Tuesday, January 1, 2008

Permits Timeline

What we went through to get permits from a city with a reputation for being helpful and efficient.

All told, the process took over 5 months.

Feb 6 2008: First step: Architect showed plans to city Planning dept, confirmed that we are passing regulations. No formal design review needed, we're told -- only a short review over-the-counter when we submit plans for building permit.

Apr 7 2008: Try to submit for permits. Sorry, previous planner was wrong, can't do this over-the-counter after all. Now we do need a formal design review, despite Feb 6 conversation. Earliest we can submit is May 12.

Apr 8 2008: Submitted plans for design review. Estimate for review is two weeks.

Apr 24 2008: Planning reviewed the design, recommending approval. However, require neighbor notification process to give neighbors a chance to comment. City sends notice to neighbors and posts notice in front of our house, neighbors have until May 7 to review plans.

Apr 25 2008: Dave visited city building dept, spoke with Building and Engineering to ask how this unexpected 5-week delay (design review, neighbor notification process) can be used. Suggests pre-reviewing plans to maximize chances of over-the-counter approval on permit submittal day. If plans are good, and we happen to submit to the same people who pre-reviewed, chances are good we can get an over-the-counter building permit.

Apr 28 2008: Architect met with city structural engineer, went through the plans and structural calculations, minor changes for our structural engineer. City engineer says plans are clean and well prepared, sees no trouble getting plans approved for construction. But, must be submitted for a standard review, no over-the-counter permit.

May 9 2008: Submit plans, 3 days early. Comments or permits due Fri May 30. $2508 paid.

May 20 2008: Temporary power pole permit obtained.

May 28 2008: Dave talks to building coordinator -- any news about our plans? Planning and Fire okayed, but Building has redlines which will require a resubmittal. Neither Structural nor Water Pollution have even looked at the plans yet. So, no permits for us on the 30th, just comments.

May 29 2008: Architect talked to building coordinator, who gave a preliminary list of comments from Building only. These include items that could easily have been flagged earlier, such as deck design. Structural, Water Protection, and Public Works haven’t even looked at the plans yet. Previous conversation with engineer at the city not binding; as he was a consultant and not THE city engineer who decides if Structural will sign off. Comments due 5/30, no commitments on time of day besides COB.
May 30 2008: Dave and architect meet at the city at 4:15 to pick up comments, which are ready. Building wants detailed deck design, electrical plan for master bedroom, detailed plans for radiant heat extension, plans for new electrical panel location and installation, details on upstairs forced-air vent relocation.

May 31 2008: Further examination of the Comments from the city reveals a page about Encroachment permits for all offsite improvements. This includes an applicable developmental impact fee (tbd), an encroachment permit fee of $250, and "The new accessory building would add the following fees: $1,157.13 for the SS" but the grayed-out text is crossed out! And we don't have any offsite improvements. You can believe we'll be talking to Public Works next week.

June 4 2008: Architect re-submitted to the city (who tried to send her away when she arrived at 4:30pm). Comments or permits due June 18.

June 12 2008: Dave and I meet with assistant director of Public Works to discuss developmental impact fee. It's a one-time charge for when a house goes from low to standard occupancy (2BR to 3+BR), and is calculated as a delta of sewer connection fees.

June 13 2008:Send email requesting waiver of $1157.13 impact fee, as we're not adding bedrooms or connecting to the sewer. We get a call from the ass't director of P.W.: request granted!

June 19 2008: Permits granted! Paid and picked up, ready to go. Finally!

Pre-Project Lead-up

Many events led up to this massive remodel, including deciding whether or not to do it at all.

Upstairs Remodel

Jan 2006: Move downstairs, start upstairs remodel. Addition to master bedroom, new bathroom, new closets in all rooms, new floor, trim and doors, paint all around.

Feb 2007: Move back upstairs, plus one. Long story.

Remodel or move?

May 2007. Met with Dave Clark, local neighborhood realtor about our house. Open-housed in Sunnyvale and Willow Glen. Same old, same old, for a higher price. It'll cost a fortune to upgrade whether we move or remodel, but we'll get what we want with remodeling. Most houses we'd move to would still need some work, and we've already done so much to our house we like (underfloor hydronic radiant heat, nifty upstairs windows, huge garage).

Remodeling has a much higher hassle factor, but higher satisfaction also. Decided to remodel instead of move.

Finding an architect

June 2007. Follow recommendations, cold-call from phone book. Met at home with various architects. One architect's receptionist's phone skills were so poor I thought I'd called a Chinese restaurant. This architect referred me to a former employee who'd broken out on her own.

July 2007. Meetings set up with three good candidates, but the former employee who was now independent was so many heads above the others that it was only due diligence and courtesy that made me bother keeping the other appointments.

July 31 2007. Signed with architect.

Design process

September 2007. House is measured scrupulously by a crew of 2. Takes two trips, over 10 hours on-site, 4 weeks of entry into CAD system, and over $4000. Whew.

October 2007. Several designs suggested by our creative architect. Loved the proposal to move the lower section of the staircase to solve downstairs flow problems. She sees beyond that, separating public and private spaces of the house.

November 2007. Sign with kitchen designer, recommended by architect, and they've worked together before. Architect present at several pivotal design meetings, this was great to do things like move or align walls as needed for the kitchen.

January 2008. Kitchen layout done, appliances chosen, now time to pick out drawers, doors, pullouts. Not easy to decide where your silverware goes on paper!

February 2008. Structural engineers being slow, but the plans are nearly ready to submit to the city. I make a preliminary windows & doors selection for Title 24 calculations. Architect pre-reviews plans with the city, planner says this should be an over-the-counter permit.

Finding a contractor

March 2008. Start calling and meeting with contractors. Two recommended by architect, one recommended by a friend. None can start serious bidding until plans are in their hands. Starting finish selection (doors, windows, etc).

May 5-8, 2008. Meet with contractors for bids. Like with the architect, we already have a strong favorite but are doing due diligence.

May 9, 2008. Signed with contractor! Targeting to start work first week of June.

Why Remodel

The primary motivator for this remodel is to reconfigure a bizarre layout downstairs, the result of various additions over the years. A small dark kitchen was left in the center of the house, that doubled as a hallway between the stairs and the living room and front entry. There was no easy fix for the fundamental flow problems, and it took the imagination and skill of a talented architect to come up with a very nice solution to a tough problem.

This remodel entails:

* Additions on two sides of the downstairs, about 400 sq.ft. total
* New kitchen in new location
* Moving the lower section of a staircase
* New flooring, windows, doors, trim throughout most of downstairs
* Redone wood fireplace, new gas fireplace
* New guest suite downstairs
* Three completely new bathrooms
* A ton of new closets
* Small addition upstairs

In the end, we'll have a 6BR/4BA 3100 sq.ft. house with a knockout kitchen!

Some Frequently Asked Questions:

How much is this going to cost? A lot. At least $500K; even more when you add in all direct expenses (rental house, moving, and the big one: unexpected problems, and changes along the way) and indirect expenses (take-out food, childcare).

Is it worth it? Probably, since we plan to live here until our kids go to college, and odds are good the house value will pay for the remodel in 15 years. But, I'll like it a lot more, and that makes the project worth it right there.

Why didn't we move instead? We seriously considered it. But, just to get what we already have (2700 sq.ft, 5BR/3BA, large lot), would cost at least $1.6M note: this is pre-recession 2007 reasoning). We can't get nearly as much as that for our house, largely because the kitchen sucks! Also, much of what we've already done here we really like (huge garage, floor heat, my PERFECT bathroom), and every house we saw would need some remodeling or had some major drawbacks anyway.

So financially, it's about a wash to remodel vs. move. Hassle: no question, moving wins. Satisfaction: remodeling wins. Though I still have some regrets about the lack of a walking neighborhood, the house itself will suit us perfectly.

Aren't you being just a little bit spoiled? Yeah..., well, sort of. On paper, this house sounds big enough, but in practice, the funky layout makes it very hard to use that space. It's dark and weird and impossible to improve the awful kitchen. It's intangible but powerful: the strange layout inhibits natural family dynamics, and it's just not enjoyable being here. The whole house will work much, much better after the remodel -- for us, and the future owners.

Old downstairs layout:


New downstairs layout:


The key that unlocked the flow problem was changing the staircase from an upside-down L to an upside-down J, by relocating the lower section of staircase. Now the kitchen didn't have to be Grand Central Station to get to the upstairs. We still have some odd paths in the house, but, after all, this is an odd house.

House History

Parnell House History
Or what we know of it.

Realtor photo to sell the house in November 1999.


Originally, this was a 1400 sq.ft. 2BR-1BA farmhouse built in 1913 by Claris Rich. Mr. Rich was raised in Santa Rosa, by parents who had emigrated to California from Maine. Mr. Rich lived here with his wife, who died sometime in the 1960's, until his death in (about) 1974 -- over 60 years. They raised 3 children here, including a daughter who we were told still lived on Homestead Road nearby.

The original land parcel went all the way to Lawrence Expwy and Stevens Creek Blvd, and the house's original address was almost certainly Homestead Road. Mr. Rich raised apricot and walnut orchards, and Mrs. Rich was known for her beautiful roses.

In the 1950s, Mr. Rich sold off much of his land and annexed it into Sunnyvale, rather than Cupertino. The story is that Sunnyvale had a smaller lot size requirement than Cupertino's 1-acre minimum, and the land was more valuable for development if it was made into smaller lots. The neighborhood was developed into ranch house tract in 1958, with a 27,000 sq.ft. lot reserved for the original farmhouse, in which Mr. Rich and his wife continued to live. Several of our neighbors bought their houses new in the late 50's and early 60s, and so knew and remember Mr. Rich. (These kind neighbors have provided us with most of our historical information on the property.)

810 Parnell Place in 1971. Facing northeast, from across Kinglet Court.

When Mr. Rich died in the 1970s, the property was purchased by Harold "Red" Allen, and his wife Patricia Allen and her four daughters. Red was a contractor, and subdivided the lot into 3 parcels in 1978 (according to a survey and resulting parcel map from the county). He built a modern Mediterranean-style 2-story house on the far lot, then another large 2-story house on the lot immediately adjacent to ours.

The Rich farmhouse remained on a 11,700 sq.ft. lot -- just under the 12,000 sq.ft. minimum needed for another subdivision (for 6000 sq.ft lots now required by Sunnyvale). To the Rich farmhouse, Red added a pool room and second story with four dormers, and upgraded the wiring and plumbing, though never completed the project. Red went bankrupt and sold the house in foreclosure to the Robert Knapp and Sandra Jones, with two small children, in 1983.

The Knapp-Jones had a formidable task: the house had been abandoned for some time, and was filled with junk. During that time, we believe that the original doors and drawers for the dining room built-in hutch were stolen (based on some notes in disclosure paperwork). We realized how much work the Knapp-Jones did in the 16 years they lived here, when two of Red's stepdaughters stopped by one day in Y2000. They explained that what we know as the "family room" was just a pool room tacked onto the house, and was never integrated into the kitchen as it is today. The upstairs originally had four bedrooms (today there are 3, the Knapp-Jones apparently combined two to form a master suite), and the upstairs guest bathroom had never been finished.

The girls also explained that Red was concerned about noise from 4 little girls, and so built in a two-foot air gap between the two floors. The Knapp-Jones also replaced all the windows and doors, replaced the chimney and fireplace, and remodeled the kitchen and all 3 bathrooms, not to mention countless other items.

The Knapp-Jones tried to sell the house for a year before we bought it. Twice, contracts fell through because of all the remaining work that still needed to be done. They spent a year painting, landscaping, repairing and making numerous improvements to sell the house. It was effective -- Dave and I fell in love with it at first glance. In the crazy go-go times of the late 1990s, we closed on our house in November 1999.

Today, the house is hardly an example of Craftsman-era perfection, but it still retains some of that era's qualities, such as the 4-foot pocket door between the living room and dining room Originally, there had been a furnace in the basement that gravity-heated the house through a huge grate in the center of the house. At some point, the basement furnace was removed and replaced with a forced-air furnace upstairs, but ductwork and registers never made it downstairs.

Our next-door neighbor has one of Mr. Rich's old apricot trees in his front yard, and our yard has an old orange tree from the 1920s, a neighbor believes, as well as a highly pruned almond tree, a flowering pomegranate tree, and a mimosa tree. I've just planted some roses beside the driveway to commemorate Mrs. Rich.

Dave and I are now putting our own stamp on this house, as the fourth owners in almost 90 years. When we got the house, the Knapp-Jones had done a lot of work, but it was still a blank slate. It also still needed some basic infrastructure work, such as bolting the house to the foundation, a garage, a new roof, and heat downstairs. We built a garage intended to match the house (completed June 2001), and started numerous infrastructure projects in the house in order to incorporate some of the space upstairs. In 2006, we remodeled the upstairs, not able to wrap our heads around the whole house. In 2009, we completed a massive remodel of the downstairs and much of the upstairs again. In 2010, as of this writing, now we're embarking on a landscaping overhaul, and I hope that will be it for huge projects.

But perhaps the most important thing we'll do here is raise our three children here -- the next generation to someday look back and remember this place fondly.

Oct.2001 -- a mysterious letter arrived addressed to Lola Shearer from Rebecca Lee at the Oak Hill Funeral Home on 300 Curtner Ave 95125. Lola Shearer is Mr. Rich's daughter and hasn't lived here in decades, maybe this funeral home can help us piece more together.

Original Blog

The early-stage writeup of this project is here:

Original "Rich Poor House Blog" on Google Pages

It's really not a blog, and someday I'll convert the entries to a true blog here. As most remodelers know, there are always projects that get left behind, and that's one of them. It's dealing with all the photos that's a real pain. It'll happen someday, somehow.

...wait, it happened! The conversion is done, and many things got added in the conversion: more photos, the link to the slideshow, labels. Forget the original writeup, stay here!