Although it can be very frustrating working with local municipalities the one thing you have to keep in mind is that getting mad and yelling at a building official will only make things worse!

You must deal with the city in a diplomatic and cautious way… Case in point, the remodel that we have been struggling to get through Salt Lake County has made us jump through a number of hoops that seem to be rather atypical, but in order to get the permit we complied. After doing all that was asked (and spanning about two weeks to do it in) the city has told us today that we didn’t need to do about half of what we did.

Resisting the urge to lash out at the official one must smile and walk away!!!!

We have been working with a client who is doing some remodel work. They are converting their garage into living space, so there are no structural changes. The plans are going through Salt Lake County, and we found out (the hard way) Salt Lake County has changed their requirements on both setbacks and height restrictions.

Even if you aren’t adding on to an existing home you now have to meet the new requirements for any permit. This will make things more challenging for some of our clients who want to remodel!

As the New Year progresses and we see January quickly coming to a close, I am happy to say that we are already seeing new clients come through the door. We are finishing up a nice little remodel, and have another one starting today. We also have a new client meeting this afternoon.

Still working on the systems upgrade….keep your fingers crossed!!

We will be performing a systems update here at Salt City….A much needed upgrade to our computers. Please be patient with us as things may slow down a little for the next few days.

We are excited about the upgrades and hope they go better than the phone system upgrade (what a disaster that was).

Getting your building permit can be a tricky thing! Different cities can have very different sets of requirements. For example getting a plan through Salt Lake County can take two to three weeks while getting a permit for Tooele County can take a month. This is one advantage you have by using a contractor who knows what he/she is doing. A good contractor will know how to work with the city (or) county and insure that your plan will go through as quickly as possible.

Plan rejections are a VERY common thing. We do our best to tell our clients that getting a plan rejection is not the end of the world. A plan rejection only means that the city wants addition information. It does not mean that your plans were drawn or engineered incorrectly. We had a client last year who built in Cottonwood Heights…. The city rejected the plans for further clarification. We took the plans and made the corrections in about two days. The plans were re-submitted and the client had their permit by the end of the week. They were a little panic struck at first, but after we appeased the city and were able to keep the ball rolling the client was happy once again.

From Woods Cross, to Toole, and from Pocatello to Las Vegas, we have helped clients get their building permits in a timely and professional fashion.

Happy new year everyone! As we say goodbye to 2009 I just want to reflect for a moment on what an amazing rollercoaster of a year it has been. We doubled our workload from 2008 (and this is very exciting)….And we had the opportunity to work with a number of new clients and contractors. I just want to say thank you to all the families we were able to work with and create exciting new plans for.

We upgraded our phones (what a disaster that has been)….We are working on a major overhaul with the website (thanks to our wonderful webmaster)…and we are about to upgrade our computer systems (keep your fingers crossed). All in all and despite the negative press, we have been blessed this year and hope to make 2010 even better.