Permit Process (1 of ??)

What's the scariest part of the entire remodeling effort?  Carrying large amounts of heavy material into the basement?  Sacrificing time and effort away from my young family?  Raiding the bank account?  Accidentally meeting the circular saw in an intimate setting?

No, none of these things scare me the most.

The scariest part is the Permit process.  Maybe it is my healthy respect for the law, or the fact that I've had one too many speeding tickets in my life, or that my job has granted me a government security clearance, but I'm most nervous of the folks with pencils at our township building.

I'm nervous that with a simple stroke of the pen they will cause great harm to my basement plans.  "You need an egress window here, and you need to tear down the basement steps in order to have proper head-clearance, and the ceiling is too short so'll you'll need to dig and pour a new foundation."

Lots of people say, "Do you even need a permit? Couldn't you just do it without anyone knowing?"  Honestly, I'm not sure.  At the end of the day, I'm happy to live in America.  I've been to Africa and I've seen how they run their electrical wire.  I view the township personnel as my allies.  Hopefully they'll be excited that the people who are paying their salaries are improving their homes and communities (and boosting their home assessments...comes full circle doesn't it?).  And when I sell my house in a few years, I want to have a powerful argument as to why I can list the new square footage on the MLS listing.

I tested the waters a few weeks ago with a short and polite email to my township's Safety & Codes Enforcement department with a few questions.  I was pleasantly surprised with the speed of their response.  Additionally, I'm lucky enough to live next door to a local builder who knows these folks by name.  Unfortunately the email response and my neighbor's comments don't agree...so I am more confused than before.  But I feel like I am headed in the right direction.

So tomorrow I head to the township building in the early afternoon.  I'm going to bring a couple of my Visio working diagrams (more on that in a future post), and a bunch of questions.  I don't want to overwhelm them with an overly eager and anal software engineer who thinks he is an armchair architect...I'm most interested in understanding the process.  Which forms do I fill out?  Will I have a sit down meeting with these folks?  Can I ask some questions and get a blessing before I get started?  How do I get inspectors to visit my basement?

Hopefully I'll feel a little more comfortable after tomorrow afternoon.