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Remember the days when if you owned the land, you could build about anything on it? Well, those days were long gone before we were even born so once we got things down on paper, we had to endure the building permit process.

What we want to do is fast forward to the fun part – the steel-cutting- floor-polishing-room-decorating phase. Peering over the blueprints and filling out paperwork is a pain in the neck and a major enthusiasm buster. Unfortunately, there are forms to fill out, days to sit by waiting to see if you did it right, then redoing it right, etc.

Everyone who has ever built anything that needs approved wants to tell you their “Building Permit Horror Story.” Just going to the Tulsa County Annex, filled us with dread, but we lucked upon Supervisor Teresa who took a real interest in our project. We had been researching this for about 6 months and had drawn, and redrawn the plans so many times that it felt like we had already built a subdivision of container houses.

We had a small hitch in our plan after learning that the 7- to 14-day estimated permit process was going to be extended because we would need to get an official engineering report. So it was back to the drawing board as we called our architect friend, Grady Whitaker, who helped find us an engineer with the right credentials to meet the regulations needed for permit approval.

It was just a slight bump on our construction journey. On  09/09/2011, the Bright Container House was officially permitted to proceed.

More posts to come.