Quote:
Originally Posted by wdfifteen
Is that because the topsoil in your area is too unstable to support a slab?
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No, it's just the building code out here, which leans towards overbuilding because we are in earthquake country. I don't know about other places, but my deck has pretty serious lateral load straps to keep it from falling off the house in an earthquake, and the garage design has a lot of similar horizontal bracing that is intended to keep the structure from shaking off the foundation. Number 4 rebar hooks have to extend down to the bottom of the footers.
A couple thoughts that might be useful to others: Javadog mentioned earlier that there was some cut and paste on the plans, and he's right. Hence a number of inconsistencies. Like lawyers and I expect lots of other professionals, the folks who do design drawings plug in a lot of boilerplate. And since it was my earnest desire to expedite the permitting process, I didn't want anything outre, novel, or creative that might cause an administrative panic. I wanted something simple and comfortingly bland, familiar gruel for the civil servantry.
The plans show what Boeing called a 90% design release. In actuality, 90% was as far as it ever got, the last 10% being available for running changes (if Higgins reads this, he can correct me if I've mangled this explanation). This summer, I got the deck on this place redone (a long story), and we had many fairly significant running changes. I concluded that this was a better-to-ask for-forgiveness-than-permission situation. I'm pretty sure they won't make me tear it down because of a slight change in framing.