Existing blue prints

[Antonito]

My friend needs the blueprints for his house in order to do some renovations. The previous owner didn't have them, and god only knows who the builder was (it's 30 year old house). When a different friend in Vancouver was doing this he said he went and paid for a set of copies from the city hall. My friend here tried that and they said no, no photocopies, no nothing, no matter how much he's willing to pay.

Does anyone know of any other places he could go? Is there a different branch of government he could go to?

[Tik-Tok]

I wanted the same when I bought my house a few years back, the city told me they wouldn't have anything older than 1978, the only other possible place to get them would be from the house builder if they still exist.

[Antonito]

Ah that would explain it. Not that it's a very satisfying answer. "Dur, we don't bother keeping records, so as far as we are concerned 80% of the city doesn't really exist"

What the hell is wrong with this city? The city planners past and present must be inbred cousins of the mayor or something. It's not a problem that is unique to Calgary by any means, but sometimes I look at the foresight put into stuff the city does involving infrastructure and construction in general and shake my head.

[Tik-Tok]

They didn't see a reason to keep them up until the late 70's when different bylaws started coming into effect. It's not like they decide to just throw them out after 30 years, they just never kept them in the first place back then. Once the house plan was approved, they didn't care about it. You can blame the city of 19xx-1977 for not keeping the records.

[ken-gsr]

^^werd, everything takes time to evolve. You couldn't expect everyone to think the way they do now back then. It was a different place and time. The latest bylaw came into effect in 1980 and prior to that land use there was no real reason to keep track meaningless buildings. They have all the drawings for historic buildings, but unfortunately they didn't keep the drawings for your friends 1200sqft bungalow built 50 years ago.

why doesn't your friend do what most people do, and hire an architect to do the drawings. Just because the building is already built, doesn't mean that someone couldn't measure the damn thing and put it on paper.

[Antonito]

So the city at the time didn't think it was a good idea to be able to know what it was issuing permits for? With this logic my buddy could say the house is made much more solidly than it is and pay some corrupt architect to rubber stamp it, then build some collosal add on, sell it, then not be around when the next owners die a horrible death once a heavy snowfall comes and collapses everything, all under the "watchful eye" of the city.

It's a safety issue. The whole idea of permits is that the city is making sure there aren't death traps around. So without the knowledge of what has actually been built, they are running blind on this issue.

This isn't complicated, and unless the average IQ was 50 points lower back then, it shouldn't have been hard to figure out then either

And yes my buddy can get it drawn up for him, it'd just be nice to save the time and money. Sorry he's so lazy that it offends you

[ken-gsr]

Actually you can't go add a monstrous addition on to the house. Any form of addition would require a new building permit and possibly development permit. Depending on which area he lives in he might not even be approved to do the addition.
If you are building something today, it doesn't fall under permits issued 50 years ago (let alone 1 year ago). If he want's to do an addition to his house know he will have to jump through all the hoops to make sure it is legal, and meets code and by-law requirements.

By the way, if he does build some enormous addition with out a permit (not likely because neighbors always seem to have a funny way of complaining when someone is building something with out a permit) and the house falls down and kill someone. They will find away to track down the property owner at the time of the addition and sue them. As stupid as you may think the City is - it is not hard to tell if an addition was done to a house after it was originally built.

It is not that I don’t agree with you – the City should have kept all of the permitting information from the past, but the way for applying for permits was way different back then.

[Antonito]

You've missed my point. The permit he'd have to get to do extra work would be based on drawings of the house. If the city doesn't have the original drawings, and they leave it up to my buddy to produce a new set, and he screws the system and draws something that is safe on paper but in no way represents what is truly there, and does it in such a way that a visual inspection cannot detect, then he can do whatever cost-efficient stupidity he would want. And it would all be legal unless there is a collapse, at which point him and whatever architect he payed off being charged in a court of law would be pretty crappy condolences if someone dies. Or if they just skip out on the bill and the next owner is stuck with a worthless home

This is all theoretical. No, my buddy is not going to do any of this. If he was, he wouldn't have even bothered getting a permit, seeing as how it's an interior load bearing wall and no one would be the wiser. I'm just venting because I've had to deal with the nightmares that occur from improper documentation of buildings. It sucks balls.