Feasibility and local verification

Nobody can tell you from a web page whether your addition fits your lot, whether you may pull your own permit, or what your insurer will cover while the roof is open. The people who can are a short walk or a phone call away, and they answer specific questions far better than general ones. This module does not give you the answers. It prepares you to ask for them, to know who holds each one, and to write down what you were told, by whom, and when.

1. Feasibility is a set of conversations Understand

"Feasibility" sounds like a study someone hands you. For a homeowner it is simpler and more active: a list of questions, each with a person or office that can answer it with authority, worked through before you spend money on drawings and bids. The output is not a yes or no. It is a written record of what you were told, which turns into the constraints your designer works within, the conditions your contractors price, and the dates your schedule has to respect.

Three ideas carry this module.

• Every question has an owner. The building department answers permit questions. The zoning office answers setback and lot-coverage questions (sometimes it is the same counter, sometimes not). The utility answers capacity and connection questions. Your insurance agent answers coverage questions. Your lender answers draw questions. An attorney answers contract and liability questions. An engineer answers structural questions. The health department answers septic and well questions. A testing laboratory answers "is this asbestos" questions. Asking the right office is most of the skill; asking the wrong one produces confident wrong answers.
• Generic guidance is not local verification. This course, every book, every forum post, and every contractor's "we do these all the time" describe what is common. Your lot, your house, your town and your policy are specific. Common is where you start the question; specific is where the answer lives.
• An answer you did not write down is a rumor. Record the date, the office, the name of the person, what you asked, and what they said. Six months later, when a plan reviewer says something different, the record is what lets you ask a calm follow-up question instead of starting over.

How to read the tables that follow

Each table lists questions in one area. The who answers column is the point of the table: it names the office or professional whose answer counts. Where more than one is listed, ask the first and let them point you to the next. The why it matters column tells you what goes wrong when the question is skipped, so you can decide how hard to push for a written answer. Not every question applies to every project; the Practice section filters the list to yours.

2. Questions about the site

Site questions come first because they can end a project before design begins. A lot-coverage limit, an easement under the only place an addition can go, or a flood zone that changes the foundation rules will each reshape the design, and the cheapest time to learn about them is before the designer starts.

3. Questions about the design

4. Questions about approvals and inspections

This is the longest table because it is the one most people get wrong, and because the answer to "who pulls the permit" carries consequences that are easy to miss.

Review timelines are published, variable, and not the elapsed time

Departments often publish review targets. Four examples, as their own pages stated them when the course's research was done (October 2026): one Florida city listed five workdays for minor residential work under a stated dollar value and fourteen for major work, with a program that refunds the fee if a seven-business-day review is missed; one Arizona town listed twenty working days for a first review and ten for a second; one California city listed eighteen business days for a first review of a new house, thirteen for an addition and ten for an alteration, with shorter rechecks; and a mountain town in California listed ten to fourteen business days for a first review while warning that a new house can take six months to more than a year through all reviews. Several departments offer expedited review for a surcharge in the range of a third to a half of the fee.

Two things to take from those numbers. First, they are targets for one review, not for the whole process; correction cycles restart the clock, and incomplete submittals are the usual cause. Second, nationally, the average gap between permit authorization and the start of construction on a new single-family home was 1.4 months in 2025, longest in New England at 1.8, according to the National Association of Home Builders' (NAHB) analysis of Census construction data. That is an average across everything from tract homes to custom houses; your own gap is a question for your department.

Source: the NAHB Eye on Housing post on 2025 construction time gives the authorization-to-start, construction and total durations from the Census Survey of Construction, by builder type and by region.

5. Questions about utilities

Utilities are a common place for additions, accessory buildings and new homes to lose weeks they did not plan for, because the utility is a separate organization with its own queue, its own fees and its own idea of what "soon" means.

6. Questions about insurance and workers

This is the table that is easiest to skip and can cost the most to have skipped. Ask your own insurance agent before work starts, and ask in writing.

What federal OSHA has said about homeowners

The Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) answered a question on this point in a 2004 interpretation letter. As the letter states it, the Occupational Safety and Health Act applies to "employers," and a typical homeowner who hires independent contractors to build or expand a house does not meet that definition and does not become a "controlling employer" over the contractors' workers; the letter adds that the homeowner's own construction-safety expertise does not change the analysis. The letter is about federal OSHA jurisdiction over a homeowner who hires independent contractors. It does not address a homeowner who directly employs workers, or who supervises and directs how contractors' employees work, and state law can differ (California, for example, publishes guidance on households that directly hire workers for tasks beyond ordinary domestic work). Whether any of that describes your arrangement is a question for an attorney and your insurance agent, not for the course.

Source: the OSHA standard interpretation of December 29, 2004 is the letter itself, on OSHA's site.

7. Questions about financing conditions

If a lender is involved, the lender's conditions become part of your project's rules. They are not code and they are not law, but they decide when money arrives.

One federal program, as HUD describes it

The Federal Housing Administration's (FHA) Section 203(k) Rehabilitation Mortgage Insurance Program is one example of financing that comes with its own conditions, and it is worth knowing about because it is often the first thing a lender mentions to a homeowner renovating an older house. As the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) describes it: the program lets a buyer or owner combine purchase or refinance and renovation into one FHA-insured loan through an FHA-approved lender. HUD describes two types. A Limited 203(k) is for non-structural work up to $75,000, with no minimum, and an FHA-approved 203(k) consultant is optional. A Standard 203(k) is for major rehabilitation and structural work, with a minimum repair cost of $5,000 and no maximum renovation amount as long as the property's value stays within the FHA mortgage limit for the area, and a consultant is required. HUD's description of the process has the consultant prepare a work write-up and cost estimate, the contractor obtain permits before work begins, and the consultant inspect and certify each phase before the lender issues a two-party check payable to borrower and contractor, repeated until the work is complete.

What that means for this module: the program's structure assumes a contractor, a consultant and staged draws; whether an owner can do any of the work themselves, what the consultant costs, and whether your project qualifies are questions for an FHA-approved lender or a HUD-approved housing counselor. Sources: HUD's 203(k) program types page describes the Limited and Standard programs and the stages from origination to close-out.

8. Questions about who may do the work

Licensing is the area where generic guidance is least useful, because the structure itself varies: some states license general contractors at the state level, some leave it to cities or counties, some register rather than license, and some do not regulate general contracting at all while licensing electricians and plumbers. The questions are the same everywhere; the answers are not.

An example of an owner-builder exemption, as the statute states it

Florida's contractor licensing statute contains an owner-builder exemption, and reading it is a useful way to see what "exemption" actually involves. As the statute describes it: the owner acts as the contractor and provides "direct, onsite supervision" of all work not performed by licensed contractors, and may not delegate that supervision to an unlicensed person; the owner must personally appear and sign the permit application and demonstrate understanding of a disclosure statement; the owner must verify the licenses and workers' compensation of anyone hired; unlicensed workers must be the owner's employees, with tax withholding and workers' compensation; the owner may be liable for injuries to unlicensed workers, which homeowner's insurance may not cover; the local building agency must withhold final approval or revoke the permit for violations; and a building sold or leased within one year of completion is presumed to have been built for sale, which defeats the exemption. The point of including it is not that your state works this way. It is that an exemption is a set of obligations, not a loophole, and that the only way to know yours is to read the statute for your state and ask the licensing board.

Source: Florida Statutes section 489.103 is the exemptions section of the state's contracting law, including subsection (7), the owner-builder exemption, on the Legislature's site. California's licensing board publishes a plain-language page on the downside of being an owner-builder that lists the responsibilities the board says the owner assumes under that state's exemption, including liens by unpaid subcontractors and claims by injured uninsured workers.

9. Questions about hazardous materials

Older houses contain materials that are harmless in place and regulated once disturbed. The questions here are about testing and about who is allowed to disturb what, and they belong on the list for any renovation or addition to an older house: for lead, the federal rule draws its line at 1978; for asbestos there is no single date, and a tester or your local agency is the one to ask.

On lead, as EPA states it: the RRP rule generally does not apply to homeowners doing their own renovation work in their own home, but it does apply if any part of the home is rented, if a child-care business operates there, or if the house is being renovated to sell. EPA recommends hiring certified firms, and for owners who do their own work it lists practices: test for lead or assume it is present, contain the work area, protect yourself, minimize dust with wet methods and tools attached to HEPA vacuums, clean up daily, control waste, and finish with a HEPA vacuum and wet wipe, with optional clearance testing. A contractor you hire for work that disturbs paint in a pre-1978 house is generally subject to the rule's certification requirement; ask for the certification number and check it against EPA's listing. Source: EPA's page Renovation, Repair and Painting Program: Do-It-Yourselfers explains how the rule applies to owners doing their own work and lists the lead-safe practices EPA recommends.

On asbestos, the course says only this: testing before disturbing older materials is a question for a qualified tester, and whether a survey is required before your permit is a question for your building department. Federal workplace rules on asbestos are written for employers; what applies to a homeowner's own house is a matter of state and local rules, which vary.

10. See it: a fictional counter conversation See it

Dana Pellingham owns the 1958 single-story house on Alder Street. Before hiring a designer, Dana went to the building department counter with a one-page sketch (the kitchen, the dining room, the nine-foot section of wall to be removed, the sink moving four feet) and a list of six questions. Here is the record Dana wrote that evening, in the form the course recommends: date, office, person, question, answer, and what to do next.

Notice what Dana did. The questions were specific to the sketch, each answer was recorded with the person's name, and each answer turned into a next action with an owner. Nothing was treated as a rule beyond this department and this scope. When Dana's designer later asked "do they want an engineer's letter," the answer was in the record, with a date.

11. Practice: build your verification list Practice

Time: about 60 minutes, then ongoing. Open the local-verification question list. It carries the questions from this module as starter rows with a "who answers" column, filtered to your project type when your setup is complete. Then:

1. Delete the rows that cannot apply (no septic, no HOA, no lender) and add the ones your project raises that the course could not anticipate: the shared driveway, the neighbor's retaining wall, the oil tank your inspector mentioned when you bought the house.
2. For every remaining row, fill the "who answers" cell with a real office or person: the department's name, the utility's name, your agent's name. "The city" is not an answer; "Fennelmoor Building Department, permit counter, 555-0100" is.
3. Order the rows by what blocks what. Site and approval questions first (they shape the design), then utilities (long lead), then insurance and financing (before contracts), then professional and hazardous-materials questions (before bids and before demolition).
4. Write the first five questions you will ask at the building department counter, in the order you will ask them, with the sketch or document you will bring. Short, specific, and in the form "what would I need to show you to do X."
5. Record answers as you get them, with date and name, and mark each row verified, partly verified, or open. The open rows are your risk list for Module 5 and Module 6.

Then compare your list with the criteria in Check your work.

12. Your project Your project

13. Check your work Check your work

Criteria

• Every row has a named office or professional in the "who answers" column, not a category.
• Every answer recorded has a date and a name, and the question as asked.
• Each answer has a next action, or the row is marked verified with nothing further to do.
• Rows the authority could not answer have been rerouted (the counter said "not us," and the list now says who).
• The list includes insurance and financing questions, not only permits.
• Open rows are marked open, and you can say which of them would change the design, the budget or the schedule if the answer is unfavorable.

Worked example: one row done two ways

Common mistakes

• Asking the contractor instead of the authority. An experienced contractor's answer is a good first guess and nothing more. The department, the utility and your agent are the sources; the contractor's answer goes in the "what we were told" column, not the "verified" column.
• Treating a phone call as verification without a name and date. If you cannot say who told you, you were not told.
• Reading a rule from another place. A forum post about setbacks in another state is a question for your zoning office, not a fact about your lot.
• Skipping insurance and lender questions because the permit questions felt like the hard part. The permit questions have a counter; the insurance gap has a claim adjuster, later.
• Stopping at "not us." The right response to "we do not handle that" is "who does?"
• Treating a verified answer as permanent. Scope changes re-open rows. So do code adoptions and staff changes. Date everything.

What is still unresolved after this exercise

• Whether the design the counter saw is the design you will build. Every scope change re-asks the permit questions.
• Whether the answers from different offices agree with each other (the building department and the utility often do not, on meters). Where they conflict, the conflict is itself a question, for both.
• What the answers mean for you legally and financially. That is for your attorney, your agent and your lender, with the record in your hand.
• How long each hold actually takes. Module 5 turns these answers into a sequence with holds for review, inspection and lead times.

14. Knowledge check and scenario

Before you move on

• My verification list has a named office or professional in every "who answers" cell.
• I have written the first five questions I will ask at the building department counter, and I know what sketch or document I will bring.
• I have asked my insurance agent, in writing, whether my policy covers the house during this work and whether builder's risk coverage is needed.
• If a lender is involved, I know how draws are released and inspected, and what the lender requires of the contractor.
• I know which questions on my list are for an attorney, an engineer or a testing lab rather than for an office counter.
• Every answer I have recorded so far has a date and a name.