Today was a busy day for the LoveNest household. We filed an updated driveway plan with the county (and discovered we immediately need to do a 3rd filing), then we filed for our building permit, followed by the beginning of our shed project.

There’s so much to write about all those things but I’m watching the clock push long into the night and tomorrow we have to wake up early, dust the snow off our new driveway cover, and start framing shed walls.  But I wanted to take a moment to share a couple of thoughts for posterity.

First, this is really hard. It’s amazing the endless hours that go into a few sheets of paper that represent your future home. Its the culmination of many choices and many people’s inputs. And what happens when you submit all that hard work for review? It probably gets rejected :-). That’s what happened to us today. But we walked out of the county with a preliminary filing and a list of things to address to make them happy. Now those many people get to work making small changes here and there and the project moves forward.

Second, that is the nature of the beast. As much as I’d love everything to be perfect the first time around – we’re dealing with people. I can dot every “i” and cross every “t” per the codes until my wrist cramps up. But when you file with the county, it’s now a human who looks at your work. A human who hasn’t spent the last few hundred hours pouring over every detail of your plan and knowing each minutia of detail. So they get confused. They ask for clarification. They ask for changes. Ya just gotta roll with it, give a big smile, and do what keeps them happy because

Third, if the county ain’t happy – you ain’t happy. Our project lives and dies on the decisions of our gentle county overlords. I may not agree with them or understand what’s so confusing about a document, but if they don’t like us there are a number of bureaucratic ways they can slow us down and cost us money. Maybe they decide we DO need that discretionary water infiltration system after all; or maybe this issue can’t be decided without a hearing. Nothing they do is illegal. Nothing is done with malice. But they are people and its job number one to keep them liking us until the Certificate of Occupancy is in our hands.

I am so happy to be on this journey with my love by my side. I’m joyous that we get to experience the ups and downs of this process while hand in hand. And now I’m gonna go crawl into bed and dream of building window headers in the snow tomorrow.