To permit your project or Not permit your project? We answer it.

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[00:00:09] Caroline Blazovsky: Yeah. And I'm asking Eric, I have never seen someone busted for not doing a permit. So I'm wondering, like what happens when they do bust you? I mean, do they show up and just see a bunch of contracting trucks and say, Hey, I'm not aware that anybody's doing anything. And the township just walks in and says, Hey guys, where's your permit?

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[00:00:29] Eric Goranson: I will give you real life experiences right now that I've seen happen. I was doing this really high end design in a downtown Seattle condominium project. This guy was gutting his condo. He was a world he's now since passed. So I tell the story. Now,

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[00:00:47] Intro: remodeling and renovating your home, there is a lot to

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[00:00:51] Intro: We got you. Come in. This is around the

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[00:00:56] Intro: Welcome to around the house with Eric G and [00:01:00] Caroline B. This is where we talk. Boom improvement every single week. Thanks for joining us. Hello,

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[00:01:08] Eric Goranson: everybody having a good time here. We've got a fun one today. Looking forward to this because I put up on around the house nation.

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[00:01:41] Caroline Blazovsky: It is such a sketchy topic too. It is. Cause I feel like if you don't do it, you're kind of like being a little shady, but then if you do do it. It might end up costing you a lot of money and you may feel like, I don't know if I need to it's this gray area I'm building it is I don't even know what to do

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[00:01:59] Eric Goranson: And the [00:02:00] problem is, is it's different everywhere. So like, let's, we'll take this back to the basics here, for instance, in the state of Oregon, where I live, you get your permit from your local building department, but building codes are the same across the entire state because it's state. Now you can have a little tweaks here and there and a local residence kind of thing.

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[00:02:48] Eric Goranson: And it's completely different in other parts of the country. So you have to take that into mind when you start thinking about, do I need to pull a permit or don't need a permit? [00:03:00] And that's the interesting part.

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[00:03:12] Caroline Blazovsky: Chances are you need a permit, but that's just me. That's how I kind of gauge it. Cause I'm not pulling permits every.

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[00:03:29] Eric Goranson: Even when you're just rep replacing.

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[00:03:39] Eric Goranson: Okay. Okay. Well, I mean water heater is easy. Yeah. If you're improving it, but here's the thing that's interesting within that many times, just a repair.

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[00:04:12] Eric Goranson: So it gets interesting on how those rules work,

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[00:04:39] Eric Goranson: it gets sketchy.

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[00:05:07] Eric Goranson: Now. As soon as you go in and do some work on it, that grandfathered in status is D. So for instance, here was a great example, and this is where you have to be really careful with building permits. And this is a story that I saw play out personally, cuz I was a designer on the project. So homeowner bought a house.

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[00:05:53] Eric Goranson: Contractor went in, had the permit in hand, posted, falling. Every rule, [00:06:00] everything tore the bathroom out. Did some changes to the plumbing called in for the first permit inspection. Contractor walks in and goes, huh? Original building permit for 1920 on this thing shows the upper floor is being storage.

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[00:07:00] Eric Goranson: And that was pretty crazy. That was expensive. So what happened was, is they had to go in there, the floor was designed for storage, so they had to beef up the floor system. They literally had to go in and open up walls on the finished basement, tear up the floor down there because they needed to put new footings in for the columns in the middle of the house.

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[00:07:42] Eric Goranson: Well, here's the worst case of this, and this is where you have to keep those records for a house. The city of Portland also made a huge mistake when they converted over from hard documents to electronic, they lost a decade worth of permits. They can't [00:08:00] locate them. Homeowner had a stamp set of plans that said submitted, but they were not from back when the house was remodeled during that time, but they do not say approved.

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[00:08:34] Eric Goranson: And that is one of the biggest loopholes in real estate transactions. Today, if you have this old farmhouse, that was a single story farmhouse with a basement and a huge storage area upstairs. And let's say it's a thousand square feet in the basement thousand square feet in the main floor thousand square feet up in the, at.

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[00:09:18] Eric Goranson: Do you wanna pay that $250 a square foot for 2,500 square feet? Or would you rather pay it for the a thousand you're actually getting. Let's talk about that. When we come back to Caroline, let's talk about this, cuz this is gonna be a big deal for people out there, especially if you're thinking about taking on a project like that, let's do that just as soon as around the house returns.

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[00:09:47] Intro: I be loud? Be so hot.

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[00:09:59] Eric Goranson: Hey, I'm Rudy Wade. [00:10:00] And you're listening to around the house with Eric G and Caroline B, listen to my music to improve your home.

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[00:10:10] Eric Goranson: we move. Welcome back to the, around the house show. Caroline and I have been sitting here talking, do you pull a permit? Do you not pull a permit?

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[00:10:26] Caroline Blazovsky: Yeah. And it's, and it's also, I, I think from a financial standpoint, you know, people wanna save money. These things aren't cheap. So the average cost of a permit is gonna run somewhere around $1,281.

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[00:10:50] Eric Goranson: It can be a lot more too, depending on what you're doing. Mm-hmm , um, sometimes here there's development fees. Sometimes there's all these different fees that come [00:11:00] onto that.

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[00:11:21] Eric Goranson: Back when I was designing kitchens every day, it was about $25,000. If that project exceeded that you now had to fit in with the tree code out front. So they came over and at final inspection, you might have to add three approved trees off their list to your front yard to get. Kitchen remodel signed off and I'm not kidding.

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[00:11:47] Caroline Blazovsky: It there's so much to this topic because I just had a contractor come out to my house and I'm looking to do a paper patio. And his first response was, oh, don't worry about it. Like, you know, this is an existing [00:12:00] structure. You had something there that was similar. Your grandfather didn't, don't worry about it.

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[00:12:17] Eric Goranson: tough one. Let's dive into that in a second. Let me, let me put a bow around my last story in the last segment real quick.

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[00:12:45] Eric Goranson: Correct. So whenever you're gonna go out and buy a house, make sure you pull the square footage from the tax assessor. And trust me, that number means nothing. Because the tax assessor, if you told that tax assessor that your 3000 square foot house was [00:13:00] 22,000 square feet, they would love to tax you for that.

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[00:13:22] Eric Goranson: Is that not on what the tax assessor is? So if

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[00:13:44] Eric Goranson: Yeah. If it's not a new house and it was, if it's over 20 or 30 years old, I would make sure that you go down and pull that. And if it's 50 plus years old, I would do it every single time just to know what you're paying for, because they figure that house on how [00:14:00] many square feet. Right? How many bathrooms into that you're paying for a lot of stuff that you would have to tear out to get bought up to code to make that a legitimate square footage.

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[00:14:38] Eric Goranson: Yeah. So that's where that gets a little more interesting is what you have to do to get that going now many times electrical. Yes. You know, but one of the biggest warnings that I get and you and I talked about this before the show, one of the biggest concerns I get is when you're doing a remodel, it is up to that homeowner to make sure those [00:15:00] permits get pulled, not the contractor.

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[00:15:24] Eric Goranson: Have they had issues? Do they have a license that you're missing? What's going on there? Not all contractors are wrong that do that, but they are warning signs for me that I go, my, my ears kind of pop up a little bit and go, huh. Wonder why that is. That makes me nervous.

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[00:15:50] Caroline Blazovsky: Pull a permit. And so you, you know, you gave a couple of examples that, you know, you may not really have proper usage of your home, your square footage. You may have to go [00:16:00] back, backtrack and end up costing you more money. But then also homeowner's insurance is something to think about too, because if your homeowner's insurance, if for any reason you do a project and you end up, let's say you get a flood or maybe a fire.

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[00:16:20] Eric Goranson: happen. Yeah. Let's talk about that for a minute. Great example. So I went in to go do a kitchen remodel probably five years ago on a house that had a addition done to it. They pulled the permits, right?

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[00:16:57] Eric Goranson: Mm-hmm . So you now reset [00:17:00] that. So we were gonna have to pull down the insulation. Put new insulation in of course all the drywalls gonna have to come down. It was gonna be another $40,000 to fix that space because they didn't get the final on it. Now, there is one thing too, Caroline, that gets very interesting.

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[00:17:42] Eric Goranson: If you really make that building department and that building inspector mad you're done, that can be a huge issue. Um, in the Tri-Cities where I grew up in Eastern Washington state. They ended up having a city council person [00:18:00] 20 years ago, get into a fight over a water heater permit. And there was a police standoff cuz he would not allow the building department inside the home, the sheriff or the police department tried to escort him in.

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[00:18:32] Eric Goranson: Not pulling permits. We'll do that just as soon as around the house

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[00:18:55] Intro: Hey guys, you're listening to around the house

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[00:19:01] Intro: building it up. Welcome back to the, around the

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[00:19:14] Eric Goranson: And of course, Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, just start looking at around the house show and make sure you join our Facebook close group, which is around the house nation. And if you're listening to us on the podcast right now and make sure you go over to your favorite podcast player and click that subscribe button.

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[00:19:45] Caroline Blazovsky: Yeah. And I'm asking Eric, I have never seen someone busted. For not doing a permit.

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[00:20:05] Eric Goranson: I will give you real life experiences right now that I've seen happen.

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[00:20:37] Eric Goranson: And the plumbing fixtures that we ordered from him were high end imported from Germany and did not have. The little plumbing stamp that they needed to have on them to pass building code in the United States, they had not been tested and approved. Yeah. How did he get caught? Not his neighbors [00:21:00] building department head was walking down the street, walking to a lunch meeting and saw the plumbing fixtures being delivered up into the high rise.

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[00:21:24] Intro: bad.

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[00:21:35] Eric Goranson: The second one is that pesky neighbor you don't get along with. Hmm. And where I saw this happen, it happened on a Saturday, which was even weirder. He was swapping out windows on his weekend projects. So he was ordered some new windows, changing the opening on one of them in his kitchen. And man building permit guys showed up, building inspector showed up [00:22:00] on a Saturday, which is super rare.

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[00:22:30] Eric Goranson: Or how big was the footprint or. Was that building there, that shed, that shed that you built too big and they can go on there and take a look. How big was that deck there? Oh, wow. That deck doubled in size. And it's a second story deck. You should have pulled a permit for that. You see where I'm going?

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[00:22:51] Caroline Blazovsky: I'm wondering, like, you know, I just imagine them driving around in vehicles, like looking for mm-hmm activity. I mean, how many people do they [00:23:00] have on staff? Like, is this a realistic expectation that you could get busted? Or is it more of a fee like a, you know, do they have us in fear? I'm just curious cuz I don't really know.

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[00:23:09] Eric Goranson: how works the answer is? Here's the thing. Here's where most of 'em happen. I'll say 70% of the time, maybe 60 to 70% of the time. I'll give a little more room here. 60 to 70% of the time that building inspector is driving to another inspection. Maybe your neighbor. Hold a permit for their deck. They're pulling to the driveway and they're walking down the side of the house and they look over and go, wow, they're doing a deck too.

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[00:23:57] Caroline Blazovsky: Mm. I could see that being like the bigger thing, like [00:24:00] you're doing something and they're just like, you know what, I'm gonna call it in. They're not supposed to be doing this, or maybe they're close to your property line that could tick you

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[00:24:17] Eric Goranson: He had one homeowner next door. Was making daily, every six hours calls into the permit office with complaints that they were breaking the law and they had permits. It was the pesky neighbor next door going, they're not doing this right. They're not, of course they showed up. They had it all filmed. They had everything there.

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[00:24:59] Eric Goranson: I'm gonna [00:25:00] call it in or I'm gonna, oh, I see a truck out front bet. They didn't pull a permit for that. That's all it takes. And a lot of the trades, they got names on the front of it.

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[00:25:20] Caroline Blazovsky: So typically you think, okay, I'm gonna go pull the permit. I'll do the job this month and then we'll come close it out. But if you have to wait for a contractor, is there a limit? Is it six months, 18 months,

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[00:25:36] Eric Goranson: I've seen 18 months, depending on what. Municipality says it can be, but most of the time you can get an extension really easy. Just call 'em up and go, Hey, I need an extension or fill out the paperwork online and get an extension. So it's usually not that big a deal. It can be a big deal sometimes though, if the code changes in the middle of that and hard to say how that's gonna go, you know, if you're doing that over the [00:26:00] holidays and sometimes there's that, Hey, there's that new 20, 23 code.

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[00:26:19] Caroline Blazovsky: So I'm gonna stick to my little rule. If it's going to change the value of my home for real estate transaction, I'm gonna get a permit.

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[00:26:43] Eric Goranson: Great example. I was on social media the other night here. I think it was actually last night and there was a nice lady on one of the groups that I'm in as an admin or an expert.

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[00:27:12] Eric Goranson: I was a permit. It was big. Yeah. And she's like, I'm gonna rip it out. I'm like, whoa, whoa, whoa, slow down. Sister, first of all. Yeah. Sister slow down that might not be able to come outta there without doing some work. And she goes, oh, what if I just throw a four by four? No, no, no. You've got like a two by like a three foot wide opening.

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[00:27:53] Eric Goranson: If you're doing your own project, that is something that I think is a, is a good, solid [00:28:00] discussion on structure of having that structural engineer pay a few hundred bucks, maybe a thousand bucks to help walk you through some of these things. Because having that engineer and some drawings to tell you how to do.

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[00:28:34] Intro: house returns.[00:29:00]

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[00:29:08] Eric Goranson: I'm AAMI from Stephens, bam. And you are listening to around the house with.

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[00:29:23] Eric Goranson: welcome back to the, around the house show. This is where you get your home improvement advice every single week. Thanks for joining us. Well, Caroline and I have been diving into, if you're just joining us, we've been diving into, do I need a permit? Do I not need a permit? And of course that rule goes always back to your local permit office, but.

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[00:30:05] Eric Goranson: Mm. And then you just have fines and, and maybe some redoing of the project.

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[00:30:37] Caroline Blazovsky: You kind of need

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[00:30:59] Eric Goranson: All of a [00:31:00] sudden, they have to bring that area up to current building code. So there could be a lot that has to be done on that to meet that, you know, as much a current building code that it can. So that's where that gets a little more

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[00:31:19] Caroline Blazovsky: You're gonna put in some new windows, you're gonna add windows to the house that weren't traditionally there. Whose responsibility is it? Is it the homeowner to do that? Or is it the window company who advises you about that?

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[00:31:35] Eric Goranson: So when you go to pull the permit for adding new windows, they're generally gonna wanna see a drawing of where the windows are. Structural engineer, stamped drawings for that, because it's not only just going in there. Okay. I'm cutting a hole in the side of the house and I'm putting a new header in and I'm figuring out that span.

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[00:32:21] Eric Goranson: Now they have to do those calculations. So many times it's like a garage. You know, if you do, if you build your own garage, when you get around that, outside of that garage door, there is nailing schedules where they say, okay, you need to use three quarter inch plywood or half inch plywood or steel moment frames or whatever to keep that structure.

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[00:33:08] Eric Goranson: And if you break that coming down, there could be significant load on some, two by fours there that you didn't calculate. And now you've got a header that could be. Boeing, it could take out a window. It could cause some other structural issues. So anytime you're changing structure like that, unless it's just a single one story house and you're doing a quick little window thing.

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[00:33:36] Intro: Interesting.

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[00:33:45] Eric Goranson: you've got, here's the thing.

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[00:33:55] Caroline Blazovsky: slightly it's gonna be, it's gonna be slightly bigger, a little [00:34:00] bigger and obviously taller because it's a slider versus a

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[00:34:07] Eric Goranson: You would need to have engineered drawings for that in almost every municipality. That's gonna require a building permit for that. They're gonna want. A quick drawing to show what that load calculation is and how that's gonna transfer down because you are reframing that structure. So technically that's that's where they'd wanna see that mm-hmm few hundred bucks they'll come out there and could be a, you know, could be a few thousand bucks depending on what they have to do, of course.

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[00:34:50] Eric Goranson: You want a structural engineer to come out and give you a report on the correct way to fix that. Maybe it's steel posts, maybe it's carbon [00:35:00] fiber strips. Maybe it's a new foundation wall. All of that should be looked at by a structural engineer as well. Just like you would, uh, a retaining wall outside.

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[00:35:19] Caroline Blazovsky: Lots to do lots to think

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[00:35:22] Caroline Blazovsky: most homeowners, most homeowners don't know where to get a structural engineer is our website.

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[00:35:29] Eric Goranson: go? You know, here's the thing. I have always gotten my structural engineers from my building designers that I've worked with in the past, just because I have those relationships. You can jump on to Google and find one in your area and have them, you know, call around to a few of 'em mm-hmm , you know, I like the smaller, independent ones versus some of the big, huge firms for doing stuff.

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[00:36:21] Eric Goranson: See you

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[00:36:39] Eric Goranson: structure.

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[00:37:04] Eric Goranson: What,

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[00:37:06] Caroline Blazovsky: you just say? Yeah. A helical pier. I'm learning

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[00:37:26] Eric Goranson: And there's a meter on there that tells you what the force is of the power that they're screwing that down into. And maybe it'll say up to, you know, make up a number up to a thousand foot pounds, then that comes up with a steel bracket. And that is the support. So if you've got a house that's sinking, you can go out and put those every six, eight feet around the house and lift from that and actually lift that house up.

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[00:38:02] Intro: It's jacked up.

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[00:38:24] Eric Goranson: Helical pier as the Jack point. So you're gonna lift from that and then you can put a bracket onto it and hold it. And, uh, that won't move anymore. It is just solid as a rock. Yes. Word,

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[00:38:40] Eric Goranson: PR. And there's a lot of people that do those. It used to be something that was, you know, they can be expensive.

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[00:39:07] Eric Goranson: Hey Caroline, I'm here in the music in the back. You know what that means? It's time to go.

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[00:39:14] Eric Goranson: permits, follow it. Be legal. See what you can do. It's not a bad thing. I'm Eric chief and I'm Caroline B and you've been listening to

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