Why get a permit?

With all the difficulty our building permit caused, I often get asked "Why even get a permit?" To answer this, let me first summarize why you wouldn't want a permit. (Note that all information is true where we live and may not be true in other places).

1) Increased property tax - Whatever you spend on a permit gets reported to the property tax office and your tax may increase.

2) Pain in the neck - Doing work under a permit is, simply put, a pain in the neck. There are so many details and places you can get snagged. The building codes are often cryptic and interpreted very differently depending on who you talk to. In our community, the standards are ridiculously high (much higher than any community in this area).

3) Delays - Doing your work with a permit will delay your job. Meeting the high standards takes time. Often you cannot schedule an inspection when you need to. In our city, the standard is that they offer next day inspections. I often waited up to 6 days for an inspection. The job cannot progress until you have an inspection. You and/or the contractor are forced to wait at home during the window of time in which the inspector might arrive. When the inspectors find corrections (which they almost always do), you have to get all the proper people out again to fix things and then re-call for an inspection.

When I started this project, I had a long track record of project management in my professional life. It's something I'm good at, and one of the reasons is that I think things through and try to imagine anything that could go wrong. I assumed that if I did enough homework that I could anticipate what could go wrong and be prepared for it (this has almost always been true in the past). This was a false assumption and not a reflection of my inadequate preparation. There are many places where things go wrong and there is absolutely no way that anybody could have known it was possible until it happened, including contractors. I've said many times that if only the city would document things and make them available to the public that many delays could be prevented. Event the contractors I worked with were shocked by the unpredictable delays we encountered. There were even things where the city had literature that covered some contingencies and the literature just wasn't complete.

4) Contractors - Getting a permit forces you to use contractors with a city business license. Many charge more to do the work with a permit (especially in our city). Some won't work in the city we live in.

Sounds pretty bad, huh? So why on earth would any sound-minded person get a permit? Well, consider the following.

1) It is illegal to do construction that requires a permit without one. The city literature I got clearly states you may be subject to civil or criminal charges for doing work without a permit.

2) Risk of losing the work - If caught, at minimum you have to bring the work up to code and prove it. This may mean opening walls, tearing out construction, etc because our city will not accept pictures you took during the work. Worse, you may have to simply remove the work (even if it looks good and adds to the house). Even worse, you may face the above mentioned civil and/or criminal charges as well as having to rip out the work or bring it to code.

3) Future sales liability - When you sell, you have to disclose the non-permitted work. All of it. The law is quite clear about this. This means your house has less appeal (I would be very scared to buy a house with unpermitted major work). If you don't disclose, your buyer has strong grounds for a lawsuit against you and you can be criminally charged with fraud.

4) Your safety - Houses can be very dangerous if not built properly. In the electrical system, the risks are pretty obvious. You can burn your house down with improper wiring. The people that owned our house before us did a lot of their own mangling (they probably called it upgrading) including electrical work. Our electrician was surprised again and again and kept making the comment "I can't believe this place didn't burn down." This was after we had a contract, so he wasn't trying to sell me more work.

Gas lines are a big risk. In our house, we had a new length of gas line (about 10 feet) run because we relocated the gas cooktop. The pipe was undersized by 1/4". This slipped by 3 licensed, experienced plumbers employed by our plumber. The city caught it on inspection and we had to change it. What's the problem? An undersized gas pipe can cause air to be sucked into the pipe which can explode.

Structural issues are huge in a house. You can get all kinds of shifting and cracking even if it doesn't kill/maim you.

Inspection is the only way to make sure safe. My electrician missed a few grounding wires even though he is quite good. 3 licensed plumbers missed gas line size. These are serious risks which the average homeowner is not qualified to assess.

5) In our community, there have been some prosecutions for tax fraud on unpermitted work. Since permitted work increases your taxes, you can be prosecuted for not declaring the work.

6) My career would suffer were I to be caught. My profession has a code of conduct which clearly states that fraudulent activity is not acceptable. I could be barred from ever working in my field again even though this has nothing to do with my work. Many jobs now require a background check, and I imagine any sort of fraudulent activity could hurt your chances of being employed.

7) I hold a minor appointed office in our local government. My code of conduct for this office also clearly prohibits any sort of fraudulent activity. If I were to get caught, I imagine it would be quite newsworthy. I don't even want to think about my name in the local newspapers.

8) One benefit to getting a permit is reduced homeowners' insurance. We got a quote from one company which cuts our insurance premium in half because of all the work we did. It may not seem like much, but multiply the effect over 10, 20 or 30 years and it's huge.

So no the question is, how would you get caught?

1) Permit history on a house public knowledge. Anybody can go to the city permit office and pull the permit history on any house. I would check any house I was considering buying and did check when we bought ours.

2) The city is trying to catch you. They may have ways of finding unpermitted work we wouldn't even think of.

3) City inspectors spend many hours every day driving around. They are constantly looking for things being done without permits.

4) They remember your house. I was surprised many times by how much the inspectors remembered from visit to visit. They could pick out what had changed each time they were here.

5) They look for violations while inspecting other stuff. We had some structural reinforcing done on a second permit while our main permit was open. When they were inspecting the structural work, they were poking around and asking questions about all the other work to make sure it was permitted.

6) Increased enforcement. One neighboring city has a full time guy whose only function is to find unpermitted work. He drives around looking for things, goes to real estate open houses and browses sales adds trying to find mismatches in the recorded square feet, bedrooms, bathrooms, etc. He looks for things in sales ads like "new kitchen" etc. Municipalities are getting increasingly strapped for cash and this is an untapped revenue source which doesn't require any new tax levies to be passed. I predict that this kind of enforcement will grow in many areas.

7) Your neighbors could complain. If you neighbor has the slightest grudge against you, they could make one call and blow the whistle on you at any time, even after the work is done. I would not like to live with this hanging over my head.

So there you have it, my reasons for working with building permits.