About A House - Design Variance Application

Boy! It's been a couple of really busy weeks for us! The reason why you haven't seen any update isn't because of lack of progress or topics. We were informed by the owner of our ex-house (we're renting back) that they're planning to list the house on the market. Since the new house is far from ready, we're probably better off finding another place to live for the next few months. That's what we've been running around organizing...

Remember the Ceraclad rejection for our permit? We worked on the variance application after the new year and got our variance approved on Feb 15. Before giving the details of what all that entailed... here's a quick overview and some pretty interesting residential applications of this material around the NorthWest.

Seattle Single Family Residential
A house posted by EcoMajority
Renovated house in Napa - the pictures didn't load in my browser so here's the designer ... this project is Napa Residence 3. Check out the WOW project, Ross Residence while you're at it!

Okay, enough eye candy! Back to the variance application. The process was actually not all that painful for us as Wilma, our designer did all the leg work for the application.  We were aiming for the Feb 15 meeting with deadline of all submission by Jan 23.

The list of submission material included writeup of the justification for the variance, sample Ceraclad material with example of mountings, structural engineering endorsements, canvassed neighbours' signature of endorsement.

Among other considerations, the Board of Variance must be satisfied that:

• The strict application of the by-law would impose an unreasonable restraints or unnecessary hardship on the use or development of the property;
• The special circumstances giving rise to hardship upon which an appeal is used are unique to the property in questions.

What's our angle then? It's to focus on the low maintenance and durability aspects of the material as we would like to limit the amount of effort required to continually paint, upkeep and preserve the exterior cladding.

There were letters sent from the city to all the neighbours regarding our applications and a site visit by the board prior to the decision meeting.

So what did we had to do exactly? We carried the sample material around and canvassed for signatures over the course of a couple of weekends and managed to meet some really terrific neighbours! We got 9 signatures in total; almost everyone on our side of the street. Across the way turned out to be mostly rentals.

Cost of variance application: $1000 to city of Vancouver and a few hundreds for the all the supporting materials.