I'm not familiar with CA laws, rules or regulations, so this may not be of any help at all. One possibility that came to mind was that perhaps you could rent a "storage unit" of some kind that would be in a "commercial" location that could be an address you could use should you have to perform any of those repairs where you need to take an action to your "shop" to work on it. Your just happening to forget to stop by the "shop" and accidentally bringing the action on home with you... well, accidents happen, right?!! Just don't let it be obvious to the neighbors what you're doing. (Blankets and moving pads can hide stuff really well.) You still have the "home-based" business. You just don't bring any work home with you anymore... technically. It may not work, but I've known of other piano types doing similar things in other states. Best of luck, Brian From: frowninverter at gmail.com To: pianotech at ptg.org Date: Thu, 15 Jul 2010 02:47:38 -0700 Subject: [pianotech] Probelm with Business License. Please help! Hi everyone, I just moved here to California a couple of weeks ago, and am working on getting my business plan assembled so I can soon start my piano tech business. As part of that process, I gave a call over to my county to find out how much a business license would be (I live outside the city limits). They told me $415. But then they asked where I would be operating my business, so I explained to them that it would be a home-based business where I will perform a majority of my services at my clients’ location and that once in a while I would take a part home to work on using manual hand tools which are pretty quiet, and that my business would not generate any additional traffic, etc. She then asked me for my address, so I gave it to her. Just as soon as I gave her my address she announced that I could not run my business where I live! She said the property is zoned as agriculture, and because I would occasionally bring something home with me to work on that it would be considered a commercial operation which would not be allowed under the property’s zoning. Any thoughts…besides moving or pretending I didn’t hear what the lady said? <grin> I’ve left messages for the city to find out if I lived there if I would run into the same problem, but they haven’t called back. In your experience, am I likely to run into this problem living in a city? We are planning to move into a city in the near future. But with this goofy problem, we might be moving sooner rather than later. <grin> Thanks for your advice! Warmly, Hy frowninverter at gmail.com _________________________________________________________________ Hotmail is redefining busy with tools for the New Busy. Get more from your inbox. http://www.windowslive.com/campaign/thenewbusy?ocid=PID28326::T:WLMTAGL:ON:WL:en-US:WM_HMP:042010_2 -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: <http://ptg.org/pipermail/pianotech.php/attachments/20100715/22cdfcff/attachment.htm>
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