Today brought a mid-morning trip down to DC so that I could get a permit for our window replacement job (starting tomorrow!). People who've lived in the District put the fear of God into me about how long the whole permit process would take, and how this would be my introduction to the bureaucracy that will rule my life from here on out, but the reality was almost the exact opposite: from start to finish, getting the permit took me about an hour.

Our new house is in the historic district of Capitol Hill, so any work on the front-facing portion of the house requires not just a permit, but also a sign-off by the Historic Preservation Office. So I started off there, info in hand, to present my case for window replacement to the officer assigned to our district. I had to wait about 10 minutes for her to get out of a staff meeting, but once she was available, her involvement in the process took about three minutes. She asked to see pictures of the front of the house and what kind of windows we were using as replacements, and then after explaining that our two-over-two windows might not be historically accurate, she granted the permit. (She actually first asked whether I'd consider putting one-over-one windows into the main bays, but I told her that our contractor had already had the windows made and was ready to install them. She then wondered what I would have done had she not granted the permit, and I reminded her that that's why I had had this entire conversation with her a month ago, via email, and that she had reassured me that two-over-two windows were fine.) That done, I headed over to the main DCRA office for the final sign-off and permit.

I had been told that homeowners could short-cut a lot of the red tape at DCRA by using the Homeowners' Center, so that's where I headed. I discovered a small three-person office next door to the main permit desk, an office in which I was the only person other than the three DCRA staffers. The man who processed my permit application had me run across the hall to get a signature from the Construction Inspection Branch which would prevent problems with the installation of a DirecTV dish (something we decided to add onto the permit for the sake of completeness), then run downstairs to pay the $33 fee, and by the time I came back -- probably about 20 or 25 minutes total -- my permit was waiting for me. It really was a cinch. (It actually was enough of a cinch that I braved the DC Department of Motor Vehicles, and came out with a new DC driver's license about 90 minutes later.)

I'm sure that more complicated construction or renovation plans might take longer to get cleared, but I have to say that this whole process was easy as pie. And with all of our new neighbors telling us how quickly contractors get stop-work orders placed on them without valid permits in Capitol Hill, it was worth every penny to know that our windows will be in by the end of tomorrow.