Not Building a Steelmaster Shop

Change of plans on this last project.. About $5k down the drain but at least I can recoup maybe $10k from sell­ing the now-complete kit.

You’re prob­a­bly won­der­ing why the change of heart?

1. Plan before you build — broke this one. Would have never even started had I known what the city requires in per­mit­ting (a lot).
2. Hire the right help. Licensed con­trac­tor helps, they at least have to look­out for their license. I didn’t fol­low this one either, and while it’s totally my bad, I still feel like I got taken for a ride a lit­tle. Noth­ing against the other fella. Talk about a flash­back to the eCom­merce busi­ness a few years back with the “part­ner­ship” deal (shudder).
3. Pre­lim­i­nary Land Par­ti­tion pretty much done, onto Final Plat stage then to fig­ure out how I am going to extract the equity out of the 2 lots.
4. Ran into extra snags. When the city sewer con­nec­tion was pulled up in 1994, a (from what I was told shady) sewer com­pany aban­doned but did no decom­mis­sion the sep­tic tanks. The city has no record of decom­mis­sion­ing, so the bur­den of proof falls on me. This is also a require­ment for the land par­ti­tion, so no way avoid­ing it now. I did some digging.
   • Tried call­ing, and even going over to the old plumbers place of busi­ness (he was “unavail­able”). Highly doubt he would have records from 17 years ago anyways.
   • Pulled a chain of title on this prop­erty back to 1980’s and tracked the own­ers down in Santa Cruz, Cal­i­for­nia and spoke to an older lady. She said yes they did own that prop­erty. The hus­band was always “at work” every time I called, now they are dodg­ing my calls. I also got their email, with no response. Maybe they are on vaca­tion at this time of the year? I’m giv­ing them the ben­e­fit of the doubt and think it could be a coin­ci­dence and I’m just call­ing at a bad time. But at this point it is what it is.
5. I real­ized I was drift­ing away from my goal. While a temp shop would have been super for what it was intended for, I knew it was time to cut my losses before I sank more time and cash into it. So I’m pulling out.

So at this point, I just need to sell the shop kit. Then take care of the sep­tic tank issue and con­tinue the Land Par­ti­tion and pil­ing up cash money.

What are my approchaes to the sep­tic tank challenge?

1. Called a Real­tor of mine, he men­tioned he was going to talk to some Title Com­pa­nies and do some dig­ging. Appar­ently Title Com­pa­nies have record research depart­ments and can be resource­ful at times.
2. Got a tank “loca­tor” out here, but they appar­ently just use a video cam­era to “scope” the loca­tion. But with the old pipes miss­ing, that was a no-go. That was $95 (dis­counted since he didn’t really help).
3. Called my Land Use gal, she may know a few folks that can find it.

It looks like it’s inevitable that I will just have to com­pletely tare up a chunk of my yard. Should be fun!

I am hav­ing fun learn­ing this silly stuff though. Should be a piece of cake some­day. By the way… some city work­ers are total dicks. Some actu­ally try to go out of their way to help.

Until next time. Cheers.