Garage detachment, Part 1

In an earlier post I mentioned that the previous owners had drafted a plan for a master bedroom/laundry room addition but had decided instead to move. Their plan consisted of adding onto the front of the garage, creating a new attached garage in that space (so that cars would enter and leave from the front of the property rather than driving around to the back, the way it currently is), and extending the current garage in the back and converting that area to the bedroom space. And this was the rough plan we first handed to our contractor, John Wagner.

When he saw the plan, he had a few concerns, the first being that the proposed addition would jut into the front yard quite a bit. Apparently there are zoning restrictions that govern where the front line of a house can extend on a piece of property. "No problem!" I replied, as I had a distinct memory of the previous owner explaining something to that effect and assuring us that they had in fact already obtained a zoning variance for their plan.

So Wagner went to work adapting and polishing up the rough sketch. He needed a copy of the platte for the house, so I went downtown to obtain it from City Hall. While there, I decided to pop into the building inspection office and see if I could verify that a variance had indeed been granted and was still valid. The clerk searched the computer archives, and then she searched the hard copy files, but they could find absolutely nothing on our property. Not only had a variance never been granted, one apparently had never even been applied for.

This confused me, because my memory was very clear that the previous owner explicitly stated the variance existed. But if there was no variance on record, there was no variance, so I soldiered on. Plopping the rough plan down in front of the clerk, I asked if a variance was required and whether it would be likely to be granted. The answer to the first question was a quick and definite "yes." The answer to the second question was not so definite. The clerk then pointed out a second problem with the proposed plan, which is that it involved creating a long wall on the left-hand side of the house (where the new garage and bedroom would extend). Apparently there is a limit as to how long of a stretch of wall you can have on a home, and the proposed plan exceeded that by quite a ways. If we wanted to go with this idea, we'd have to submit a formal application for a variance, letters would be sent to all our neighbors describing the proposal, and it could get hairy if there were any objections to the plan. At the very least it would take a fair amount of time and hassle.