Among the information that I disclosed to the current owner was that I had a kitchen fire at 143 Fearing Street during the time that I owned the property. Although I didn’t sell the house until the summer of 2009, it was that fire in the winter of 2002 that caused me to lose the property. The damage to the house was not bad. It was a stove top fire that burned up into the range-hood and scorched the wall behind the stove. But the real damage came from the Amherst Building Inspector, the Amherst fire inspector, and Liberty Mutual fire insurance company. While the building was still burning I had a decision to make. I needed to decide if I could put out the fire myself or if I needed to call the fire department. In retrospect I should have let the building burn to the ground instead of letting all of those people into my house.
When the fire department arrived, they chopped a hole through the wall into the shower behind it. After the wall was chopped out, one of the tenants pointed out that he could then move the pots on the stove while taking a shower. The damage caused by the fire department meant that I also had to repair the bathroom in addition to repairing the kitchen. While the fire was going on it was terrifying stand outside and listen to the firemen plan what they would do if my home were fully engulfed in flames. They talked about cutting down my trees to prevent the fire from spreading to adjacent buildings. In all the fire was put out quickly, but the real damage was done by the Amherst Building Inspector. I am still unclear why it was legal for that woman to enter my house without my permission. It turns out that I am not the only one who hates her.
Getting the house fixed was almost impossible. Every contractor I called told me the same thing. They would not work on my house due to Amherst Inspection Services. One contractor was ready to come over and bid on the job, but when I gave him the address in Amherst he hung up on me. Three of the contractors who would talk with me told me stories about work they had done that had to be ripped out and done again because of Amherst Building Inspection. In total I received six letters from contractors who refused the job. What I learned is that the judgement of the Amherst Building Inspector is frequently wrong, but that contractors did what she said because it was less expensive than fighting her in court. Finally, in order to get the house fixed I did many of the repairs myself with the aid of a handyman who was willing to work at an hourly rate.
The process of getting the house fixed was laborious. We could do a little bit of work and then we would need to call for another building inspection. Then after each call it might take them a week or two to get to the house so we could do a little more work. And every time they came, they told us there were additional things that we needed to do. I understood why that contractor hung up on me. There is no way that a contractor could bid on fixing a house in Amherst. There seemed to be no end to the process. Worse, when I called my insurance company they told me that they would only pay for repair to the property, not the upgrades that the Amherst Building Inspector was having me do. I argued that having these upgrades was required for closing the walls and completing the repair. I still think that Liberty Mutual should have paid for this work. Now I call a lawyer whenever I need to negotiate with an insurance company.
As one example of how the repair went, I was told that there needed to be fire blocking put in the wall behind the stove. So, I broke out the plaster in the bedroom wall above the kitchen directly above the stove and I installed this fire blocking in the three open spaces between the studs. Then the Building Inspector came back and told me that I needed fire blocking along the entire length of the wall that the stove was on, about sixteen foot of wall. So, I had to rip the plaster off that entire side wall of the room all the way to the corner of the building, behind a closet and around the corner to install the fire blocking. It was January at the time and that was my bedroom. I remember how bitter cold it was sleeping there with the wall open. I then called Building Inspection again and they said that I had done a good job installing the fire blocking but it needed “smoke caulking” before I could close the wall. The next day I got the smoke caulking and installed it, but it then took building inspection another ten days to get back and verify what I had done. All I could do was wait. I couldn’t install the insulation or the drywall until it was inspected. Couldn’t they just tell me that I needed fire-blocking in the entire wall and smoke calking the first time they were there? In all, it took a month of sleeping in a freezing room to complete what could have been one day of work.
And it went on and on like this trying to fix the building. Each block of wood, each nail, and every wire needed to be inspected. The damage from a small kitchen fire took me nearly two years to fix. I always thought that I was doing more than they were asking, but it never seemed to be enough. There was a house in Greenfield MA that I had visited years before, where a fire had taken place but the building had not been repaired very well. The price of that property had to be reduced because it had a pervasive odor of smoke. I was not going to let that happen to my house. While repairing the wall behind the stove I threw away any wood that had any smoke damage and replaced it with new wood. On that wall behind the stove I installed fire-code sheetrock in place of regular sheetrock so that another fire it would not burn into the wall. I also had a new stainless steel range hood installed above the stove with a restaurant grade fire suppression system so that if there was ever a fire again it would be automatically be put out. I found it was an almost impossible task to fix the house while placating Amherst Building Inspection. All I was trying to do was keep my home.
One of the pieces of stupidity from Amherst Building Inspection had to do with the window in the small upstairs bedroom. The Amherst Building Inspector told me that the window in that room did not meet fire egress standards. She said that I could not have a tenant in that room until that window was replaced by one at least 36 inches tall. What I understood from her was that the fire in my kitchen required that every room in my hundred year old house needed to be brought up to current building code. This was a lie. But not knowing it was a lie, I did what I was told. I evicted that tenant. I then called an architect and had him do drawings for changing the roof-line on the front of the building so that the dormer could be expanded and a larger window installed. As part of that process the architect had me break out part of that wall to understand the current building construction. Speaking with the Amherst Building Inspector she told me that if I wanted to challenge the need to replace that window than what I needed was an independent code review. What the code reviewer told me is that unless there was actually work being done to that window that space was grandfathered as a bedroom. All told, the loss of rental income, the $860 that I paid to the architect for the preliminary drawings, the $1,000 that I paid for the independent code review, and the construction cost to rip out and replace that section of wall cost me about $4,000. And all of this money was spent just to demonstrate that the Amherst Building Inspector was wrong. I still feel bad about that tenant. I feel that I broke a promise to her by disrupting in her graduate studies, even though there was nothing that I could do.
Speaking with an attorney about what had happened he told me that what the Amherst Building Inspector had broken the law. Nowhere is it in the statute that homeowners are required to get independent code reviews for the work being done on their buildings. Her requiring this expensive review was a compensation for her just not knowing the code. It is her burden to demonstrate the relevant statute, not the homeowner’s. But like many cases in Amherst, this is another example of someone doing something illegal with no recourse that the other person can take. Before you buy 143 Fearing Street, or any home in Amherst, consider if you want to own a house in a town where it almost impossible to have the building repaired.
Another piece of stupidity had to do with installing the range hood fire suppression system. The installation of this fire suppression system was not required by code. Still, because I included it as part of the renovation, the insurance company required that it be inspected within the two year timeline for the fire repair. The insurance company required that all town inspections be done before they would make their final payment. I called for a fire inspection a month an half before this deadline. I called again at a month. I was told that the first appointment needed to be rescheduled. I called again at two weeks. In the end, the Amherst Fire Inspector did not arrive until three weeks after the deadline. The fire suppression system had been correctly installed and he certified it working. But the Amherst Fire Inspector’s late arrival meant that I would not receive the last payment from the insurance company, a check for $3,000. I appealed to Liberty Mutual but I had missed their due date.
In 2003, months before that fire, I had lost my job in Springfield as a computer network administrator due to downsizing. Two years before that, I needed to close my business in downtown Amherst, in part due to the harassment of Amherst parking enforcement. And then on the night of the fire, the Amherst Building Inspector told me that I could no longer rent the basement rooms at 143 Fearing Street that I had built a decade before. So in that night, in addition to being out of work and having no other source of income, I lost the rent I had been receiving from two and later three rented rooms. In the words of the Amherst Building Inspector, “Those rooms are not human habitable space. And if I find anyone using those rooms, I am going to bring you to court.” The previous Amherst Building Inspector told me that he knew what I was doing but he never threatened me. In all, the upgrades required by Amherst Building Inspection cost me a total of $16,000 above what was covered by my insurance. Although I sold 143 Fearing Street six years before the time that I am writing this, I am still making payments on my credit cards for that fire today, and the majority of that is due to Amherst’s Building Inspection.