SNAFU - Situation Normal All F@#* Up: Part Duex
I was made aware of an issue with the bathroom on the mezzanine for my unit last week. The county has rejected the permit because the bathroom on the mezzanine is not wheel chair accessible. I would need to reconfigure the bathroom to be wheel chair accessible as well as install a chair lift or elevator to keep the bathroom on the mezzanine. Alternately, I could keep the bathroom as is on the mezzanine if I added a wheel chair accessible bathroom on the lower level that had equivalent facilities (toilet, sink, and shower in this case). If I do not want a bathroom at all, that is ok, but if I have one it must be accessible.
The county is taking a hard line that the units are each individual commercial units that must comply with accessibility rules. The developer has tried to argue that the units are private units that cannot be used as businesses to no avail. The developer has also pointed out that there are 2 ADA bathrooms in the clubhouse that is within 100 feet of my unit but the county does not care. The permitting process literally only sees what is in my walls and nothing else.
To me, adding a bathroom on the lower level is a non-starter. These units were made very narrow to maximize the number of units that can fit on the land. A 7’ wide bathroom on a 23’ wide unit would eliminate the possibility of parking two cars under the mezzanine. I would lose 1 of 4 possible parking spaces. Given the offset garage door opening, it has always been questionable to me if there were really 4 parking spaces as the two by the garage door are actually hard to fill without a teleporter. I had planned on using the two spaces under the mezzanine with lifts to allow 4 potential storage spots and the two spaces by the garage door to be combined a centered up roomy space to work on one vehicle. That would be a total of 5 vehicles stored/worked on. The picture below is what the architect suggested for a lower bathroom. With the suggested bathroom I would be down to 3 spots max.
Reworking the upper bathroom with a chair lift is also not palatable. The bathroom would have to get much larger and fixtures I have already picked out would most likely not make the cut. The added space needed to make the bathroom work would also eliminate much of the space available for other items on the upper mezzanine - bar, tvs, couches. The chair lift is expensive, bulky, and in the way when it will most likely never be used. I looked at vertical lifts as well but could not figure out where they could be placed that did not interfere with getting into or parking in the two spots under the mezzanine.
In either option, the work that has been done to the unit to date is at serious risk of having to be re-done. This really makes me mad because during the July plumbing fiasco I pushed hard to get a full set of drawings and permits before anything was put behind the drywall. They convinced me to continue without doing that and all it did was delay the permit issues until even more things need to get re-worked.
The developer and architect have a plan but I'm not sure how viable it is. The county will not do anything on their own. The developer and architect are going to submit a case study to the national code using my unit and the complex as a whole. They are going to argue that since businesses are not allowed in the complex, the units are privately held, and that there is an ADA bathroom in the public space of the complex within 500 feet of any unit - that the individual units do not have to individually hold to the accessibility standards. If they can get a precedent set by the national standards group, then the county will follow suit and allow it to happen. The developer wants to set the precedent because he knows it is going to be hard to sell these narrow units if they have to follow all the accessibility rules in each unit. I give them props for effort but I really am not sure I give them much chance for success. It will take 2-3 weeks at a minimum to get an answer from the standards group and another 3-4 weeks to know if the county will accept the answer.
At this point, I have sent an e-mail to the developer, general contractor, architect, and title company holding my down payment that I will not be closing until this gets settled.
I really do not know what to do if they hold us to the current rules. I am seriously thinking of just walking away. I've put 100s of hours into this at this point and I really do not want to do that. However, the narrow space really does not leave lots of options. The best of the worst is to probably give up the shower(s) and put 5' wide narrow bathroom under the stairs. Basically, take the picture above - get rid of the shower and rotate what is left 90 degrees so that it is only 5' out from the right wall. That would leave 18' to get by under the mezzanine. Then I could re-do the upper mezzanine without at bathroom at all. All of the plumbing, electrical, and some of the drywall around the upper mezzanine would all have to get re-done. It just makes me sick thinking about it. I tried to do things right up front but it just didn't work.
