Flip This House #3

Parent Cafe
821

<p>I was able to take one step forward today. </p>

<p>I found a draftsman with extensive experience drawing up these plans and working with the City. He met me at the property and spent 3 hours measuring ‘before’ and then ‘after’. He mentioned several areas where he feels that the City is going to require structural engineer review and report - most importantly the enclosed front porch. Also, because I changed the size of a couple of windows I now have to do a California Title 24 review (energy efficiency review).</p>

<p>I am overpaying a bit to hire this guy but I care more that a) he knows what he is doing and b) could start work immediately. He has already called the building inspector/code guy and there is a meeting planned at my property on Thursday. The code guy was pleased that we were proactive and is going to come meet with us to review the plans before I ever even bring them into the City to apply for a permit. He is going to advise us on what may not fly.</p>

<p>Drafting, Plans, Copies and Meetings = $3,000
Structural Engineering = $1,500
Title 24 = $500
Permit Fees Estimated = $1,500</p>

<p>So, I am going to spend $6,500 but I might get an extra permitted legal 300 sq ft</p>

<p>This does not include what the City may require me to take down and rebuild back to original, or open up drywall that is already finished or whatever.</p>

<p>When the draftsman poked his head out the window of the new office he said the City may have a big fit about the giant dirt mound. I sure hope I don’t get into the position that I have to tell them that I know whose dirt it is. One neighbor’s complaint is going to ricochet across many neighbors. </p>

<p>Oh, and here’s the irony… while working with this draftsman all day I noticed that nasty neighbor is up on his roof with a whole work team. They are running gas lines all over the place for some kind of new tankless water heater - without a permit!!! I was so so tempted :slight_smile: But I didn’t make the call.</p>

822

<p>CB, you’re a nicer woman than I. I could make the call for you. ;)</p>

<p>It sounds like you’re dealing with this as best you can. And you can’t do anything more than your best. This sounds like a good fellow to have on your side. $6500 is a drop in the bucket in terms of what you’re going to be able to sell the house for.</p>

823

<p>Maybe no one has to call, with all the city folks coming and going to your flip, they may find the new tankless water heater on their own. As far as the dirt mound, I’d answer any questions truthfully–and let the neighbor know that someone else started the domino effect.</p>

<p>I hope this goes as smoothly as possible, coralbrook!</p>

824

<p>Update on the La Mesa Shadow Hill property</p>

<p>Hahh! Karma!! That big house in La Mesa on Shadow Hill is still lingering for sale. Same listing agent that sold the house to someone else “because they were easier to work with” (read… promised to give him sale listing in future) is still trying to sell that house since June 6. Over 4 months lingering on market. They just dropped their price from original $849,000 to $730,000. That’s $120,000 less than what that listing agent promised their client it was going to sell for.</p>

<p>My offer was based on potential sale of about $690-$700k. Let’s see what it finally sells at (although they did some stupid cheap things with their remodel)</p>

825

<p>CB, you know your market.</p>

<p>I love karma, when it works. </p>

<p>I’m still waiting on a few pieces of karma that haven’t kicked in yet, but I expect they will. ;)</p>

826

<p>Today my new set of French doors and exterior doors are showing up. Have no idea where I am going to hide those. I’m down to only one worker who is pulling out tree stumps, clearing all the weeds and debris and scraping/sanding the paint on the exterior. Have no idea how this poor guy is going to carry all the big doors up the stairs so he and I are going to try to muscle those doors into the little garage.</p>

<p>Draftsman is supposed to be done with set of plans for review today. We’re going to go over them and try to get them completed. Have meeting with City inspector at the property on Thursday at 1:30pm. I’ve never heard of a City Inspector that will come out and meet with you prior to submitting plans so I consider myself lucky to have him trying to help. At that point I should know what I am going to have to remove from my dream plans.</p>

827

<p>cb, this sounds pretty positive. Ideally the City Inspector will let you know what might need to be tweaked and you’ll do it, so that when you formally submit them there won’t be any problem.</p>

<p>Fingers crossed.</p>

<p>I know this isn’t your ideal situation, but I’m learning a lot.</p>

828

<p>It sounds like the City inspector is at least trying to work with you. I hope all goes better than expected.</p>

829

<p>Yesterday I got to spend over 5 hours driving around in circles trying to find the legal property boundary. The draftsman said he needed the ’ survey’ of the property in order to land the building properly in the boundaries.</p>

<p>He sent me to the County Survey Department. They have no records on the property except for the original 1907 Subdivision Map that created the streets and lots. I got a copy of that.</p>

<p>Then onto the City of San Diego Building Department downtown who do not have any building records of the property because they had a fire in 1972 or something. They only have a couple of permits for water heater replacement and a retaining wall. Got copies of that, although they are useless.</p>

<p>Next I go to the County Assessor who has the records used for tax assessment and the parcel maps. I should have just started here. I told the draftsman that I should go to the County Assessor because they are the owners of the parcel map, but he insisted on County Survey Department. I got the building footprint (which I already had from my real estate agent doing research for me before) and the tax assessor records of improvements for tax purposes.</p>

<p>Now I stand at the parcel map desk and they are all excited because it’s like solving a mystery. They have the same 1907 subdivision map. Their records only go back to about 1965 so they have no record of this original lot being split into two small lots, although they have the current map that shows the boundaries. Get copies of that. There is no way to figure out When the lot got split into two lots and where is the recorded map that created the lot split. </p>

<p>They send me over to sit at microfiche of deeds. All I know is that this lot got split sometime between 1907 and 1936. They want me to sit there and go through every year of history and try to find the Grant Deed that sold a piece of the lot to someone else, working backwards with names of owners. After 2 hours I realize this is looking for a needle in a haystack.</p>

<p>Go home defeated and then realize that I have an excellent relationship with my title company. One email to them and they return the Grant Deed that split the lot with the new legal description. There is no map involved, the lot was split by the sale of land with a new legal description. Very simple… I own 64’ of the original 140’ length lot.</p>

<p>So now I go back over to the property with my carpenter and we spend 2 hours trying to get out the tape measure and figure out where the heck our boundaries are. It’s a mess because there are fences, walls and a very high slope. As far as we can tell, our property reaches 8" into where the neighbor has built their adjoining patio on top of their little garage and our back fence is jogging all over the place from years of neighbors putting up fences.</p>

<p>All I know is that our Utility Room is set back about 2 ft from the back lot line (maybe!) and that we have a lot more space encroaching into that dirt alley than we thought. We may be able to move that retaining wall out another 3 ft from the Utility Room but that would mean a huge amount of work to dig out from the mountain of dirt and move our trench three feet. I’m scared to try to dig out dirt for fear it will cause an avalanche. Trench is already dug after 2 days x 2 laborers.</p>

<p>Today is D Day meeting with City. I have three key issues that I need to share with him… need to keep the house secure to prevent more robberies and break ins (please don’t make me take down walls, siding, windows), have to get house shored up in case of rain (please let me put up retaining wall and re-roof, even if we only roof the main house) and it is mandatory that we keep a working toilet (please don’t make me tear out working toilet right now).</p>

830

<p>I forgot to mention the most interesting thing I found from the detective work. The Grant Deed splitting the lot is selling to two different parties. The Deed includes Covenants and Restrictions for the subdivision. Almost every other paragraph states that all buyers, owners and occupants of the properties must be Caucasian. It also clearly states that the only Non-Caucasians allowed in the neighborhood shall be domestic servants employed by owners or renters.</p>

<p>I have no idea how long these covenants were in effect although I see dates of 1938 and 1958 as possible expiration of the restrictions.</p>

<p>Wow, I didn’t even realize that they would bother with that kind of horrible segregation in San Diego.</p>

831

<p>Not uncommon to see those racial restrictions, Coralbrook. San Diego was no exception to the general reality.</p>

<p>Wasn’t there a survey done at the time of purchase? Can the surveyor come back out and mark the property corners? </p>

<p>Neighbors ended up owning one of the other neighbors’ dining room due to a bad original survey based on ancient base survey points, and the title company paid to get it all cleaned up. (Both neighbors cooperated, so that made it relatively easy, I guess.) Turned out that the survey base point was almost two feet off from true, but it had been established more than 100 years ago. </p>

832

<p>It is not common to have surveys completed during a residential sale in California. I’ve never seen it happen. The title company hands you a parcel map and that’s about it.</p>

<p>There are no survey ‘monument’ points stamped in this neighborhood. Nothing to even start a survey with</p>

833

<p>In my neck of the woods, actual surveys to pinpoint the property boundaries are quite expensive. I had to have one when I put an addition on my house. There is a marker a couple hundred yards away and it still cost around $2000.</p>

<p>Nobody does them for a simple property sale.</p>

834

<p>I think it would be worth it to have you property surveyed. It may make things go faster with permits and such if you know exactly where the property line is. We had to have a survey of our property in MA in order to put up a fence and found out the neighbors had been kindly mowing about 12 square yards of our back yard for years;-)</p>

835

<p>coralbrook, as I’ve said before, PITA for now, but ultimately worth it in the long run.</p>

<p>And now you have new friends at City Hall. :)</p>

836

<p>It sounds like all the boundary lines work in your favor, coralbrook. It may be that the neighbor has to move his dirt pile to give you more room around the utility/office room. Hoping for good news for you.</p>

837

<p>Wow… this is all educational. I had assumed all property sales/mortgages required title search and survey. </p>

838

<p>When we purchased our home in the 1980s, we looked over the property and had the seller hire a surveyer plus pay for party wall agreements with the neighbors, since there was a wall that went back and forth along the property line which wall WE own. To the best of my memory, it affected 3 of the 4 sides of our property, with the 4th side bounded by the sidewalk. We have 5 neighbors affected and the seller had to get them all to sign off so if down the road we decide to sell, we can do so without title issues.</p>

839

<p>@coralbrook, I’m eager to hear how your meeting with Mr. City went. (Although it’s only 2:30 PM where you are, so you may not have even met yet.)</p>

840

<p>MEETING WITH CITY CODE COMPLIANCE</p>

<p>It turns out that the guy I have been speaking with is a Building Code Compliance Officer. Because an official complaint was filed with the Building Department, he is going to have to write up a ‘Notice’ which will be sent to my home. It will probably say something like ’ You must rectify violation within 30 days". He told me that he has to do that in order to close the complaint that is on record. </p>

<p>The good news is that he says that the original building permit is not available in City records. The oldest record available is from the County Assessor record which only shows a first visit in 1960. This shows the Utility Room and the Enclosed Front Porch, but it does not have any record of the bathroom facilities in the Utility Room. But, evidently my pictures showing everything in there may be enough since the City does not have any evidence to prove otherwise. It’s very likely that the Assessor just never went into the out building Utility Room and never noted the extra bathroom. From what we can tell all of the ‘data’ in the public records showing 2 bed/1 bath 1017sqft are derived from the County Assessor’s 1960 notes because there are a couple of measurement errors that seem to be perpetrated into the records. The gentleman says it will be anybody’s guess whether the City Plan Review will allow the bathroom in the back or not. Just great!!!</p>

<p>The other area where there is conflicting evidence in historical records is the Enclosed Front Patio. </p>

<p>They are not going to require a survey because my little laundry room addition is within the current building foot prints.</p>

<p>Basically, the City officer says that the new remodel is going to be ‘adorable’. However, I have to go through stringent Historical Review. Noone knows where the original front door of this house was and no one knows what the front of the house used to look like. There is no way to require me to take it back to ‘original’ because there is no record of what original is. The officer views it as a full remodel with a small addition.</p>

<p>I may have to tear down the roof we built over the Utility Room because it is ‘not to code’. Oh well. </p>

<p>He looked at our mound of dirt and suggested that I remove any broken concrete on the top of the dirt where someone might think it came from our construction and make sure that any dirt we created from digging the trench should be moved to a mound on my property to make it clear that we didn’t add to the pile. Otherwise, it’s a different jurisdiction and he doesn’t have to file a ‘complaint’ about it.</p>

<p>Next step is I have to get a structural engineer over here for a site review $$$ in another meeting with the draftsman $$$ and then the structural engineer has to tell us what we need to include in the plans $$$ (another revision of plans) and provide a structural engineering report $$$. Then I have to call Code officer up again for another meeting ($$$ for draftsman to be here) and then I can finally take the plans into the Code Compliance officer where they have to sit for one day to get stamped ($$$ probably). And THEN… I can finally submit plans to apply for a permit $$$$ and pay all the fees. </p>

<p>Best case is I am still 3 weeks away from even getting approved permits before I can start work.</p>