December 20, 2017

Yesteryear
One year ago today: December 20, 2016, first Rebel road trip.
Five years ago today: December 20, 2012, the invisible couple.
Nine years ago today: December 20, 2008, listen to your mother.
Random years ago today: December 20, 2015, a message from Shkreli.

           My first brush with City Hall. I didn’t recognize the code inspector. Mistaking him for an aluminum siding salesman, I kicked him off my property. When things calmed down, it turns out he’s the new guy out to make a reputation for himself. I wondered what he was doing driving down the shortest, most difficult street to find in this city. Here’s the score. My permit allows only what the porch structure consists of, and that is a lean-to on the side of my building. Turns out it is four square feet too large for a lean-to, so it needs a covered deck permit. Which means an expensive engineering set of plans rubber stamped for effect. We are talking $$$.

           I tried everything. I showed them the official printout exempting homeowners who do their own work. Nope, they say I 'intepreted it wrong'. Really? No, I can’t just shorten the width, as that runs afoul of code. Less than 8 feet turns it into a balcony or veranda with a ton of railing requirements. Fortunately, I had only dry-fitted the pieces, but the inspector didn’t like that either, so he slapped a stop-work notice. I’m keeping it for a souvenir.
           I quickly looked up the penalty, and dang, it is a Florida law. That means you don’t comply, the police get involved. No more absorbing the citation as just another construction cost. The bottom line is always money. They want me to spend money on an engineered blueprint, but can't bring themselves to say it. That's the definition of 'bureaucrat'.

           It’s like Agt. R says, we’ve become the big little town. These outsiders show up with their high-falootin’ gonna show these locals attitude. I’m not a newcomer, why I’ve been here over a year . . . I tried the angle that the city bylaw only applies to homeowners who do work that is normally required to be licensed and I haven’t done anything that requires a license, so therefore my permit is blanket. Nope they said, it’s the square footage thing. You don’t need a diet in Lakeland. Just walk past City Hall and you’ll feel $400 lighter in no time. And that’s just my guess what it will cost.
           My crowd was quickly informed of these new situation. All of them are homeowners and they were used to the old inspector. They consider this an outrage, meek mild me getting a stop-work order when I haven’t fixed anything in place yet. All of them have done work that puts them in the same situation. I’ve got the money, but most people don’t. Who gets a $400 permit for a $800 job? Oh well, I’ll press ahead with the new drawings and pay for another permit. It’s not me who everybody hates.

Picture of the day.
Sneaky.
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           This means what I want for Xmas is a porch. That’s not going to happen, even with the new permit, and I’ll tell you why. The front of the building has to be reasonably level. That is only done so far up to the last eight feet of the kitchen section. Take one look under there and you’ll see why I stalled. That’s where that kershmozzle of plastic and iron plumbing begins, crisscrossed with cloth and plastic insulated wiring. That will be a such a major job, that I’ve long decided to bypass it all with new work and cut it over later. It follows that I didn’t level that area because it could break pipes or wiring.

           However, I slept on it and came up with a solution. Take a look at the house model as shown here. Notice that the porch can be removed. That got me to thinking. It is will be held onto the building by a series of eighteen special 4-1/2” ledger screws, much stronger than lag screws and custom designed for this type of job. While one would not actually remove the porch, it is a floating structure except for the joists. That is, if I loosened those screws, the porch could be moved out from the house a few inches. Hmmmm, I thought, why loosen them all?

           I know that the front of the porch is level. All the headers and ledgers that extend past that last eight feet are level with the porch, not the house. Why not temporarily screw the level part of the porch against the unleveled part of the building? At most, the leveling will move only a few inches, and that can happen later. Since the porch is strong enough to be free-standing, I would just remove the screws and refasten them. This makes it just possible to have a porch in place without waiting for the rest of the job to catch up. I’ll be looking at that today.
           All this depends, you understand, on whether I have to spend my money on materials or on permits. I can already hear my taxes going up.

ADDENDUM
           You may notice the link to Martin Shkreli’s name above. He was never convicted of anything serious. He got some minor jail time (four months) last August from a jury of bleeding hearts in Brooklyn. Again, his real crime was not cutting in the big insurance companies on his dealings. He didn’t pay off the right people. Twitter cut off his account, another reason you should be boycotting that self-appointed censorship gang. Shkreli said he’d fock Lauren Duca, the anti-Trump libtard reporter who is trying to make her mark by bad-mouthing him under the disguise of free press, so she claimed harassment.
           A lady judge seized his bail bond money, saying he is a threat. To who, she couldn’t say, certainly not Duca. Who is not that bad-looking, in the sense of great corrective surgery, make-up, and hair coloring. Everybody knows what Shkreli meant, but sexual harassment accusations are in style this winter.


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