You might have noticed the words “demolition” and “listed building” in the previous blog post. It’s usually pretty hard to get demolition permits for listed buildings, as the whole idea of listed buildings is that they must be conserved. Funny enough, I don’t have a demolition permit for our building.

Before things get out of hand and you call the police, let me state that I do have a building permit for it. However, the existing permit is being revamped by us together with an architect, and naturally also with the building control department, who is in the end the one issuing the permits. So it’s not final yet. The general rule is that no work on a building shall commence before the permits are in order, and the building project has started officially.

But to save my sorry ass I use a permit which trumps everything: after I conducted a proper investigation on the health of the current structures of the building, it became quite clear that the upper parts of the building are an immediate health hazard. And I do not mean like you’d get a bad cough by living in it, I mean loose-pieces-of-wood-pierced-by-3-inch-nails-perforating-my-kids-heads-when-they-walk-past-it hazardous.

You see, we live on Reposaari, the Nantucket of Finland as I started humourously to describe it, and there’s a lot of wind here from the open sea. Last autumn and winter came with strong wind gusts, more frequent than normal, bringing down various pieces from the building roof. I’ll let the following pictures explain the situation.

Does it look like a parent would keep this around, waiting for a piece of paper, while a 5-year-old and a 2-year-old run around in the garden? Gewalt mit DeWALT, I say!