A Little Back Ground

So apparently the process to buy 20 acres in wine country is full of hurdles and set backs.  Late in the process I finally found the word that I needed; TENACITY. Patience would have been a good one as well, but that has never been a strength of mine.
Miles and first looked at the property in October, made an offer in November and had an accepted offer in December.  Easy enough, right?
Then came the inspections. A general house inspection, well, septic, chimney, radon test, and of course the random county septic inspection that almost ended the entire project. So about 1k later, we knew that the house was not falling down and we could flush the toilets! After inspections came the appraisal from our bank.  That took another 3 weeks and luckily came back favorable for us. Then it was time to deal with the county planning department.
After taking a year and a half of interior design classes at PCC, creating lots of project boards and countless Auto Cad drafts, I was super excited to be the designer for the project.  Spending time drafting, moving walls and finally creating my much coveted mud room, the plans were ready to send off to the county.  Due to the existing architecture of the house, there are only a handful of internal load barring walls. Which means that we are able to have a very open floor plan and we don't have a need for a structural engineer.
Everything was submitted after a few drafts and me learning some much needed architectural standard language and notations in construction documents. At this point we had to push out closing a couple of weeks to allow the county time to review the plans.  No problems and everything was ticking along.
Then a week before closing the county asked us where the septic inspection documentation was.  We passed on the report, no problem. The planning office informed us that in fact we had to pay the county inspector ($554) to certify it, which takes a few weeks. WHAT?!!!  Sam, our general contractor, and I paid a visit to the county planning office to grease the wheels with anything necessary.  The lovely part of moving to a rural county is 1) County officials are actually helpful 2) There is literally one person who does this job and she actually had an open schedule 3) There is a willingness to bend the rules a bit if you are nice. I was accused at one point of trying to bribe a county official (with beer) but I'm fairly certain that if this is the worst accusation in my life, I'll be doing alright.
That week found Miles and I digging, a bit aimlessly, in a large field for pieces to the septic system. I will skip the gory details but I can say that I now know way more then I ever wanted to about the intricate workings of on site waste management systems. But we passed the inspection, the report was expedited and we were good! Permits were picked up and paid for, we were officially started!
Oh, wait.  Then there was the issue of the fire marshall...