The Shaft

“It’s grandfathered in,” said the Listing Agent.

I had called the agent on behalf of my clients, Jenny and Brad, who were writing an offer on her Listing.

“Is there a building permit for the Family Room addition built on to the back of the house?” I asked.

“My sellers say it’s been there forever.”

I passed the news on to Jenny and Brad that the Family Room addition had been “grandfathered in” and we left it at that.

Six months after we closed escrow on the house, Jenny and Brad filed for a building permit to add a bathroom to a section of the Family Room.

Brad called me. “We have a little problem with the house,” he said anxiously. “The Building Inspector who came to the house told us the Family Room is not “grandfathered in”.

The Building Inspector condemned the Family Room and served Jenny and Brad with a notice of Code violation.

When I related the situation to my mentor, KDV, he said, “Looks like you sold your people the gold mine, babe, but they got the shaft.”

I went to the Building Department and talked to the Chief Building Official.

The Chief frowned over the inspection notes and said, “The Inspector says here that the Family Room windows, light fixtures, and construction framing can’t possibly be over forty years old, which is the age it needs to be to qualify as ‘grandfathered in’; in other words, it wasn’t constructed before building permits were required, so it is illegal.”

The Chief told me that Jenny and Brad were required to submit a set of architectural plans and pay the fees to process the permit, but because Jenny and Brad didn’t cause the violation in the first place, the fees were less than they would be if the Family Room were being constructed new.

I hired an architect, we submitted the plans to the Building Department, and the Inspector came back for a one-time “Special Inspection”.

As it turned out, the Family Room was well-constructed and in compliance with Building Code, except for one thing: the walls were placed on the old original patio concrete slab with no perimeter foundation footings. The only solution was to dig trenches under the walls and pour a new concrete foundation two feet deep and one foot wide.

KDV stopped by the house and found me on my knees, shovel in hand, digging trenches.

“So you did sell your people a gold mine, babe,” he said “but you get to dig the shaft.”