We recently closed on the construction loan and all of our plans are finalized and ready to go.  However, before we could start building we had to get formal permission from the county government called a building permit. 

The building permit was just over $3,500.  I don’t have a lot of details on what was required to apply for the permit as our builder took care of applying for the building permit on our behalf.  I don’t have any pictures to share or anything interesting to say about it but wanted to do a post on it since we are blogging the entire process on our Building Our Dream Home page and getting a building permit is a critical step in the process.

I do know that the purpose of the building permit is primarily to make sure that the house that is being built meets national and local building code requirements and is being built in an appropriate zone.  I assume a secondary reason is that it provides the county with another source of revenue.  Fortunately, it is a predictable process and expense – all of the requirements, fees, and details are available on your county’s website or at their local office.  As an example, HERE is the link for our county’s Development Service  Center website.  The process is more than just applying for the initial building permit.  The permit is the first step but the completion of the process involves county building inspections to validate everything is built to code and ends when the county provides a Certificate of Occupancy.  Here is a summary of the process from our county’s website:

We will continue to post on each step of our build process.  If you would like to see where we are in the process now please check out the Building Our Dream Home page.