Inspections

In the city of Seattle, your last inspection before your final inspection is the insulation inspection. Once you pass that, the inspectors don't come back again until everything is done. The following is a list of inspections that we have had since construction began in February.

1. Structure (passed the 1st time)
2. Plumbing rough-in (passed the 2nd time)
3. Electrical rough-in (passed the 1st time)
4. Gas piping (passed the 3rd time)
5. Framing (passed the 1st time)
6. Shear wall nailing (passed the 3rd time)
7. Insulation inspection (passed the 1st time)

Inspection is one of the most unpredictable part of your construction schedule. You don't know if you'll pass. If you don't, you'll have to call your subs back and fix things. You can easily lose 3 or 4 weeks just getting one inspection passed.

I find that we have had mostly a pretty easy time with inspectors. They know that I'm an architect and that definitely helps in terms of appearing more credible when i talk about what has been done. The inspectors we had tended to be friendly and helpful. With one exception.

When we had our second shear wall inspection, the inspector was pretty pissed off. The items that he had problems with were not any more significant or numerous as my other inspections, but he seemed to think that we were just wasting his time. I finally figured out later why he was so mad. I had a couple workers at the site adding some additional wiring that we decided to put in for TVs and speakers. Although they were minor alterations, the site was messy, and we still had to drill holes in the structure to pull wire.

Obviously, it looked bad. It taught me a lesson (though it should really have been obvious)... On inspection day, make sure that your site is clean and tidy. Also make sure that there are no workers doing any work during the inspection. If you do that, and you only have minor items that needs to be fixed, you'll usually at least get a conditional pass, which will allow you to keep the construction moving.