I'm in a really bad mood right now, pretty much ready to yell at anybody who gives me shit. Why? Don't read any more if you don't like naughty words, because I have a lot of them.
Because I wanted a fucking cellar, not a live-in basement, but the City of Alameda is basically making me design a fucking mansion for bicycle storage and lagering, thus draining every penny I had for, say, a functional bathroom into elaborate energy-efficient windows for the basement.
Because, you know, it's better to live in a house where the rooms you actually live in have large, air-leaking holes to the outdoors but your new storage space is designed within an inch of its life, than to have a utilitarian storage space and a comfortable, warm living space. Obviously I have fucked-up priorities.
Have I mentioned that they want complete elevation drawings of the ENTIRE HOUSE so they can decide whether 3'-10" is less than 6'-0"? Have I mentioned that one yet? Or how they seem to have told Noel that our property line begins somewhere halfway up our front staircase? Or that we had to add so much light and ventilation to the WINE CELLAR that it is now absolutely useless as a wine cellar, and I had to squeeze a tiny corner to wall off into a closet for that purpose? How about how they told us three different reasons why we needed to ruin our nice basement by making it into a living room? do seven more, different drawings every time I come back with the ones they've asked for? Or how the lady said, "You know, why don't you just drive down and sit with me talk about this" when I had just explained to her that I'm 250 fucking miles away from Alameda at the moment?
I'm ready to bite somebody's head off. I'm trying to decide whose head it will be. I think I will start in planning (they want those ridiculous elevations) and work my way through plan review (you who made me ruin my perfect basement to make some suburban shithouse rec room idiocy because you watch too much fucking TV to realize that there are people who actually don't think snouthouses are appealing at all), then I'm going to get started on anybody who tries to explain it to me as if it made sense to live in a basement on a shallow island so of course I would want to do that.
Fucking world. It can fucking bite me.
Edited: Noel has taken over like some kind of personal saviour or something, and thinks he can make all well with the city. This would totally make my month.
