As soon as the tedious process of prelims approval ends, you can start gathering all the building permits you need, a step much easier and more straightforward than the previous one. The building permits are there to make sure that your final plan meets with the minimum standards required by your local city or county. The rules may be set for reasons of safety, logistics, or for environmental or other reasons.
First of all, you need to hire engineers to make sure you’re meeting the needs of your local government and help create the working drawings. The permitting process isn’t always a short one. Some processes can take more than a year with complications or bureaucratic difficulties, but you might get lucky and finish it in a few months.
Some building departments have a preliminary review process. For a fee, they look at all your working drawings after design review or before you formally submit the information to the planning department. They’ll let you know if they notice anything questionable or potentially against code so you can fix it first.
You start by submitting the working drawings to the building department with appropriate fees required for application. The plan checkers scrutinize the working drawings to make sure they meet all the local codes and requirements. The plan checker marks the working drawings with red pencil for correction or in rare cases turns the plans down for permit.
Then, you can pick up the marked plans at the building department. The architect and engineer make the requested changes to the working drawings and resubmit the plans to the building department. If the plan checker still isn’t satisfied, he’ll red pencil the plans again and request they be fixed again. This process continues until the plan checker is fully satisfied, at which point the plans are officially approved.
Sometimes you may need to go through this process more than once. The plans may require review by a local city department and a county department. Different local governments have different jurisdictions for code, so they’ll dictate their own approval process. Discuss the plan check process with your architect and engineer so you’re clear on the steps and timing.
When your plans are finally fully approved by the building department, you can pick up your permits. Expect to pay a considerable sum of money for all your permits and the remaining fees and pick up the permits so you can break ground. The costs vary widely from area to area, as do the names for the fees. You’ll have to pay these fees in full before you’re allowed to begin building on the property. Often these fees cover general expenses for the neighborhood’s local infrastructure as well as overhead for the local government.
Potential Fees in Gathering Building Permits
Here is a list with the potential fees you might encounter during this process:
- Appeal fee
- Building permit
- Design review fee
- Drainage study fee
- Grading permit
- Land use permit
- Parks and recreation fee
- School fee
- Tree permit
- Variance fee
- Walkway fee.
You must make sure to have sufficient funds budgeted for these various fees and that you’re prepared to pay them when the time comes, even though their cost shouldn’t be a deal breaker. You may have to pay these fees out of pocket, but you may be able to reimburse yourself through your construction loan if you included them in your budget. These building permits fees can often be reimbursed immediately by showing the bank the receipts.