All the houses have stories, or, I should not write livejournal entries to A Prairie Home Companion
So I was out trying to find the bird feeder cage that went missing while we were gone - I suspect raccoons - and while I was out walking around the perimetre and trying to poke my way through the blackberry infestation which the previous owners had let take over half the property, I finally met our northern neighbour, whose name is Ron. We ended up talking for quite a while. He's been here a decently long time and had seen the house built by the previous owners.
It was, to put it gently, a fiasco. He told me all about it.
Back in 1999 - do not cue the Prince song or I will slaughter your children - the newly-formed City of Kenmore had not yet taken over all civic responsibilities from King County. Despite being founded circa 1901, it had never formally incorporated until almost 100 years later, and getting the city act together took a few years. King County was, in particular, still doing permitting and zoning.
King County was, and still is, a tad on the side of clueless. So if you went in with, say, a building plan and map that showed a flat lot where, in reality, a 40 degree slope was, they wouldn't know any better, nor would they likely particularly care to ask. So they might approve your building permits without even sending someone out to take a glance at the lot. And if you want to start building in October - which is to say, late in the start of the rainy season - that's your own lookout; it's flat, right?
Not so much.
So the owners and contractors rush in with cranes and back-hoes and shovels and bobcats and dig right into this giant sloping hill, and make this giant vertical cliff, eating out literally half the lot, and rush into construction in heavy, heavy rains, and don't bother with silt barriers or extra draining or even so much as a temporary retaining wall; they just want, our neighbour is convinced, to do as much damage as they can before the fine City of Kenmore and County of King get a telephone call telling them that something's not right up in Uplake and if they don't get up there and do something about it soon, the whole side of the hill is going to slide all the way down to Route 522, and might even go so far as to hit City Hall.
Now, it doesn't take more than one mudslide and a small assortment of rocks and boulders bouncing down the street into the next street and into the driveway of the house down at the end of that next street before someone's going to make that call. And they do. And the next day there's about three people from King County and four people from the City of Kenmore and two contractors and two owners and one architect all standing out beside the cliff in the mud in the rain, and all but about three of them are mighty displeased, the three who are not being the ones who planned out the whole thing to start with. They put in a call, and pretty soon an even bigger crane comes in, and builds a temporary retaining wall out of those giant highway Legoes you see whenever they need to keep a hill out of the way when they're building a new bridge.
Then, they get to negotiating.
And negotiating.
And negotiating.
And each time they get done with negotiating for a while, they call in that giant crane, the kind you need to lift giant freeway logos over a partially-completed house, and take down that retaining wall, pretty sure that this time they can just get started again whether they have a signed deal or not, and each time but the last, of course, they're wrong, but that doesn't stop 'em from doing it, just showing how much more money than sense was involved, because the rental on those cranes is expensive.
And that's when things start to go a tad wrong.
The first thing they figure out after they've got the giant temporary highway Lego retaining wall put up is that the architect drew out the plans on the wrong scale, and the whole thing is going to have to get redone. But they fight about that for a while and that doesn't happen until at least two rounds of negotiations, because suddenly that's looking like a whole lot of money even to people who have more money then sense, and besides, they like the way the driveway sits now and they don't really want to move it.
The second thing they figure out is that the City of Kenmore wasn't about to let a bunch of fools and morons build into that hill if they can stop it, except that, well, they've already done most of the damage, so if they're going to have to put up with it whether they want to or not (and they are), they are by god going to make damn well sure that that house isn't going to come sliding down the street one day after a few heavy rains, sending a bunch of mud and rocks down to the street at the end of the street and into the driveway of the house at the end of that street and maybe all the way down to Route 522 and possibly all the way down even to City Hall.
So they tear the whole house down that they've built so far, and tear up the whole plans they had before, and draw the blueprints again to the right scale, and get back in the back-hoes and shovels and bobcats (and they've already got the crane) to dig back out the hill, and set up a whole new retaining wall and foundation and design and driveway slope (which they don't like as much because it's steeper but what can you do given how far into this thing you are already and you don't even have a foundation built yet), and pretty soon you're talking 80 cubic yards of concrete and god only knows how much steel just for the footer.
For those of you who know the stories of Fort Joby, all the concrete that went into the walls of Fort Joby made up right around 44 cubic yards of concrete. For those who don't know, that was for a long driveway, a sidewalk, and a couple of layers and a couple of hundred feet of ordinary, sane retaining wall in the City of Seattle, and that did include all the footers, which his concrete-engineer father-and-law kind of thought were entirely too large for the job and a waste of time, but everybody knows you can't talk Joby out of over-engineering something once he's got an idea in his head.
And by the time they've finally got a foundation and a retaining wall and an 80-cubic-yards-of-concrete footer holding the whole thing together - and it is one whole big mess, continuous, from the street all the way up to the top of the tallest retaining wall in the back, which for the record is about two stories tall where you can see it, and a lot more underground - they've got a foundation that Contractor Number Two told my neighbour Ron was more per square foot of construction site than they'd put in for a skyscraper office building in the downtown of Seattle, and they know, 'cause they've done that kind of work before, and this here is just plain crazy.
After all that, building a house on top of it - well, that's no problem at all. Hell, they could've put two houses on it, and an office building, if the zoning would have let 'em, and by the time they got done they probably wish they'd just gone and built an office building, because they were never getting their money back, and in fact they didn't.
I'd always kind of figured - given that the house had been on the market on and off for a couple of years for a lot more than we ended up paying for it - that they'd finally given up and were just trying to get their construction money back.
Nope. That's what the higher prices had been. By the time we got here, they were just plain desperate, and, well, they kind of lost their shirts. Which would normally be sad, since I'm not one to spend a lot of time wishing ill-will upon people who haven't done any harm to me, but in this case, I think they went in asking for it.
So the moral of the story, if there is one, is: don't be a jerk. Don't go lying to the zoning board and building commission and County of King and City of Kenmore and thinking you can get away with building something on the cheap (where you might not want to be building something at all) because you think if you can just do enough damage with your cranes and your back-hoes and your shovels and your bobcats that you can get away with doing whatever you want. Because the odds aren't too bad that it'll come back and bite you right in your shiny metal ass.
And that's about all there is to say about that, except that I never did find that missing bird feeder.
Stupid raccoons.
I may want later to take this down; I've written a short article about this event for print publication, submitting it under my real name on May 30, 2008. But we'll see whether they accept the short version before I even have to think about it. ^_^
And now, your moment of quiz:
In the year 2005 I resolve to:
Getting knocked up...twice.
Get your resolution here
It was, to put it gently, a fiasco. He told me all about it.
Back in 1999 - do not cue the Prince song or I will slaughter your children - the newly-formed City of Kenmore had not yet taken over all civic responsibilities from King County. Despite being founded circa 1901, it had never formally incorporated until almost 100 years later, and getting the city act together took a few years. King County was, in particular, still doing permitting and zoning.
King County was, and still is, a tad on the side of clueless. So if you went in with, say, a building plan and map that showed a flat lot where, in reality, a 40 degree slope was, they wouldn't know any better, nor would they likely particularly care to ask. So they might approve your building permits without even sending someone out to take a glance at the lot. And if you want to start building in October - which is to say, late in the start of the rainy season - that's your own lookout; it's flat, right?
Not so much.
So the owners and contractors rush in with cranes and back-hoes and shovels and bobcats and dig right into this giant sloping hill, and make this giant vertical cliff, eating out literally half the lot, and rush into construction in heavy, heavy rains, and don't bother with silt barriers or extra draining or even so much as a temporary retaining wall; they just want, our neighbour is convinced, to do as much damage as they can before the fine City of Kenmore and County of King get a telephone call telling them that something's not right up in Uplake and if they don't get up there and do something about it soon, the whole side of the hill is going to slide all the way down to Route 522, and might even go so far as to hit City Hall.
Now, it doesn't take more than one mudslide and a small assortment of rocks and boulders bouncing down the street into the next street and into the driveway of the house down at the end of that next street before someone's going to make that call. And they do. And the next day there's about three people from King County and four people from the City of Kenmore and two contractors and two owners and one architect all standing out beside the cliff in the mud in the rain, and all but about three of them are mighty displeased, the three who are not being the ones who planned out the whole thing to start with. They put in a call, and pretty soon an even bigger crane comes in, and builds a temporary retaining wall out of those giant highway Legoes you see whenever they need to keep a hill out of the way when they're building a new bridge.
Then, they get to negotiating.
And negotiating.
And negotiating.
And each time they get done with negotiating for a while, they call in that giant crane, the kind you need to lift giant freeway logos over a partially-completed house, and take down that retaining wall, pretty sure that this time they can just get started again whether they have a signed deal or not, and each time but the last, of course, they're wrong, but that doesn't stop 'em from doing it, just showing how much more money than sense was involved, because the rental on those cranes is expensive.
And that's when things start to go a tad wrong.
The first thing they figure out after they've got the giant temporary highway Lego retaining wall put up is that the architect drew out the plans on the wrong scale, and the whole thing is going to have to get redone. But they fight about that for a while and that doesn't happen until at least two rounds of negotiations, because suddenly that's looking like a whole lot of money even to people who have more money then sense, and besides, they like the way the driveway sits now and they don't really want to move it.
The second thing they figure out is that the City of Kenmore wasn't about to let a bunch of fools and morons build into that hill if they can stop it, except that, well, they've already done most of the damage, so if they're going to have to put up with it whether they want to or not (and they are), they are by god going to make damn well sure that that house isn't going to come sliding down the street one day after a few heavy rains, sending a bunch of mud and rocks down to the street at the end of the street and into the driveway of the house at the end of that street and maybe all the way down to Route 522 and possibly all the way down even to City Hall.
So they tear the whole house down that they've built so far, and tear up the whole plans they had before, and draw the blueprints again to the right scale, and get back in the back-hoes and shovels and bobcats (and they've already got the crane) to dig back out the hill, and set up a whole new retaining wall and foundation and design and driveway slope (which they don't like as much because it's steeper but what can you do given how far into this thing you are already and you don't even have a foundation built yet), and pretty soon you're talking 80 cubic yards of concrete and god only knows how much steel just for the footer.
For those of you who know the stories of Fort Joby, all the concrete that went into the walls of Fort Joby made up right around 44 cubic yards of concrete. For those who don't know, that was for a long driveway, a sidewalk, and a couple of layers and a couple of hundred feet of ordinary, sane retaining wall in the City of Seattle, and that did include all the footers, which his concrete-engineer father-and-law kind of thought were entirely too large for the job and a waste of time, but everybody knows you can't talk Joby out of over-engineering something once he's got an idea in his head.
And by the time they've finally got a foundation and a retaining wall and an 80-cubic-yards-of-concrete footer holding the whole thing together - and it is one whole big mess, continuous, from the street all the way up to the top of the tallest retaining wall in the back, which for the record is about two stories tall where you can see it, and a lot more underground - they've got a foundation that Contractor Number Two told my neighbour Ron was more per square foot of construction site than they'd put in for a skyscraper office building in the downtown of Seattle, and they know, 'cause they've done that kind of work before, and this here is just plain crazy.
After all that, building a house on top of it - well, that's no problem at all. Hell, they could've put two houses on it, and an office building, if the zoning would have let 'em, and by the time they got done they probably wish they'd just gone and built an office building, because they were never getting their money back, and in fact they didn't.
I'd always kind of figured - given that the house had been on the market on and off for a couple of years for a lot more than we ended up paying for it - that they'd finally given up and were just trying to get their construction money back.
Nope. That's what the higher prices had been. By the time we got here, they were just plain desperate, and, well, they kind of lost their shirts. Which would normally be sad, since I'm not one to spend a lot of time wishing ill-will upon people who haven't done any harm to me, but in this case, I think they went in asking for it.
So the moral of the story, if there is one, is: don't be a jerk. Don't go lying to the zoning board and building commission and County of King and City of Kenmore and thinking you can get away with building something on the cheap (where you might not want to be building something at all) because you think if you can just do enough damage with your cranes and your back-hoes and your shovels and your bobcats that you can get away with doing whatever you want. Because the odds aren't too bad that it'll come back and bite you right in your shiny metal ass.
And that's about all there is to say about that, except that I never did find that missing bird feeder.
Stupid raccoons.
I may want later to take this down; I've written a short article about this event for print publication, submitting it under my real name on May 30, 2008. But we'll see whether they accept the short version before I even have to think about it. ^_^
And now, your moment of quiz:
In the year 2005 I resolve to:
Getting knocked up...twice.
Get your resolution here