Randomness

[Distracted]

Pictures! We want pictures of your dollies... I mean, ACTION FIGURES!

[Pitseleh]

A couple of nights ago I dreamed I was onboard Babylon 5. I was part pof the security staff or something 'cause I was trying to get the ambassadors and the officers to safety. It was a very cool dream for me...

I'm back to school now which means tons and tons of homework. We're designing a beach house now.

[Kevin Thomas Riley]

Pictures! We want pictures of your dollies... I mean, ACTION FIGURES!

Indeed! Action figues it is!

But sorry, I don't have the means (i.e. a digital camera) yet. But they look like this:

Spock and Andorian
McCoy
Romulan

[Escriba]

I'm back to school now which means tons and tons of homework. We're designing a beach house now.

He-heee... sounds fun. My sister is mad because she drew the designs for the renovation of a country house and the owner did whatever he wanted except what she had designed. And now she'll have to do new blueprints for the "works end" permission the Administration demands.

[blacknblue]

I hope the contractor kept good notes. Those things can be a real pain otherwise. Even for a relatively small job. And frequent photos during construction can help a lot too. Was an inspector on site at regular intervals?

[Escriba]

The inspector only must inspect the site when it's finished, so usually no inpector comes to do his/her job during the works. This is Spain, you know?

[blacknblue]

No wonder your sister is mad.

[Distracted]

Pictures! We want pictures of your dollies... I mean, ACTION FIGURES!

Indeed! Action figues it is!

But sorry, I don't have the means (i.e. a digital camera) yet. But they look like this:

Spock and Andorian
McCoy
Romulan

Cool!

[Pitseleh]

The inspector only must inspect the site when it's finished, so usually no inpector comes to do his/her job during the works. This is Spain, you know?

Over here, if an architect is hired for the entire job, he is in charge of supervising. If something goes wrong, he/she is to blame.

I would be absolutely angry if I were your sister. Was she only hired to do the design or for the whole thing? Don't the plans have to be authorized before the work begins?

[Alelou]

Don't feel so bad about Spain. In the area in NJ where we bought our first house, the building inspector would just drive by and then mail you a certificate of occupancy. When we were house-hunting I saw the weirdest illegal apartments and extra bathrooms and things. One house had stairs going from the bathroom down to the basement. One basement had a toilet on a platform about a foot and a half high -- you looked at it and just wondered how anyone got up or down and what the heck they were thinking putting it there to begin with. The house we bought had been an illegal three-family where they'd actually tried to stuff an apartment in the basement, which had ceilings low enough that you had to duck in places, a rat slab foundation (dirt poorly covered with a thin layer of concrete poorly covered with cheap carpet), and asbestos all over the place. I saw worse in a doctor's house in Englewood. He had stuffed something like seven separate rooms that he rented in his basement...

[blacknblue]

It's not really funny. I know that. But...



When my old man decided to build a utility room onto his vacation house cottage in KY, out in the ass end of literally nowhere, on the fringes of the Daniel Boone Nat'l Forest, thirty miles from the nearest town and fifteen miles from nearest cell phone reception, he still had to get permits for everything and have the work inspected at every stage of the game. I can't believe a state as metropolitan and developed as NJ would let people get away with crap like that.

[Escriba]

Over here, if an architect is hired for the entire job, he is in charge of supervising. If something goes wrong, he/she is to blame.

Well, yes, she has the "execution project" so she can supervise the job. The problem is the custom did whatever he wanted and told my sister afterwards. Fortunately, the changes didn't threaten the structure's stability. Otherwise my sister would be in deep shit (sorry, language.)

You need two official authoritations here: one to begin the works (for that, your project, blueprints, etc. must be revised by the municipal architect of the town or city where you're going to construct or do the renovation; the other authoritation comes after the works, the Administration sends an inspector and makes sure everything is legal and that the architect in charge (my sister) authorized any possible change that has happened. But of course, for this, my sister has to design new blueprints, smile and say "yeah, I planned the changes, absolutely, it happened like this, you know?"

Sometimes an official inspector shows up during the works and it usually means big troubles because everything is different as how it was designed and the architect or the foreman builder needs to tell a lot of lies

[Alelou]

If you work at an ad agency, you get used to the client asking for changes that fly in the face of logic, aesthetics, and return on investment. My boss has a saying at such times: "What would Kinko's do?"

As for NJ, if you've seen the Sopranos, you might get an idea who really runs the place. Plus every little village/boro/town is its own little patronage mill. Our town couldn't have been much larger than one densely-populated square mile. (It was so small there was no need for school buses.) Lots of people made a living off the taxes collected in that one square mile...

[JadziaKathryn]

Randomness: I will be back next week, as I'm going to Sydney!

[CX]

In North Dakota, we don't need permits unless it's something being built in town.