*sigh*

[izhilzha]

City building codes are utter crap. No one in the country can build their own stuff any more--you have to be rich enough to pay contractors or live in squalor.

Absolutely idiotic.

(Especially when you're a tenant in a big old house and suddenly everything is presumed to be a safety hazard. *spits on official "laws"*

Comments

[mosinging1986]

Completely unrelated, but that's the icon I mentioned in one of my posts!

[persephone_kore]

Huh. I know some people who built their own house and said one of the advantages was they got to make stuff better than code, because to code was really kind of minimal and unpleasant. Haven't looked into it myself though. Though they were talking about stuff like how sturdy the structures were, how thick a beam was for instance, rather than the presence of features that people got fussier about over time....

[izhilzha]

Yeah, if you have loads of money and are building your own house, that might be true. When you're poor? You can't afford that OR the contractors.

(What kicked this off: my landlady got slammed by the city for having non-regulation plumbing. The house is like 80 years old at least, by the way, and in great shape. We were trying to figure out some way we could still have the plumbing for the laundry out back, but apparently there's no way to build a structure to house the washing machine and dryer without getting contractors to do it, and it costs thousands of dollars. You can't even buy one of those prefab sheds and make it into a house extension--there are so many damn unnecessary rules, which serve no purpose that I can see except to put fees in the city's pocket.)

[ladybrick]

I totally survived being in that house yesterday!

Maybe the stairs are a safety hazard...