Phyllis,
Originally Posted by
Phyllis Hunter
I'm in the County of Volusia, City of Daytona Beach, FL, if that helps.
Howdy, next door neighbor. I'm in Ormond Beach.
Glad to have someone nearby on this board. Welcome to the sandbox.
It has to do with the bedroom window egress compliance and, if existing units are greandfathered in what year does that grandfathering begin.
"in what year does that grandfathering begin"
Well ... for me it began in 1986 ... don't know about the other "grandfathers".
There are four things you will learn here soon enough:
1) That we need to know as much about codes as possible even though we cannot enforce the codes (unless you are a municipal inspector, and in that case you can only enforce the code, nothing more).
2) That we do not do "code inspections", yet do 'code inspections' as it was (or should have been) "built to code".
3) That safety does not read the above codes and does not adhere to code change dates.
4) That code is minimum and, being as we are not code inspectors, we are not stopped from addressing 'more than minimum'.
Now, back to your question about egress windows ...
Will the fire care when egress windows were required to be egress window sizes?
Not on someone's life, no.
While I don't know for sure (I've only been up here in Ormond Beach 2 years now, up from South Florida) but I think that most, if not all, the rest of Florida (excepting South Florida with the South Florida Building Code) was under the Standard Building codes before going to the Florida Building codes in 2002.
Originally, when egress windows first came in, their size was 4.3 sf instead of the current 5.7 sf.
All that said, the house we had in South Florida had window sill heights of around 48" with awnings windows, neither of which fits within egress window requirements - that house was built in 1975. I've seen, and inspected, houses down there with window sill heights at 60" and even higher, no way they meet egress requirements - typically built in the 1950's and 1960's.
Would it have mattered during a fire whether or not those windows were allowed 'at the time of construction'? Not really.
When were egress windows *REQUIRED*?
Define "required".
Egress windows were *REQUIRED*
when the first person needed to escape or be rescued from a bedroom - regardless of whether or not the local building department considered egress windows important.