The concrete subcontractor let Katie "help" with the pour.
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Katie here. Finally getting a City permit is worthy of a post from each of us. This has been such a long time coming. And this process has further cemented my run for city council.
Minneapolis has a number of challenges - two major ones being housing and climate change. We cannot meet either if every innovative sustainable development takes 18 months from permit application to approval. Just two examples of barriers we encountered, but should be easy to overcome:
Our experience is what is it is. But it doesn't have to be this way. In fact, the City claims to want better. A goal in the 2040 Plan aims to: "k. Help secure and fund demonstration projects of emerging or underutilized technologies, concepts, designs and methods." This means that at a high level innovation is welcome and encouraged. However, that spirit has not reached all levels of the City enterprise. My goal is to make sure that it does. Our project demonstrates that breaking through red tape is painful, yet possible. It just shouldn't be this hard. Our City processes can and must evolve if we're to meet our goals. We now have our permit. It's time to figure out the rest of the timeline to get this thing up before the snow flies! Just a quick post to say: WE FINALLY HAVE OUR FINAL BUILDING PERMIT!!!
This has been a slog and I am so thankful to the awesome, badass, persistent women at Precipitate for all of their work on this. We first started the design and application process some 18-24 months ago. After getting through zoning/use permitting and variances with small but workable hiccups, we were bogged down by a much less efficient or user-friendly process to get our building permit. It ended up taking more than a year to go from zoning approval to building permit, with the pandemic certainly not helping matters at all. I can only hope that the process gets smoother and faster for future applicants. Moral of the story: make sure you have a great team going into any project, but especially so if your project will be unusual or new in any way. Thanks Precipitate! Onward! Dear Readers, I'm terribly sorry that this update comes more than a month after the last update. I was making interim updates to my IG, but was neglecting my duties to the website. For this, you have my sincerest apologies. Also, this has been the sadder part of the build to watch, but we'll get to that in a second. Anyway, updates below! Peter Since our last episode, the slab area of our foundation has been further excavated, insulation has been added everywhere, plumbing has been placed, internal drain tile installed, and a radon wrap is over the top ahead of the final concrete slab pour, which will happen sometime this week when it stops raining (but also, yay rain! Minneapolis is in a pretty bad drought this summer). That probably sounded like a lot, but really what it means is: we have had the lion's share of our fossil based products installed and it has been PAINFUL to watch. We have added more foam insulation that was cut extensively with chainsaws and there is honestly a lot of extra material leftover that will be heading to a landfill, as well. The worst is the pool of foam pellets forming in the rain out my window as we speak, which we will have to clean up and remediate as we clean up the site before we eventually add vegetation in the future. Glass half full side of things, even if it is foam based, it has been great to see the care taken to make sure everything fits and is tight. The three guys that have been working on this extensively over the last few weeks have done a great job and our architects and builder have done a good job checking quality control and making repairs if something isn't quite right. Our house will be very well insulated, which is much easier to do from the onset than as a retrofit. Also, though Katie has built houses before both with Habitat For Humanity as an AmeriCorps vista and with her dad in Indiana, I have no residential building experience of note. So for me, it has been interesting to learn, for example, that most homes don't have insulation in their foundations at all! Or similarly, I develop large solar facilities for a living and have worked with agricultural drain tile before, but I have never seen the garbage can-and-hose style drain tile that was installed here. Always learning! I will work to post my next update sooner. As mentioned above, this should end the foam part of our project as the foundation slab gets poured as soon as the rain stops. That should also make our site start to look a lot cleaner and more interesting. Final piece we are waiting on is our final final *final* building permit, which we should have today or tomorrow if the City hits its timelines. More to come! |
AuthorKatie Jones and Peter Schmitt chronicle their building adventure. Archives
January 2024
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