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Anyone have any experience with this? I've done residential permits before; I can do a site plan, floor plan and elevations, but the commercial application process looks like they really want me to use a professional architect or engineer. I'm having a pre-fab metal shed put on a concrete slab in Raleigh for my personal use, but it's on a lot zoned IND2, so they want a commercial building permit. The shed people will give me an engineering package for the shed, as will the foundation guy, ditto for the electrical and plumbing guys. I should be able to put all of those packages together with a site plan and call it a design package, but I've never done this before for a commercial permit. It's not in a flood plain, no running water, no state highway frontage, and it's an empty clear span structure with no HVAC. I talked to one architect, but he said that the engineering and design done by a commercial architect would take months and exceed the cost of the building. This process is starting to look like a racket cooked up by architects.

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"Every ship is a minesweeper, once."

Don't know for sure, but when I had my steel shop building built on our farm (zoned Agricultural), they put me through the ringer. I told them it was for a personal garage/workshop, which it is. They told me that if I had more than 1 untagged car on the property, they assumed I was running a repair shop and would have to do the following:

1- get the property rezoned to commercial ($$$)
2- upfit the building to comply with commercial regs (bathrooms, etc)
3- upfit the building to comply with ADA requirements (Handicapped parking spaces, Handicapped accessible bathrooms, etc)

Every thing worked out , eventually- but the building sat after it was completed for the better part of a year and a half without electricity because they were trying to make me comply to their BS. I eventually went in and asked what the status was, and they said "Oh, everything's fine, we'll send the order to get the power turned back on". I didn't ask any questions....


This is all in Johnston County FWIW

I'm dealing with the city (Raleigh), and we have a meeting scheduled for 9/17 to review their requirements. As far as I have been able to determine, they want a series of packages for the different elements of the building (foundation, building, electrical, plumbing, etc), each certified by an engineer, and then integrated into an overall plan that is certified by a designer. I'm starting to see why the previous owner of the property never developed anything on it.

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"Every ship is a minesweeper, once."

Would it be easier to get the lot rezoned?

I'll have to check on that. The downside would be that if we ever sold it, then we'd have to change it back.

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"Every ship is a minesweeper, once."

As you aren't up on Wake Co. zoning... IND2 (industrial 2) property is the white whale of properties; if you've managed to get ahold of such, you sure as hell don't get it rezoned. (there are no set-backs or usage restrictions for IND2 -- we've already been yelled at (and fined?) for having too many ("more than one") untagged cars on our IND1 lot.) If we rezoned it, it would never go back to IND2 again.