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In the Texas town where I build low-income, single-family houses, as a contractor, I must hire licensed vendors for electrical, plumbing, and mechanical work. All the work done by the hired vendors must then be again inspected by the city. 1) If I were building my OWN house, I could get permits to do all the work otherwise required by licensed vendors. 2) If I build in the ETJ (extra territorial jurisdiction), I don’t need permits, even if the city will engulf that part of the county tomorrow. 3) Car mechanics routinely do electrical, plumbing and “mechanical” (no pun intended) work on cars, with an equal amount of consequence, yet they don’t need to be licensed. I’m not throwing rocks at the electrical, plumbing, or mechanical trades, but isn’t there a double standard here? My houses are 1200 square feet or less, and installing electrical, plumbing, and mechanical appointments, according to code and subject to inspection, is a no-brainer. I would like there to be an intermediate permit strategy that allows guys like me to wire, plumb, and heat/cool small houses without the expense of hiring the licensed vendors. I’m certainly not competing with these vendors. After all, no one builds for the poor. My little families can’t afford the high-dollar vendors. I would never presume to wire the Chrysler Building, or plumb the Hoover Dam. I would be interested in anyone’s take on this. Thanks in advance.
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How about attepting to qualify (and pay the fees for) each of the required licenses, thataway the bureaus won't be deprived of the pork they need to sustain their jiggly little bellies, and you won't have to buck the system to have control of your modest projects.
*Most likely to qualify for the licenses you'd have to apprentice in each trade for five years.There's been alot of posts and disagreements here on the validity of licensing in the past couple of weeks. My take...it's silly to require the work to be done by licensed trades and then to also require the work be inspected.
*Ryan- My above suggestion, made part tongue-in-cheek, part earnestly, would prove viable only in a state where the licensing rules allowed for interpretive breadth. What I'm thinking of mainly is a proviso excluding commercial work and perhaps a dollar or sq. ft. threshold that Dan's work could come in beneath. Perhaps a "Mechanical Systems" type license, that would subsume plumbing, elec. and HVAC could be pursued. Remembering, all this does not have to be accomplishable instantly. One could scrutinize the regs., formulate a plan for being able to validate the required experience and work towards it. Where I work, one can actually write a license description including and proscribing very specific scopes of work and then attempt to get the Registrar to approve it. Getting electrical included in such an approach would probably prove insuperably hard. Also, when the economy's good and everyone's busy anyway, it might be possible to make an arrangement with one's electrical sub, who's convinced of the uniformly high quality of one's work, to allow one to do the work. He then stops by for an hour, looks over the intall, gets $150 for his time and signs off on the job. Among honest and capable people who feel joy in the pride of work well and intelligently done, unique things are possible. Regarding the inspection of work done by licensed folks- please read "A Septic Travesty" in the tavern. All work there was done under license...
*Here, in NJ. The Home owner can take out permits and do the wiring if the work is in their primary residence and it's a single family home.The law says that the HO must do the work or supervise it being done. It's pretty common on smaller projects for the contractor to "help" the homeowner who may or may not be around at the time.The construction offices will always tell you on the phone "Make sure the home owner signes the drawings". That takes them off the hook I guess. And The inspector will always ask "how was this done?", not "How did you do this?".They know what's happening and as long as it's right, there's no problem.
*Around here it's not the bureaucrats who are the main beneficiaries of the "licensed craftsman" rules, it's the unions. You can only get an electrician's or plumber's ticket by joining the union and you can work in those trades by paying protection, er, dues, that what they call them, dues to the union so that the union president can buy a new Mercedes and they can spend the rest of the money on socialist causes. The craziest is in Quebec, where it's illegal for a home-owner to change a light-switch or a ceiling fixture (I don't know how well these laws are obeyed). I understand the politician's delema of worrying about unemployed waiters going around wiring houses without permits or inspections (and probably without paying taxes too); but, like someone else said, wiring/plumbing small houses is not rocket science: with a proper permit, that's based on a plan and follow-on inspections, the small general contractor should be permitted to do his own. PS, in theory, I can take out a permit to do the electrical to support a reno or improvement; however, as soon as the inspector (who is a union electrician) figures this out, the chances of ever passing an inspection are nil.