Is it Permitted?

A few weeks ago at an open house I was working, someone asked me if the bonus room downstairs was done with a permit. The sellers had converted some storage space into a little room that they watched TV in and it was actually really nicely finished although there were no windows in that room.

"No, it sure wasn't" I said. "It's not in the square footage in the county record either."

She got this very worried look on her face and asked "Well, can't the city come and force us to remove that room? It's illegal, right?"

This conversation has happened alot in my experience and I find it to be sort of amusing. This person appears to have some fantasy that a SWAT team is going to show up out front after they buy the place, burst into the house with guns drawn and force that offending room to be returned to it's original design! Umm...if that happens I sure have never seen it.

In Daly City and Pacifica for example, there are hundreds of houses who's design has living space above the garage and that garage space has square footage equal to the upstairs living space. Preposterously large space down there at that! Over the course of the last 50 plus years up there, I'll bet two thirds of those homes have added living space into that cavernous garage space down there and still keep room for a car! In my experience, a large number of those additions were done without permits. The bottom line is the unwarranted space is disclosed...and nobody cares. They actually want that living space anyway.

Having said all this, we now come to the square footage topic. I can't tell you how many houses I've seen where the public record has the actual square footage of a house listed incorrectly. This happens all the time. A seller, or maybe a seller in 1968, adds a room or two to the house...with permits, yet somehow the new square footage never made into the county's database. A 2200 sq ft house still shows on county records (and thus on Zillow...etc) as 1550 sq ft.

There's plenty of things that need permits and I sure do want to know that they are in place. Second story additions come to mind. Anything that's structural for that matter. Honestly though, sun room additions, bonus rooms carved out of old storage areas that folks use as a guest bedroom, and even some garage conversions don't really bug me that much. Often these rooms actually add some real value to a house...whether they have the city's official stamp of approval or not.