Moving Forward at a Snails Pace

A few things have happened since my last post. I haven't had a chance to update in a while because my new job is keeping me busy. Anyway, here are updates and next steps.

On the city process front:

1. We talked to our attorney and he did some additional research on the city code regarding the signing of the plat drawing. He concluded that he could certify without our neighbor's signatures. Yea! But why didn't he do that to begin with? (The easiest thing, and cheapest, was to get our neighbors to sign since they all indicated last year that they would support this project.)
2. We validated a few things with the city and scheduled our public hearing. The public hearing took place on July 30, 2008.
3. The neighbor who refused to sign the plat drawing sent a detailed letter to the city protesting our project. They cited that we were in direct violation of existing Deed Restrictions and Covenants applying to the property. He also said that he would take whatever action is appropriate to make all parties involved in this unlawful breach to fully comply with the restrictions. OK, I could completely go off on this, but I think it would take up way too much time and energy. Suffice it to say that we have fully complied with the city and county requirements and went through the proper legal process to remove the restriction on our lot. The city said he could still sue us in civil court, but unless we've missed something (I doubt it), then I can't imagine what grounds he could do this.
4. During the city meeting, the City Planning Director brought the letter up to our attention and was very glad to see that we had the legal document from the county removing the restriction from our property.
5. The city gave us an unconditional approval to move forward with the sub-division of the lot.
6. Next steps with the city are the final staff review (scheduled September 10) and the development agreement.

On the house front:

1. In March this year we had a soils engineer come out and give us a soils report regarding the soils on the site where we plan to build the house. They found ground water at approximately 8 feet and found that we had low perk rate soils. This meant that we would have to have an 'engineered' septic system to accommodate for our clay soils.
2. When they did their soil sample, they also put a pvc pipe with holes in it so that we could see what the groundwater did while we irrigated in the spring.
3. Irrigation started in May and less than a week into it, we had water in our pipe up to one foot. We had many engineers tell us that it just wasn't possible to put a basement into ground with water at 1 foot.
4. We talked to many people about houses in Michigan and the East Coast where groundwater is high, but they still have basements. They put in pumps and treat the foundation so that water is mitigated.
5. We also observed that the water went back down to 8 feet less than a week after the irrigation stopped.
6. Miles finally found an engineer that was smart enough to point out that there is no way, if groundwater was at 8 feet, with low perk rate soil, that the groundwater level could rise and then fall that quickly. He suggested we dig a trench and take samples down to 8 feet to see if we could tell what was happening. His guess was that water was coming in over the top of the pipe and filling our hole.
7. Last week, Friday, August 22, we had our soils engineer come out with a back hoe and test the soils. He confirmed what the other engineer guessed and our groundwater situation is at 8 feet, not 1 foot. This is huge. Now we can build our basement down 5 feet (you need 3 feet before you get to groundwater), we can install sump pumps and a french drain and have our basement. This also means that our septic, instead of $30k will likely cost more like $7-10k.
8. So now we have our house designer completing the basement plans and getting the drawings ready for our structural engineer. We will also need to get a drainage plan together as well. We're hoping in the next few weeks we'll be able to submit our plans to the city to start the building permit process. I've heard people say that could take 3 weeks and some people say 3 months. But, at least we're moving on a few things.

Hopefully I'll be able to update with a little more frequency now. I've also started our picture chronology that will capture the building of the house from grass pasture to finished and landscaped house. Fun.