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the building inspection hell of others
Friday, September 16 2005
After a computer-related visit to a Bearsville business, I did some diving at the dumpster of the fancy restaurant known as the Bear. They must be doing a serious kitchen renovation; for months their dumpster has been accumulating all sorts of great industrial kitchen equipment. At the beginning of August I brought home an aluminum tray rack. Today I grabbed a beautiful set of aluminum shelves and the wooden base for a stool. I would have taken a small antique chest, but it wouldn't fit in the car.
This evening we visited our friend Julia "for a glass of wine." (Julia lives in nearby West Hurley and Gretchen met her well over a year ago while walking the dogs in West Hurley park; Julia's dog is the unprepossessing Carlos, whom we occasionally housesit.) Julia's son and his wife were in town from Los Angeles, and there was also another couple there. Don, the male half of the other couple, was allergic to dogs, something we hadn't known when we'd set out, so of course now our dogs were running around with abandon. Generally speaking, though, when people claim to be allergic to _____, they're overgeneralizing. Our dogs have such short hair and clean coats that it's doubtful they produce much to which an allergic person might react. The fact that nobody broke out in hives or needed to be rushed to the hospital confirms this thinking.
Julia's daughter-in-law is a spunky actress from London. Initially Gretchen and I were sitting near her and she was the one with whom we did the most talking. Not long into our conversation the topic of building inspection horror stories came up, and Julia's daughter-in-law had a doozy of a story. Soon after she and her husband moved into their house in Silverlake (Los Angeles), they started making serious alterations. They tore down the wall between the house and garage to expand the bathroom, something absolutely forbidden under California building codes. They might have gotten away with all of this had it not been for the fact that the building inspector was in the neighborhood and could hear the ruckus of their construction. He showed up and demanded to know what was going on. Oh, the lies that were told! Since by now there was no evidence of where the old garage wall had been they were in the clear on that violation. And because of some incomplete paperwork filed by the former owner on the other bathroom, it was possible for this new bathroom to have an aura of legitimacy. Still, there not every i had been dotted and there were a number of uncrossed t's. To these, Julia responded with the two weapons a British woman has at ready disposal. She said that there are no building permits back in her homeland, and besides, because she'd become pregnant, medical necessity dictated a series of bathroom alterations. The building inspector was sympathetic, to a point. But he still made them jackhammer the concrete floor so he could see that the pipes had been laid correctly. Some days later, when the inspector returned for another round of inspection and t crossing, he caught Julia's daughter-in-law smoking a cigarette. She thought quickly and confided that, well, she'd lost the baby, the one that had never existed to begin with. This revelation immediately filled the air with tension. If this woman had lost her baby, the inspector must have been thinking, perhaps the stress of dealing with all the stupid paperwork had played a role. He had her sign something and then declared everything to be fine, leaving as quickly as he could. "I'm going to Hell," Julia's daughter-in-law declared.
Julia herself had had a run-in with the same building inspector whose attention recently came to focus like a laser beam on my laboratory deck. She'd gone out and done the right thing, getting a building permit for her proposed screened-in porch, but the inspector had an oddly familiar concern: the weight of the snow. Given the loads he wants rooves to be able to handle, you'd think we're entering an ice age or being flung from our orbit around the sun. Anyway, the inspector made Julia get a structural engineer who turned out to be an architect we know. She's still infuriated about the unworkable recommendations that $500 bought her.
Later a couple drops of rain sent us fleeing from the open-air back deck to that hard-won screened-in porch in the front. Gretchen thought she recognized Don, the male half of that other couple, but she couldn't place quite where. He'd been talking about music stuff and movie soundtracks with Julia's son, who is some sort of filmmaker. But then it dawned on her. This guy Don was actually Don Byr0n, a musician's musician of considerable acclaim. His band had performed back in January with the Sugarhill Gang at Lincoln Center in Manhattan at a show Gretchen, Katie, and Mary Purdy had attended. It had been such an awesome performance that Gretchen and friends started dancing in the aisles and then led a procession up to the stage, such unusual audience involvement (particularly given the venue) that it had been mentioned in the Village Voice.
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