One of my goals for this year was to build a backyard shed and front walkway. While I was able to finish the walkway months ago, the shed took longer due to holdups in the zoning permit and then the excessively long wait-list for the shed. I lucked out in that because of the pandemic, our Certificate of Appropriateness that was set to expire in January, was automatically extended for an extra 6 months.
To recap, the Certificate of Appropriateness is essentially a special permit we need because we live in a Raleigh Historic District. The Historic Development Commission reviews plans for basically anything that we want to do to the exterior of our house or property to ensure that it aligns with the Secretary of the Interior’s Standards for Rehabilitation, and is consistent with the character of the neighborhood.
For the shed, the main constraints were that it needed to be wood siding (not plywood), and have a wood window. This meant that we couldn’t just pick something out from the Home Depot catalog, we basically needed something custom built. We found that several neighbors had used Carolina Yard Barns, which left us confident that we would be able to get one of their sheds approved, but I still needed to also order a custom window because they don’t offer a wood window option. So we had a window sitting in our front entryway for 3 months while we waited for the shed to be built.
The build date that we were quoted was initially April 13th but that got pushed back until May 6th because of rain delays. And even then, the build that was theoretically only supposed to take a full day didn’t get completed until May 11th because it kept raining.
Above is how it looked when Carolina Yard Barns was done with it.
And then I needed to caulk and prime and paint it to match the house. I still need to touch up the paint a bit, but we’ve already started moving some things in there and it’s so nice to have our front entryway and dining room back, just in time for people maybe coming to our house again someday soon.
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