Hello all. :) we redid our kitchen 2 years ago. (Still working in the details, actually - we're slow movers.) our house is on a corner lot, and our kitchen and living room (front of the house) faces directly north. When we redid our kitchen, we got the proper permits, etc. we wanted to put a deck off the kitchen, and the building department told us to go ahead and put a door in for it since we had everything torn out anyway, so we did. (We knew it was going to be at least a year before we put the deck on.)

Fast forward to now - the building inspector has told us twice that there would be no problems putting the deck on where we want it to go. (We gave him preliminary plans for the deck - which would be 12 feet deep - to see if everything was in order before we actually applied for the permit.)

3 weeks ago, we finalized everything and took the plans in to get the permit, and we were told we couldn't put it where we wanted it to go. Our front yard is 65 feet deep, and we knew we had a 50 foot setback, so we figured we had plenty of space to put a deck on. Turns out there's a 10 foot easement, so we only have 55 feet of our own property...which means only 5 feet remain to build on.

We've been told that we can apply for a variance, but it's proving to be an interesting process, and I'm wondering if we should even bother with it. If we do, I need to come up with a reason of "undue hardship" for them to give us an 8 foot extension. I can't think of anything that would be a legit reason (that I can find) to claim that. We wanted it in the front of the house because it faces north, and because it's off the kitchen (where it makes the most sense, and we would get the most use out of it - in the back, it'll be way too hot to get any use out of it, and we'd have to go up and down the stairs to get to it any time we wanted to.)

The only thing I can seem to latch onto is the fact that there's 5 feet of property that we own that we cannot use because the house was built 5 feet from the 50 foot setback cut off. What can you build in 5 feet? (Landscaping doesn't count...walkways, flowers, etc. we're talking permanent structure here.) And apparently telling the zoning board that we put in the door because we were told more than once that there would be no problems putting a deck on won't matter. (We designed our kitchen based on this deck being a part of it - if we had known we only had 5 feet, our kitchen layout would be completely different.)

So, does anyone have examples of what we could build on the front of our house that would fall within the 5 foot parameter, that isn't basically an outdoor hallway? If not, does anyone have examples of what we could use to make our case for "undue hardship"? Because right now it seems we're up the creek without a paddle.

Thanks for any ideas or advice you all might give :)