Ode to challenges

If you decide to build a house in your backyard, you will have your own challenges. Here is my list.

CHALLENGE #1: SEWAGE

First, I had to figure out where and how to connect sewage pipes. My closest sewage manhole* was in the middle of the driveway (see #1 on the picture below). I suspect I could connect the sewage line there but it would mean digging the sewage trench all the way from the middle of the backyard, around the house, and across the driveway. In the other words: a lot of digging, a lot of piping, and a lot of concrete, hence a lot of money. 

Sewage line options.

I asked around and found out that most homes must have a sewage outlet in the back of the house and my house was not an exception (see #2 on the picture above). The only questions were (a) whether the inlet pipe was big enough and (b) if there was a sufficient slope from the ADU to the junction (the sewage is supposed to go down at certain degree). The latter question was not a big issue because if the slope was not steep enough, I could install a pump to help with the drain flow. It would've cost extra money, but nothing to lose the sleep over. The pipe size was more critical, but fortunately, it was okay.

CHALLENGE #2: SITE ACCESS

As you can see on the map, access to my backyard is very limited (it's less than 5 feet when coming from the street on either side). The back of my property faces a utility road belonging to an HOA community. That would be a better access point. Using the utility road required removing part of the fence (no biggie) and getting permission from the HOA authorities. That's exactly what we did. It took a bit of convincing, but permission was granted and we could use that side to bring bigger machinery for the site preparation (grading and such). We still did not have enough clearance for the crane when the roof trusses came in, so they had to be brought in and installed by hand.

CHALLENEGE #3: PROPERTY LINES

As I found out, for some reason, the original builder of my primary house installed my back fence incorrectly, cutting me short on one side by about 3 feet. And I needed these 3 feet. Badly! So when designing the plans, I assumed that we could reclaim that property (there was nothing but some shrubs on the side of the utility road there so should not have been an issue), but once the house frame was done and we needed to put the fence at the proper property line, the HOA administration decided to make our lives difficult (not sure why). It took weeks of back and forth, many letters, about $1,500 in fees for the official assessment by a surveyor, and over $3K for the installation of the new fence to which the HOA contributed zilch (good for them).

CHALLENGE #4: INTERNET

So, you build a house in the backyard and that's great. How do you get it connected to the Internet? My primary house is wired (adding wired internet to all rooms was one of the first and best projects I did when I moved in) and I would also like to have a wired connection in the new house addition. After doing a bit of research and talking to network people, the most reasonable option was to connect a CAT5E** cable to the network switch in my primary house, run it over the attic, down through the wall, through the backyard (inside of a conduit), up the wall of the new house, through the attic, and connect it to the network switch there, from which the cables would take the signal to the rooms. We'll see how it works out when I turn the network on over there.

There were more challenges as the construction project was going on, but they were not major, so I will cover them later.

* Excuse me if I am not using the right terminology because I have no idea what some of these things are called (and at this point, I don't really care).

** Yeah, I've head about CAT6, but we hardly managed to push CAT5E through the conduits, so CAT6 would've been even harder, and at this point, CAT5E works just fine for me.

NEXT: DID YOU SAY, SIX MONTHS?

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