’ll know how to move forward. I’ve said before that this process is like turning the pages of a book that isn’t written. We can only hope that the story has a happy ending.

This guy is one example:

Not only did Clay give us the venerable tarp garage that covered our rescued items for the summer while we sifted through them, but he was there to help coordinate the demolition while I had to be out of town for work, and in general was an overall huge help.

Smell is a very strong sense. When we were sifting through things that came out of the house, many were only slightly damaged. But the smell would trigger all kinds of awful feelings. And the smell is nearly impossible to get out of most things. In many cases, the decision to toss items was based on their odor. So whether things actually burned up, or were just destroyed to us, we lost of lot of possessions in the fire.

Two of these items were Meadow’s favorite chair and Laura’s end table that her dad built when he was young. Both were blackened, cracked and up until now I assumed in the landfill with everything else.

But no, they weren’t. Little did we know that Super Clay had rescued them from the ashes and given them new life by disassembling, cleaning, sanding, finishing, staining, lovingly repainting, and reassembling. It’s hard to put in to words how much stuff like this means to us. What once were prized possessions are now priceless treasures. Here they are in all their refinished glory:

chair and end table (click to embiggen)

What a guy!

I should add that when Meadow saw her chair she said “it’s the most perfect chair that I always wanted!”