Since arriving there has been no shortage of people willing to give us tips and warnings about the house renovation process based on their own experiences. While this has been very welcome and we would be clueless about how to proceed otherwise, the volume of information you need to absorb in a short period of time is huge. Plus, a lot of the advice we have received has been totally contradictory.
The main difficulty seems to be that there’s no correct way of doing things here. In Europe there are building codes, procedures and safety nets set in place and there’s one way to do things. In Morocco there are at least three ways to do things. One, play totally by the rules (although it’s not always clear what they are) and be forced to make changes to your house that are completely arbitrary and defy logic while at the same time taking a very long time to get the correct (and more expensive) permissions. Two, get a simple building permission and a dodgy builder, proceed exactly as you wish and then pay lots of baksheesh to the appropriate people later on to get the building approved and/or your license to operate a business there. Or three, take the middle path where you try to do as much as possible correctly until you reach the point where your business plan/budget/building’s character will be compromised, then find the grey area in between.
Everyone we’ve spoken to has had to find ways around ‘rules’, but the difficulty is in knowing which ones are flexible and which are going to cause you problems.
Take the second staircase rule for instance. Since we were told about it we’ve discussed the problem with others who cite the various examples of other businesses in the medina who only have one entry/exit route and no-one has had the rule enforced. The layout of traditional medina houses makes the addition of a second staircase – especially in the smaller properties – disastrous aesthetically and space-wise.
The other problem we’ve come up against was raised by the same team as the staircase issue – the engineer we liked and his dodgy partner that we didn’t. We brought them back for a second meeting, hoping to get the engineer on his own to ask whether he would work solo as we didn’t have a good feeling about his associate. We did manage to pose the question and as the reply was that they only come as a double act we’ve since decided not to use them. Anyway, at the second meeting the arrival of Mr Dodgy was again the portent of bad news to come. He swept in under a cloud of cigarette smoke, his heavily-lidded eyes half closed and yellow teeth flashing in a grimace that was supposed to pass for a smile. “Your kitchen isn’t big enough,” he said without preamble. He then proceeded to tell us that we had to turn one of the salons off the courtyard (crucial dining space) into the kitchen instead. When we immediately vetoed that idea his other suggestion was to extend the balcony above and build a wall out into the courtyard to add an extra square metre of kitchen space. Apart from the fact that this would be a very expensive exercise that would only create a small amount of extra space, it would completely ruin the lines of the house interior and compromise the original character of the building.
We explained to him again that the kitchen would be over two levels, connected by a dumb waiter and that we were already extending the downstairs kitchen as much as we could. He said he would show our plans and measurements to someone at the appropriate office and ask whether the split level kitchen would be acceptable.
All of this discussion was because of an arbitrary ratio decided by someone in an office that requires restaurants to have a kitchen space that is a certain percentage of their total dining area. We had already found this out ourselves when we obtained the restaurant requirements paperwork, and had gone back to the office to query the percentages, sure that there had been an administrative error. This is why we thought there had been a mistake: restaurants serving less than 30 covers need to have a kitchen that is 55 per cent of their dining area; between 30-50 covers you need 50 per cent; and for more than 50 covers you only need 40 per cent. So, the bigger the restaurant, the smaller the kitchen you are required to have. Baffled by this total lack of logic, Vincent asked the suit at the Centre Regionale d’Investissment to check the figures but was assured they were correct. “But that makes it very difficult to follow the rules,” Vincent protested. “I know, they are very ‘particulier’ (odd),” the suit replied. “That is how it’s written but commonly there are ways around everything. With baksheesh everything can be done, that is how it works.”
Astonished that someone who makes the rules would so readily admit that they are meant to be broken, we also learnt from this that the percentages had been set deliberately out of achievable range to force baksheesh payments in order to comply with them.
From this we’ve concluded firstly that our original plan of playing everything straight is actually impossible and secondly, the game is not meant to be played that way anyway. That’s also why it’s quite difficult for people who’ve been through the same process to give advice – every situation is different and negotiating the rules particular to your own project requires following your instincts rather than having the answers in black and white.
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