The Penalty of Procrastination

After we bought the camper it became obvious that it couldn't stay on the driveway. Our street is so busy that you have to wait until the traffic dies down (usually around 9 pm) to back it onto the drive without causing a traffic jam. Plus the drivers around this part of the world are all in a hurry and won't actually wait for you to back up. If you wait for the traffic to die down, it's often dark. A completely new set of problems. The other problem is that Mark isn't yet good enough at backing up that he gets it in the right spot the first time. Not to mention that if anyone parks behind the camper, it blocks the view of people who are stopped at the stop sign. And if Mark and I park behind one another, we often have to play musical cars - a game I dislike, especially when he needs to leave the house before I do.

But we have a solution. We live on a corner. While the street that runs in front of us is extremely busy, the side street that runs beside the house is not. And behind our back fence is about 25 to 30 more feet of property that runs the width of our lot. It belongs to us and we keep our little Ford Ranger pickup back there. Plenty of room for a camper. We just need to have a proper driveway because it wouldn't be a good idea to try to back the camper up through the little swale.

I called a concrete company to get a price on building this driveway. They did work for us before and they are highly rated on Angie's List. We agreed on a price in August but we couldn't get on their schedule until September, well over a month away.

As it turns out, instead of going and pulling the necessary building permit right away, they waited until the day before the job was scheduled to get the permit. And couldn't get one. She came back to me and told me that I'd have to get it because they weren't registered to do business with the city. Which means they hadn't paid the necessary fee to the city or provided the city with evidence of insurance. She suggested I go get the permit and told me to pick up a copy of the city specification for driveways. 

Okay, that shouldn't be a problem. I immediately went to the city offices and tried to get a permit. As is generally the case these days, there was a 12 year old behind the counter who indicated that there was no spec but that if I just wrote up what I intended to do along with a list of materials and provided a copy of my survey outlining where I wanted to put it, it would be approved.

Now it's a problem. And it would probably have been a problem even if they'd tried to pull the permit the day I accepted the quoted price. But we would have had over a month to resolve it. I know nothing about concrete. I have no idea how thick it's supposed to be. I have no idea what type or size of rebar should be used. I have no idea what size the corrugated steel for the culvert should be. I also have no survey drawing. This house was built in 1950. It's not part of a modern subdivision that references plat maps. The deed has a metes and bounds description. I had it surveyed and staked a few years ago when one of my neighbors put up a fence that I knew was encroaching on my property just so I could make him move it, but I don't have a drawing.

I went home and called the concrete company back and explained my dilemma. She was confused by the spec issue. She told me that when they built driveways in Plano or Frisco or any of the surrounding towns that she did not tell them what they intended to build, they told her. The way they told her was to hand her the spec for residential driveways, which apparently the City of Celina was working on but did not yet have.

I went back to the city. The 12-year old was gone. Now I had to deal with a 20-year old. He said I should not use a contractor that wasn't registered to do business in the city. The primary reason was that if they caused any damage, I could be held responsible for it. When pressed for what kind of damage they might cause he gave me the example of knocking out utilities. I could be held responsible for repairing any damage they did. He was most insistent, asking me why I would want to put myself at risk for an unregistered contractor. He then gave me a list of about seven contractors who were registered with the city.

I went back home and called my concrete company to tell them that I could not get the permit in time for the job to begin the following day. (Tell me again why they waited until the last minute to get the permit. I'd already waited a month and who knows how long I'd have to wait now.) Then I logged into Angie's List and started looking up the companies that were on the city's list. Guess what? Not one of them were listed on Angie's List. Not one. Several of them were in Fort Worth. I could see that they would be super-stoked to come out and pour roads and driveways for new subdivisions. I could not see that they would be at all interested in a job that is a "one-off". I wouldn't be if I were them.

And of the four companies that were not in Fort Worth, only two called me back. One was a concrete company, the other was a landscaper. The concrete company could come out and give me a quote right away, the landscaper just didn't have time. My other option was to be my own contractor and hope nobody damaged anything. At least that's what I thought my options were. I would be proved wrong.