UPDATE: City thinks I’m remodeling my house?

I emailed the city inspection analyst who validated my complaint and to my surprise she emailed back offering to have a call and walk me through everything. She was very kind, professional and wanted to be helpful. I was impressed with her demeanor and by extension the SDCI.

Unfortunately, the news is devastated and likely to ruin our family. We learned that the brief text was kind of a placeholder while they processed the notification of violation, so that’s kind of why it sounded like it was referring to current events. But it was not. Though I was impressed with SDCI’s helpful demeanor, I am absolutely shocked at what they did here. They received my neighbor’s complaint, which was apparently complaining about hardscaping / landscaping feature construction. While that wasn’t really an issue, the city did a deep dive on my house and compared it with NWMLS photos from a recent sale.

Based on permits from 2004 for a remodel, which are only available on microfilm and not even listed on the portal, they found that my property does not have permits for or is out of compliance with:

• One bedroom is completely unpermitted (someone split an upstairs bedroom into 2 bedrooms around 2004-2008 –> the assessor has counted that bedroom for well over a decade + through several owners and no records available digitally indicated this was a 3 bedroom house
• There are doors and windows on the exterior wall of the 2004 extension that aren’t on the original plans
• A seismic retrofit obtained most the right permits but is missing a final inspection
• The mini split did not get a drywall inspection (not sure what that is, apparently it did not get all the inspections needed)
• There is a window in a structural wall that should not be there
• There is some kind of assumption that electrical work was not permitted — I need additional clarification as I’m not sure where that is coming from

I have 30 days to obtain permits or rebuild according to original plans, but there are extensions available. There’s no way we can afford to fix this. I don’t know if we can even afford hiring engineers and architects to try to permit the existing work, but fixing it is impossible. And if we could, we can’t afford to live elsewhere while the walls are all torn up so every last wire can be accounted for. And we can’t live here while they do that, with a 1 year old with breathing trouble.

We’re feeling completely hopeless and defeated. I can’t believe the city just took our house’s listing photos and looked for decades-old violations. We both work more than full time to afford a house and we have the one year old. We have no time. We’ll maybe need to just declare bankruptcy and walk away from the house. IDK, maybe I’m just being overly emotional. Maybe we’ll be fine. Or maybe not.

I feel like we’re being punished for being a relatively recent homebuyer in Seattle – new enough you can find our listing photos anyway. Don’t let the MLS leave your photos up.