Would you buy a house with an open building permit? The violation is not major.
It would depend on what it was for…
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If I could fix the issue without much cost, I would.
It took us five years to get a Certificate of Occupancy after completing a large addition to our house. DH just didn’t get around to fixing a few things. His sister worked for an insurance company and warned him we might not be covered if we had a claim if we didn’t have the C of O. So he finally got it done.
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We were comfortable buying an uninhabitable house. But it was a special situation, with a finished accessory dwelling unit on site we were able to move into while we completed the project, and it was an incredible bargain.
A minor violation is a different story. Personally, I wouldn’t worry about the repair, but there’s a bigger question. Would the problem need to be corrected before the property was eligible for conventional financing?
If it does, it might be best to arrange for the seller to resolve the problem prior to closing.
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I hope an engineer designed that house. So many windows! It’s tough to design shear walls in that situation. We’re doing a house like that right now.
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Definitely NOT designed by an engineer; designed by an idiot, a realtor who took her favorite elements from many homes she’d sold and combined them into an eclectic “masterpiece”.
The result was a mishmash of incongruity, such as a ski chalet front porch adjacent to a two story brick turret, and windows that made absolutely no sense (pairing 8’ windows with 6’ 8” patio doors???). They lost it to the bank.
Out of morbid curiosity I called the architect whose name was on the plans and learned the story. The realtor had a bunch of hand sketched drawings and hired the architect to put them into CAD format, and refused to take any suggestions from the architect.
The architect was embarrassed to have their name on the plans and we ended up using her on the redesign. She was actually very good.
She sized all the structural elements correctly; it flew through engineering with minimal changes.
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Ok, well I would be leery with that many windows. It’s not just a matter of sizing a few beams. Hope I’m wrong.
I’d find out what the local policies are. Out where we live, at least when the housing market was hot, permits didn’t seem to matter! I don’t understand how, I thought they were important, but houses would be for sale and the flyer would just say “unpermitted addition” or whatever it was they did. Didn’t seem to make a difference.
I’d find out how long the property was in violation of the permitting etc. and how much the accrued fines are. In some places, that could be a few hundred dollars a day or even more!
Could the city or contractor put a lien against the property?
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I thought you would be interested in the email DH sent our client whose house doesn’t have as many windows as yours:
“1. As discussed, we adopted the methodology of a “timber frame” concept to resist the high wind loads at west side of the house with the large windows.
2. This method uses large wood-based framing members along with strong connections to prevent racking.
3. This method has been used successfully throughout New England for hundreds of years.
4. Your project has the increased benefit of using high performance engineered wood materials (“Versa-Lam’s”, etc.) which have higher strength and stiffness than harvested timbers.
5. The walls at the other sides (north, south, east sides) use shearwalls to prevent racking as is more common with modern platform framing.
6. Hold down anchors at the Grid A and Grid B walls resist uplift forces and fully anchor the structure.
7. Due to the high wind exposures, stiffness and rigidity is further enhanced by applying the OSB sheathing to both the inside and outside faces of the exterior walls.“
So there’s a lot to the design. We had to calculate the right thickness of OSB as well as the nailing pattern. The design took several days for a structure that’s not very large.
I’m sharing this for people who ask why engineering design is so expensive. There’s a lot to it when done correctly. Or you can just trust the GC who insists he’s been doing this forever and knows better than engineers.
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Interesting stuff. Re: GC’s who think they know more than the engineers: we didn’t have a GC but we did have an experienced framing contractor, a guy who ran about six framing crews. He truly DID know what was required and in fact advocated that we EXCEED the engineering specifications in a number of areas.
My attitude was to rely on the engineer but also follow the contractor’s advice to go overboard at times.
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People think we go overboard sometimes. We tell them that engineers don’t design buildings. When they look puzzled, we explain that codes design buildings and we just follow them. So if you think it’s overkill, complain to your legislator. Or go with a contractor or engineer who’s willing to ignore the code. From experience, we know that even experienced builders make mistakes that can be problems down the road.
We are the ones who get the call when someone’s house is showing distress due to poor structural design. It happens a lot.
Ok, off my soapbox. We were up until 3 getting that design out, so I’m pooped.
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