Why, oh why, do you need a permit to shove dirt around?
I'll tell you why. In the case of MY house. I bought it last year. Cheap. Now I know why. 15 years ago the original builder carved out half of my lot, and in front of the other half he built a retainer wall(if you could call that piece of shit a retainer wall). Everything he carved out of the mountain side, INCLUDING organic material, he simply bulldozed into the other half, leveled it and proceeded to build an addition to the house with NO FUCKING PERMITS. But the real killer is my property is on a septic, which after he 1/2 filled the area behind the retainer, he poured 4" of gravel for a LEACHFIELD!!!! Not only that, he ran a 2" greywater line under all that crap, that emptys DIRECTLY into an adjacent creek,which flows down to a bog 1/2 mile down the road. Idiot. My house is at the end of a road, totally hidden by giant Oregon forest so no one saw him doing this shit. I wish I could kick this @%$@^*#$% in the ass, but he died. Within one year, that portion of the house sunk about 1 1/2". Not only that, he must have added a second floor, AFTER the first floor had already sunk about 2" in 20', because when I moved in, the first floor was slanted, but the second floor was level. Not anymore. AGAIN, no permits. FUCKING MORON.
I just had the ground bored and analyzed by a landscape contractor. Cost $1300. They told me it is riddled with decayed organic material and there is NOTHING I can do about the ground undernieth the house except tear the addition down, dig it out and rebuild.
THATS FUCKING WHY!!!!
Another thing, just because your contractor laughed and told you to go ahead and bulldoze it, IF you got caught, you could receive a stop work order, maybe be forced to dig it OUT, AND both of you COULD be charged with a misdemeaner. At least in my area. I don't know if your building on this area, and even if you aren't, if they require a permit, there is a REASON which probably is to make sure you don't do EXACTLY what the builder did on my property.
Let me tell you another one. My ex boss bought an old fixer upper house, and wanted to remodel it. As I am a draftsman, he had me start drawing up the remodel plans. He took the exterior "as is" dimensions, and I did the interior. When I laid out the existing plan, something was wrong with the dimensions. There was not enough room for FRAMING of the exterior walls.
I went back to double check. Ha! I peeled off some interior wallpaper. Low and behold
......there was NO FRAMING!! Simply 1x12's nailed to a plate on the bottom, and a 2x4 on edge at the top. AND this had a second story to boot!! Then they nailed asbestos shingles on the outside, and wallpapered the inside. Holy SHit. It's a wonder no one got killed. But thats not the half of it. He decided to tear it down and build new. Brought in a big dumpster, and hired a carpenter, who told my boss he was going to have to get a demo permit. He laughed and told him to demo it without a permit. He proceeded to tear off less than 8 linear ft of siding when a inspector showed up. The inspector asked to see the demo permit AND the asbestos ABATEMENT documents. Ha! When told they didn't have one, the inspector looked in the dumpster and saw the asbestos siding in there. BIG MISTAKE!! He called the DEP(Dept of Environmental Protection.)Cost my boss $2k in fines, PLUS the abatement fees to haul and environmentally dispose of the asbestos at a special plant 150 miles away. Cost.....$4200. Would have cost him a disposal fee of $150 at a local dump(special site), and the price of a permit. He argued with the DEP so they made him do the most expensive way of disposing it. What a moron. Permits are cheap. No permits can be a nightmare.
fitZ
