Real Risks of Building Without a Permit?
Please tell me some true stories of buying or selling a house with a deck that was built without a permit. Did the lack of permit cause problems, and if so, how were they resolved? I know that the Buildings Dept can make you tear down the deck, but has anyone ever heard of this…
Please tell me some true stories of buying or selling a house with a deck that was built without a permit. Did the lack of permit cause problems, and if so, how were they resolved? I know that the Buildings Dept can make you tear down the deck, but has anyone ever heard of this actually happening simply because the deck was built without a permit, and not because it failed to meet the structural requirements set forth in the Buildings Code?
I have a fireproof steel back deck. It came with the house. The diamondplate surface is hot as hell in the summer, slippery in the winter and goes *boom* every morning after the sun hits it and the metal expands. Most of my neighbors have (illegal) wood decks. But I suspect that my ugly-but-legal deck will be the harder sell to a potential buyer.
I know someone who did this – a wooden deck at the parlor floor. It is not on the survey nor could it be legalized (short of reconstructing of non-combustable material).
The thought was that when it comes time to sell, and if the buyer’s lawyer is swift, the issue of a deck not on the survey would likely come up. The solution is to offer to reduce the selling price by a couple of thousand for as is.
You guys are leaving out a major fact in the favor of the deck owner. The DOB can’t issue a ticket if they can’t gain access to the deck. When they show up you can refuse access. They need a warrant to enter your property. They usually show up twice (at most) and if you don’t let them in, they tend to just let it go.
Geekspice — exactly. My answer was longwinded enough without going into exceptions. If you can prove that the deck existed prior to 1963, when the city adopted the current zoning laws, you’re all good.
Ways of proving this are on a Sandbourne map, and aerial photograph, tax map, or any kind of documentation that conclusively proves to a (skeptical) ECB court judge that your deck was there before 1963.
I legalized an existing deck that was built without permits and that is noncompliant with code (it’s built of wood and closer than 3′ to the property line). The catch is that I was able to prove (with a 40 yr old survey) that the deck had been around for quite a while. I have no idea if that tipped the scales in my favour or if it would have been legalized anyway.
This would be called a legalization.
Let’s assume a deck was built properly and met all the current regulations, etc. The owner didn’t file it for whatever reason, and an angry neighbor decides to spend an hour on the phone with the DoB trying to get an inspector over to harass the deck owner or something like that.
So fast forward to the point where an inspector shows up and issues an ECB ticket, and the ticket will have a fine and an ECB court date. The owner can contest the ticket in court as one option (probably won’t win if the deck has no approved permit). The other option would be to pay the fine (I’ve seen $500 as the amount written in but I think it is the inspector’s discretion on the severity of the penalty, I know it’s a $5000 maximum penalty).
In addition to the fine, the court will order the owner to legalize the deck. A legalization filing is just like a normal filing for a permit, but it’s a retroactive permit. It’s done by an architect or engineer, and is basically a normal plan examination treated like any other permit.
The catch is our first assumption at the very beginning, that the deck is compliant with code. If there’s something wrong with the deck, I don’t know for the sake of example let’s say that the deck has stairs that are too steep for code, in that case the legalization wouldn’t be granted without the stairs being corrected to the code steepness.
What my engineer told me: its against code but no one enforces it. This was for a wooden porch on the back of the house at parlor level.
Now if you were to have an accident on the illegal deck and needed to make an insurance claim I don’t know what the case would be.
I’ve never heard of BOD demanding that an existing, nonpermitted deck be torn down nor of a sale that’s been undermined by one.
Not saying it doesn’t happen, just that I’ve never heard of it.