owner built with more than a pen
Back in the days of the Wild Wild South End we used to erect our shacks and abodes without bothering with county building permits. Just a damn nuisance, really. We weren’t building with the idea they’d outlive us and the next unsuspecting owner would buy something unstructural or unheatable or probably uninhabitable by anyone other than a bona fide South Ender. The new immigrants just bulldoze down the old structures anyway, even if they’re fairly recent, and make room for their Taj Mahal retirement villas.
We used recycled lumber, scrounged doors and rehung old single pane wood windows. We didn’t call it sustainable architecture or crow about recycling or call ourselves Green Warriors. This is just how it was done. This is all we could afford. The county even had a special permit for this: Owner Builder. Pay a small fee and they’d let us construct our own house. You couldn’t hire a contractor — you had to do it yourself. Fair enough.
But when the county began to gentrify, the new squires complained that we were living in dwellings that they considered eyesores. Nobody asked what we thought of theirs….. And so the county eliminated the Owner Builder Eyesore permits for a couple of years, but the Sound End squawkers got it reinstated. That’s when we built our new shack. The new permit made us meet all the same codes as every contractor so it wasn’t as if we could recycle materials or build on the cheap. It just meant you could build it yourself legally. What I would call the principle of the thing….
Nowadays you can’t get an Owner Builder anything. End of an era. Some of my neighbors like to talk how they built their own house too. What they mean is they wrote the checks to a contractor and called themselves the boss. They didn’t strap on a nail pouch or throw a hammer or cut a 2×6. When someone says, ‘I built my own house,’ I always ask what to me would be an embarrassing question. They usually don’t see the difference so over time I’ve learned to let it go.
But … there IS a difference. The county knew what it was, you better believe. And down on the South End, we know the difference too. So if you ever wonder why we skip the permits, it’s not that we’re just ornery, it’s so we can actually build our own damn house.
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