Selling Your Home with Interesting Code Violations or Un-Permitted Changes

In the course of the many years you have lived in your home, whether knowingly or unknowingly, you might have done additions, renovations or simply changes to your house that violate city or county building codes, or are un-permitted where a building permit was required. Maybe someone in your family is a handyman and did some work for you quickly. Or it would have cost too much and taken too long to obtain permits properly so you opted not to do so. It could be you hired an unlicensed contractor to save costs and they didn’t know the codes. Maybe you simply didn’t know about or misunderstood the building permit requirements (there are so many of them and they can get complicated, it’s not easy to keep track). Or your property is very dated and some changes did not get grandfathered-in by the building code. You might have bought it as-is and the previous house inspector didn’t catch something. Maybe it was not intentional and just a result of some do-it-yourself or poor quality work in the past. There can be so many reasons.

Don’t panic. Code violations can be fixed. They don’t have to be fixed either. It depends on your circumstances. If you want to live there much longer, and the changes to your house are relatively big, for your own safety, health and sanity, and to prevent neighbors from complaining, you might want to consider fixing them. If you are thinking about selling the house, house inspections will point out these violations and it can impact your ability to sell it, because your buyers might need to get a mortgage and the home inspection report will impact the house appraisal, and therefore the buyers’ ability to get the mortgage. If they cannot get the proper mortgage amount because the house appraisal value is too low, they may not be able to buy your house.

Is My House Up “To Code”?

Obviously to check this, you can go to your city or county’s building permit / planning department. In this day and age, most of them have put up this information on their website so the public can easily find out what it is. To find out your city or county’s website, a simple Google search will do.

Some common changes that, if you didn’t receive a proper permit for, are most likely not up to code:

Additions

Extra living space is no doubt desirable. If you have created any additional living space to your house – a sun room, an extra bedroom, an in-law, a converted garage, a basement – and you never obtained a permit for them, chances are that they are not up to code. Or, even if they are built based on the building code, they are still considered un-permitted and can still cause you trouble when you try to sell the house, or if they are discovered by the building department. Not to mention, unpermitted additions cannot count towards your square footage when you want to sell your home.

We at Journey Home regularly look at buying properties and have seen many, rather interesting, additions. Quite a few times, we’ve seen people pouring concrete on their patio and put up additional concrete walls to encase it to make an additional room. Once, we saw a house where the entire 300 sq feet or so of a deck was converted into a living room! Another time, we saw a garage that was converted – not into 1 but 2 bedrooms, with some wooden partition between the two. While creative, these are not up-t0-code modifications.

Partitions

Partitions can be desirable if they section off spaces inside your home for different purposes. Not all of them violate building code, like for example, you added a wall to create a little office. Some of these could be though. If you’ve added a partition to create a living space, like a bedroom, and yet this space does not provide ventilation or other code requirements, however, you are most likely not in compliance. Many people think about doing such partitions to create spaces either for themselves, their families, or to rent them out or do AirBnB – but doing so will put your tenants in danger.

Once we saw a home that was transformed specifically to take in as many AirBnB guests as possible, with partitions being used to allow each guest a little bit of privacy. Yet these individual spaces do not comply with code. In some cases, these violations only cause discomfort – like when a bedroom conjoins another so for a guest to go to the bathroom, they have to go through another guest’s room. But others are far more serious – like lacking a window. Safety concern!

Wall removal

Open-space design creates a modern home feeling and is also often used to increase the perception that the house is large and roomy. To create an open-space design, some walls might have been removed. Most of the time, wall removal requires a permit and that you adhere to code and pass home inspections. There are walls that are load bearing, and others that are non-load bearing. If you did this un-permitted and you are not sure if your walls were removed based on building code, and you happened to have removed a load bearing wall, you can damage your house a great deal.

In one home we looked at, a load bearing wall was removed and nothing replaced it in its place (usually a beam would be installed to replace a removed load bearing wall). The owner didn’t even know the difference between a non-load bearing wall and a load bearing one! They were attempting to create an open space design to increase the appeal of their house shortly before selling it. Luckily, the house didn’t collapse right away. Other structural components of the house were holding it up. But in the long term, this will surely cause a problem if the house is not properly held up.

Selling Your House “As Is”

If you are going to live in your house for many more years, by all means please go get these violations fixed for your own safety and for long term livability. But if you are considering selling your house soon, please know that code violations do not need to stop or delay you from doing so. There are direct buyers, like we are here at Journey Home, that can legally and will take your properties in any existing, as is, condition, including code violations (however interesting they are) and un-permitted changes. We do not mind any area of fixes. Once we acquire your properties, we will make the needed repairs, obtain proper permits and bring the house up to code. You don’t have to spend the time and money to make these fixes before selling to us. Please know that that’s an option for you.