Building Permit Timeline: Plan Check to Final Inspection

All right, everybody. So let's say it's a Tuesday morning and it's been seven weeks after your plans went into the building department, and there's an email from your architect sitting there in your inbox. And the subject line just says, "Plan check comments are back." There's a PDF attached, and you open it, and it's 11 pages long, and every item has a number next to it. Some of them are going to say provide, some say clarify, some say revise. And your stomach does that thing.

Two questions hit you at once: Did we just fail? And how long does a building permit take, really, if this is what seven weeks gets you? Let's take the second one first, because it's the one a lot of people ask. How long does a building permit really take? In real life, from the day you hit send to the day an inspector signs the last line of the card, that's what we're going to be talking about today, the whole back half of the permit process from the plan check, your submittal, to the actual final on your project.

And the first question: No, you didn't really fail. That letter is completely normal. And a little later, I'm going to show you why it isn't a rejection at all and how you handle it in the next 48 hours matters more than anything in the 11-page document.

So somebody probably told you this would take a couple of months, and you've already got the contractor penciled in. So let's get a real shape of this in front of you. Now, it's been a few weeks since we've been inside this series, so let me get you reoriented here. In episodes 76 and 77, I stepped away to bring you up to date on the BuildQuest application that I've been developing. And then in episode 78, I sat down with a home builder out of the Northwest, Chad Esslinger, and we had a really good conversation.

I highly recommend if you're purchasing a lot or thinking about purchasing a lot or have already purchased a lot, you might want to really listen to that episode because it's going to really shed some light, hopefully not too late, on the process. But before all that, we were three episodes into approvals and permits.

So episode 73 was all about the planning department, and episode 74 was about the building department and the five reviewers behind that counter. And then episode 75 was the actual application itself and what it costs and whose name should go on the application.

Okay, so at the end of episode 75, I made you a promise. I said we'd pick up the moment your application goes in and the clock starts running, and what comes back from those reviewers, why a long list of corrections isn't the disaster it looks like, and the one question you have to ask your architect the moment those comments land, and the inspections, the final, and closing the permit out. So that's what we're doing, and this is the episode that attempts to finish that series.

It's a lot to cover. As you know, I've been doing this for a long time, for 35-plus years, and this stretch, the waiting and the comments and the inspections, is where I watch homeowners lose the most money without ever seeing it go. And not because anybody necessarily did anything wrong, but because what each step was really asking of them never got explained. So let's walk through it.

So when folks ask me how long a building permit takes, they're picturing a stopwatch. You hand in the plans, the city starts the clock, the city stops the clock, you get your permit, and whatever that number is, it's the city's number. And that's not really how it works. It's more like a relay. The baton goes back and forth, and some of those legs are run by the city and some of them are run by you.

So let's lay out these legs I'm talking about. Leg one is the intake, right? So in a lot of places, there's a quick completeness check before anybody actually starts reviewing anything. Is everything in the package that's supposed to be in there? If something is missing, it comes right back to you before the real clock even starts. And that's one reason I harped on the submittal package back in episode 75. A missing document doesn't just cost you the time to produce it. It can cost you your place in line.

So leg two is the first review, and that's the city's leg. And it's the long one, really. For a remodel or an addition, a first review commonly runs somewhere around, I'm going to say, three to six weeks. It's going to vary a lot between the different jurisdictions all over our country. And then for a new home, it can run much longer than that. And in some jurisdictions, it runs even longer than that. So I'm giving you a shape here, not necessarily a promise of how long it's going to take.

And that's probably one of the first things you're going to want to check when you go in and visit with your planning and building department early on in the process, like I've mentioned you should do during the design process. But every department is different, and it changes with the season and with how many people are on staff that year.

And remember from episode 74, your project isn't waiting on one reviewer. It's waiting on the slowest of several, all working at once. And then leg three is yours. The comments come back, and your design team has to respond. And that might be a few days, it might be three weeks, depending on what they're being asked to do and how many other clients they've got that month. And then leg four is the recheck.

So the city looks at your responses. The resubmittals are usually faster than the first review, often a week or two or three, because they're only looking at what changed. And then if anything is still open, you go around again. Legs three and four can actually go through a little bit of a circular repeat process. Hopefully not, because that's just an indicator that you've got something else going on in your application, in your plans.

So stop and really hear what that means. The number of times you go around that loop matters more than how fast the city really is. A department that takes five weeks and approves you on the first recheck beats a department that takes three weeks and sends you around three times. And don't forget here that a lot of this recirculating, going through legs three and four round and round and round again, often is because your plans were not adequate at the very beginning and required a lot of work by everybody to bring them up to par. That's what I've seen happen a lot.

So most projects of any size go around at least once, and I'd plan on that. One round of comments isn't a sign that something is really wrong. It's the normal shape of the process. So when you put the permit into your schedule, don't write down the first review time. Write down the first review plus a response plus a recheck plus a cushion for a second round. For a lot of remodels and additions, you know, that adds up to something like two to four months. And for new homes in busy places, a lot longer.

And I used to tell people to figure a couple of months at minimum. And honestly, in a lot of places today, that's becoming the optimistic end.

All right, so a little good news here. A number of states have started putting deadlines on how long a building department can sit on a residential review, and more cities are moving to online portals where you can actually see which reviewers have signed off. And where those exist, use them. Check the portal yourself, and don't wait for somebody to actually call you. But the piece of this you control most isn't the city's leg at all. It's how good your first submittal is and how fast and how complete your response is when the comments come back.

Those two things decide how many laps you're going to end up running. And then there's one more thing you control, and it's how you use the wait time. Those weeks while plans sit in review shouldn't really be dead time. This is some of the most valuable weeks in a whole project because nothing is really under construction yet, and every decision is still pretty cheap. So this is when you finish your selections, your fixtures, your finishes, your appliances, the things that end up as allowances in a contract when nobody's decided them.

This is when your contractor can firm up pricing off the set that's in for review and start lining up the subcontractors for the start date that you're hoping for. What it's not the time for is starting work. So I get the temptation here. The crew's free, the weather's good, and it's just demo, right? But starting before the permit is issued is exactly the kind of thing that turns a simple job into a stop work order from your city. So use the wait to get ready.

Don't use it to get going. So that email in your inbox, those eleven pages, let's talk about what they actually are. A plan check comment letter is not a denial. A true denial where the city says, "No, you can't build this," is rare on a residential project that's been through the planning approval process already.

What you're holding is a correction list. Each reviewer writes down what they need to see changed, clarified, or added before they'll sign off. And most of those items are small. It could be a missing dimension, a detail that needs to be called out, a note that needs to match the engineer's calculations. Your architect will knock a lot of them off the list in an afternoon. So the first thing I want you to do is breathe.

But the second thing I want you to do is not relax too much because buried in a list of 40 small items, there can be one or two that change your project entirely. And those are the ones that cost money. And I've had a few of those over the years, and they stick with you when you go through it.

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And then another one was a parking requirement. So it wasn't really that easy to find in the code. And on top of that, one of the things that we would do is we would go in and sit with a city planner and just review the project. And in this case, I think one of my designers went in to talk with an associate planner, which can be a little bit of a problem. And it all had to do with whether we needed one or two covered parking spaces.

All of the homes up and down the neighborhood had one covered or one car garage in this tightly compacted urban area. And we were guided saying that yeah, you can do that. You can do one car. Well by the time we got through the submittal process, we first went to the planning department, somebody else got a hold of the plans and said no. You have to have two covered parking spaces. So we really got blindsided by that. And that really threw it off too. We had to redesign the project after it was all completely done. And we felt like we did a good enough job doing our due diligence, but in hindsight, we could have done better. This is the kind of thing that you hopefully don't experience when you go to submit your plans to the planning and building department for your project and get blindsided by something like that.

Your really good architects and designers won't usually let that happen, but it does happen. And it happens unfortunately more frequently than we want to think about. What this means is we were doing an addition onto an existing home. And if you've listened to some previous episodes, I've talked about what's called floor area ratio. And what the floor area ratio is is how much of living area square footage there is relative to the square footage of the entire lot. So many cities will allow you to build 30, 40, 50 percent of the lot coverage. So if you have a 6,000 square foot lot, you can build 3,000 square feet of living area on your project.

In this particular project, the existing home was a very steep pitch roof. It was a 12 in 12 pitch, so it was a 45 degree angle. So it was a very steep roof. And what happened was, and this one still throws me off, if the clear head height of the attic area is taller than I think it was seven feet, if I remember, that area counts as floor area, even though we weren't planning to use that area. There was several hundred square feet of living area that had to be factored into the total existing living area, which therefore reduced the size of the addition that we could actually put on to the home.

Fortunately we weren't submitting for building permits. We were talking with the planning department at that time. But bottom line is we had to go ahead and redesign the entire project because I think we lost like 200 square feet that we were planning to use for the new addition. So keep in mind that this can happen to you after you've submitted the plans. And this is where it can really almost destroy a project sometimes. So that due diligence I talked about in previous episodes, early meetings with the planning department, really researching the zoning regulations, and that really has to do mostly with the planning department, this floor area ratio thing in this particular example.

So that one I learned a lot on, and this was quite a while ago. And the parking one still taught me something that I still pass along. So the advice that you get at a public counter is a person doing their best on a busy day, right? It's helpful, but it's not binding. So when you get an answer at the counter that your design depends on, ask them to put it in an email or write it down yourself with the person's name and the date and send it to your architect. And when the reviewer later reads the code differently, you'll at least know where the disconnect started.

So notice something about all three of these stories here. They're not really building department problems. Setbacks, parking, floor area, those are planning department rules. And that's the piece from episode 73 worth remembering here. Planning signs off a second time inside your building permit review. They compare what you submitted to what they approved and to what the code allows. And if something doesn't line up, it comes back in that same letter as everything else.

So think about that comment letter this way. It's an invoice you haven't priced yet. Every item on it is a change. Most of these changes really don't cost anything but your architect's time. But some cost a little, and once in a while, one of them costs a lot, like a smaller addition, a different beam, a fire sprinkler system you didn't plan for, or a sidewalk that you now for some reason have to replace.

So the moment that letter lands, ask your architect one question. Do any of the revisions the city is requiring change the cost of my job? Ask it in those words. Ask it in writing if you can. So why does it matter so much? By this point, you may already have pricing from your contractor, maybe from some of the subcontractors too. And that pricing was built on the drawings as they stood before the comments. So if a required revision changes the scope and nobody connects that back to the price, your contractor won't find out until the work is underway. And that's the worst possible time for everybody. So now it's a change order in the middle of the job with a crew waiting.

And a conversation that can get tense for really no good reason. So the architect didn't fail you, and the contractor isn't padding anything. The information just never crossed the table. So you carry it across. Get the revised sheets to your contractor and ask him the same questions from his side. Does this change your number?

And a couple more things on handling that letter well. Push for one complete response, not a handful of items now and the rest later. Every partial resubmittal is another lap around the loop. And in some places, after their first recheck or two, the city starts charging for additional rechecks. So you want your team answering every single item all at once.

And answering it the way the reviewer asked, not the way they wish the reviewer had asked. And if your architect disagrees with a comment, that's allowed. Sometimes the reviewer gets something wrong, but it gets handled as a polite, specific response, ideally a phone call with the reviewer, not as an argument in the margins.

You're going to be working with this department for the next year or so. Keep that relationship in good shape.

William Reid (: 18:08

Okay, so you've answered everything. The rechecks clear and one day you get a notice. Your permit is ready. Remember from episode seventy-five, that permit gets paid in two pieces. The plan check fee went in with your application. The rest of the permit fee gets paid now before they release anything. So have that money ready. And it's not a surprise if you budgeted for it, and it's a real surprise if you didn't.

Then you get three things. You get an approved plan set stamped by the reviewers. That stamp set is the set the job gets built from, not the version on your architect's computer, not the version from before the comments, that one. A copy of it typically lives on the job site the whole time because the inspector is going to compare what's built against what's stamped.

So you go ahead and get the permit yourself. Often, your builder will be picking up the permit for you, which in most places has to be posted where it can be seen from the street or kept on site.

So you get the inspection card. You and your builder usually get the inspection card. In some places it's paper, in some places it's a record online, in a lot of places it's both. And every inspection the job goes through gets signed off on that card. So you keep that card and you keep it on the job site during construction and you keep a copy of it as long as you own the house.

It's a record that the work was inspected and approved step by step. And I'll show you in a few minutes why that record is worth more than people think. Two more things about the stamp set here, because they catch people once the job is moving along. First, changes. Once construction starts, there's always a moment where somebody says, wouldn't it be better if we moved that window or opened up that wall a little bit more?

Sometimes it would be, but if the change touches anything the reviewers looked at—structure, egress, energy, the size of a room—it generally has to go back to the city as a revision before it gets built. Otherwise the inspector shows up, compares what's in front of him to what's stamped on the plans and they don't match. Small field changes happen on every job. Big ones need paperwork first. And that paperwork has its own little review clock of its own.

Second, anything your designer deferred. Back in episode 75, we talked about deferred submittals, items like roof trusses, sprinkler design that can get submitted after the main permit. Those still have to be reviewed and approved, and they can hold up the inspection they belong to. So make sure somebody owns them and knows when they're due.

Now the building department becomes something different. Up to here it's been a desk reviewing paper. Process. But from here on it's an inspector standing right inside your house.

William Reid (: 21:04

So inspections, which are tied to the permit, run in the order your house gets built. There's a good reason for that order, and once you see it, you'll never forget it. An inspector can't approve what he can't see. So the sequence follows what's about to get covered up. Think about it that way. Before concrete goes in, somebody looks at the footings and the steel. Before the walls get closed, somebody looks at the framing and at the rough electrical, plumbing, mechanical running through it. In a lot of places, somebody looks at the insulation before the drywall goes on. In some places they look at the drywall nailing also. And at the very end, there's a final inspection.

Every one of those is a gate. You don't pour concrete until the footing's passed. You don't hang the drywall until the framing and the rough trades have passed. If you skip a gate, the only way an inspector can see what's behind it is to open it back up. That's the most expensive kind of rework there is because you're paying to tear out finished work just to look at what's underneath.

And sometimes an inspection doesn't pass the first time, and that's not necessarily uncommon. The inspector writes up a correction, the crew fixes it, and he comes back. A good contractor treats a correction notice as part of the job and not necessarily an insult. Sometimes it is, but not necessarily an insult.

On most jobs, the contractor schedules the inspections and meets the inspector. That's really how it should be. It's his permit and his work, but you can still be in the loop without being in the way. Ask your contractor to let you know the same day each inspection happens, whether it passed or picked up corrections. Even just a text is fine, right? And in a lot of places you can see the result yourself online that same afternoon. In fact, some cities even will email the owner of the property, the owner of the project, once every inspection is processed. So maybe you don't even have to ask. You might just get notified. And that one small habit keeps you from finding out three weeks later that something has been sitting unresolved.

Okay, so now I want to connect these inspections to your money. Because this is one of the practical moves in this episode I'd put above everything else. Tie some of your progress payments to passed inspections. And I do this with my own contracts. Some of the progress payments are tied to the building department inspection and specifically to passing it. Not to the inspection being scheduled, not to the work being about done. Passed and signed on the card.

So what does that buy you? It gives everybody the same definition of done. When the framing inspection is signed off, the framing payment is due. Nobody has to argue about whether the stage is finished, because somebody from the city just actually said it was. And it builds a little accountability into the schedule that works for the contractor as much as it does for you. The contractor knows exactly what unlocks the next payment in this example.

So a good contractor won't fight you on that. Most of the good ones already think this way. If you bring it up and it gets real resistance, that's worth a calm conversation. Not an accusation. Just ask how they'd like to define the milestones instead.

Two cautions, so this works the way it should. Don't tie every dollar to inspections. Some payments need to follow material deliveries and other work that has no inspections attached. So tie the meaningful stages, the ones with a sign off on the inspection card, and leave the rest to the normal schedule. And make sure that payment schedule names the actual inspection. Upon passed framing inspection is clear, right? Upon completion of framing is an argument waiting to happen.

William Reid (: 25:00

All right, so the job wraps up, the punch list is done, and the inspector comes out one last time for the final. For a new home and sometimes for an addition, that final is what lets the city issue what's called a certificate of occupancy. And that's the document that says the house can legally be lived in. For a lot of remodels, there isn't a separate certificate. The signed off final on the card is the finish line.

Either way, this is the part that people miss. The job isn't done when the crew leaves. The job is done when the permit is closed. But those aren't always the same day.

It's actually surprisingly easy for a permit to never get its final. The last few items drag. The contractor moves on to the next job. The homeowner's living in the house. And it all looks finished. Nobody calls for the final inspection. And the permit just sits there open.

And permits don't sit there forever. In many places, if a permit goes about six months without passing an inspection, it can expire. Some departments give a little longer for residential work, and the exact rules vary everywhere. So check your local building department. And this one detail catches people. In a lot of departments, the clock doesn't care how busy your crew is. What keeps a permit alive is an inspection getting approved. You can have people on site every day, and if no inspection has been signed for six months, the city can treat that permit as dead and expired.

Expiring a permit doesn't make the work disappear. It just means that the work is sitting there without sign-offs that say it's approved, right? And that can come back around on you.

And I've seen this happen on our own work. We went to apply for a permit on a new project and then an old expired permit on the property popped up. Something from years before that had nothing to do with us. And now that old permit was the first thing on the table before anybody wanted to talk about the new project. Talk about a delay.

So that's one way it comes back. The other big one is when you sell or refinance. A buyer or a buyer's lender may run a search on the property's permits. That's a separate search from the title report.

So the title doesn't usually catch this, and if an open expired permit turns up, you can be asked to close it out before the deal closes on somebody else's deadline.

And closing it out years later can be a lot harder than it would have been at the time the permit was ready to be closed out. The original contractor may be out of business or just not interested. And when you reopen the old work, it can get measured against the code that's enforced today, not the one that was enforced when the work was done. Codes tighten up over time. So something that would have passed easily back then can need new work now, just because the standard moved while it sat there.

And that's worth doing before you ever start a project too. Look up your property's permit history. Most departments let you search by address online or they'll pull it for you if you call or stop by the counter. If you bought your house from somebody else, you may be inheriting their open permits, and it's a whole lot better to find out while you're planning than when you're standing at the counter with a new building department application.

So the fix is dead simple here, and it happens at the end of every job. Before the final payment goes out, make sure the final inspection is passed and the permit shows as closed. Tie that last payment to it the same way you tied the others. Look the permit up on the city's website yourself and see the word final or closed next to it. Get a copy of the signed card and put it with the stamped plans and keep both for as long as you own the house. That's the end of the relay. Not the last nail, the closed permit.

Okay, let's bring this series home.

How long does a building permit really take? It's a relay, not a stopwatch. A first review, your response, a recheck, and maybe another lap or two. The city controls part of it. You control how good your first submittal is and how fast and complete your response is. The comment letter is an invoice you haven't priced maybe. Ask your architect: Do any of these revisions change the cost of my job? And then get the answer back to your contractor.

Inspections run in the order things usually get covered up and some of your progress payments should be tied to passing them right up to the final. And the job isn't done when the crew leaves. It's done when the permit is closed.

So section 2.55 of my book, The Awakened Homeowner, lays out the inner workings of a plan review step by step. And I have a little diagram in there that shows you how all the work flows.

And then there's the inspection material in section 2.503 if you'd like to go even further. And while you're getting ready for all of this, have a look at the BuildQuest.co website. That's that homeowner platform we're building. It's nearing completion. You can sign up for early access right there at BuildQuest.co. And it doesn't cost anything and it doesn't commit you to anything. And like I talked about earlier, I just did two episodes back to back just before this one on what BuildQuest really is all about. And if you got a permit question on your own project, send it to me. My email's in the show notes, and I do read them.

So that closes out our approvals and permits episodes. The planning department, the building department, the application, and today the plan check process all the way through the permitting and inspection process.

And if you came in part way through all this, go back to Episode 73 and take them in order. I kind of built it out that way. So next time we're gonna be stepping out of the permit office and onto some new ground. I have a new guest coming on that's gonna talk about what you as a homeowner should look out for when you're dealing with contractors, when they're getting ready to sign contracts. This person consults with homeowners who often have got themselves into trouble. So that's what I'm really looking forward to. And then I'm gonna bring Chad back on another episode coming up and we're gonna talk about contract types, cost plus contracts and fixed price contracts, which I talked about. And then I even have an architect coming on later in the month. So I'm really excited that the podcast is really growing. We're getting a lot of professionals listening to it as well as homeowners. And it's so amazing how many people like me are on this same mission, are very interested in participating, because ultimately the more educated you are as a homeowner, the easier our job is.

So that's what I have for you today, everybody. I'm Bill Reid, Your Home Building Coach. And as always, I'm here to enlighten, empower, and protect you. Let's go make it happen.