Getting ready (and ready...and ready...)

I had this romantic image of just dropping off a set of floor plans at the township office with my $300 fee and happily picking up trowel and square and getting started. By now I thought we'd be well onto finishing the 1st floor platform over the crawl space. Instead we've spent the month refining our drawings, employing an engineer to help us with certain structural concerns, and getting bids on everything from windows, to excavation of the shallow hole I thought we'd have filled with house by now. We've dropped copies of the plans to several lumber yards for designs/estimates on roofing trusses, and we had a septic engineer out to stake our sand mound. (I could go on.)

Sheesh! And this is a relatively simple house, not like the multi-bathroom McMansions referred to earlier.

Julie and I have some similar reasons for this project, like wanting to save money. We are. It is costing more than we expected in some areas, though. The engineering, the building permit (estimated we'll be charged about $1300), and other permits...I can see why people are generally angry and why movements like the Tea Party sprung up. The particulars of today's political viewpoints aside, I am more interested in what drives political moods, and in this project we are experiencing a "bureaucracy of common sense": the township, codes enforcement, good building practices...these are all things that will protect me from myself and perhaps prevent the public eyesore if a house constructed by amateurs were to collapse.

Once upon a time in America a family could go westward with shovel, saw and hammer build a house. Of course some of those houses collapsed too, I'd bet. All of our ancestors couldn't have been talented carpenters and masons. There is no more "west"--there are too many of us. And too many of us leads to all sorts of complicated regulation, social and economic structures, and bother. I suppose there are a few places in the world where we can go forth and just build, but those places are far away from everything else we love here, so I guess we will go through "the process". The house will be better for it, but I can understand why it leaves a bad taste.

We're still having fun, but I'll sure be glad when we have "legal permission" to stick a shovel in the ground.