Siding and windows in Cleveland Heights

CitizenServe is the portal and that Thursday is the schedule. Most exterior changes here are board items: additions, windows, siding, roofs, decks, solar. Booking a start date without a board date is how a dumpster arrives ahead of an approval. Review of work already done is charged at three times the fee, which is the city saying in money that it wants to see the elevation before the elevation changes.

Registration is the second counter. The city takes a $10,000 surety bond on its own form and liability insurance naming the city as additional insured, typically $100,000/$300,000 bodily injury and $50,000 property damage. An owner of an occupied one- to three-family may pull a homeowner permit for some work, may not connect to public utilities under it, and cannot put hired trades beneath it.

The photographs on this page are from our own jobs on Cleveland’s east side. Each caption says what is in the frame and when. None is presented as work in Cleveland Heights.

This is the plaster-on-lath side of the county. Early-twentieth-century houses, many of them two-families, on tight lots with original wood windows and brick chimneys. Pulling a sash out of plaster is slow, and the walls behind old cladding are the ones that hide knob-and-tube once opened. Density matters too: a two-family shares a party wall with somebody who is home, and a narrow lot decides where staging can actually sit.

The estimate answers to that condition rather than to a square-foot average. What is under the old skin is unknown until it is off, so it is written as a change order instead of a guess. Openings that stay the same size keep the file short, while enlarging one adds framing and another look from the board, because the elevation approved is the elevation that gets built. Pre-1978 paint brings lead-safe work as its own line where painted surfaces are disturbed.