So on my previous post I lamented large and loud and long about that dang City of Los Angeles Department of Building & Safety requiring the back half of the house to be reinforced to a ridiulously heavy-duty level if we were to dare to consider widening the dormer and adding a bathtub to the second floor.
Turns out I was wrong.
We haven’t even gotten to what the city has to say yet.
What happened was the structural engineer — who must be from the firm of CYA&H (Cover Your Ass & How) — is the one that ordered up those 17 (maybe 18) 4″ x 4″ structural support posts and the double-sandwiching of the existing floor joists. Then instead of the architect giving us a call to say “Hey, you might wanna look at this just in case you doubling your budget is something you DON’T want to do,” he just rolled them plans over to the city and submitted them.
Without showing them to us first.
Is it me, or did the architect skip delivery on what I would call a Crucial Bit of Information? I won’t jump to conclusions just yet, because after all I’m just a layman who kneejerked his blame at the wrong entity, but it seems to me that if I hypothetically I was an architect and the hypothetical engineering plans for a hypothetical home renovation plan I was hypothetically involved in just unexpectedly doubled in hypothetical scope and cost and time, I just MIGHT hypothetically wanna clue the homeowners in on it.
Because you know, hypothetically the homeowners might be all OMGWTF!?, and to me it’s better to OMGWTF!? before — I say: BEFORE — a civic authority knows about something, rather than after.
Follow