In Palm Beach Gardens
the first question is not the code.
It is the development order.

It is the approval under which your community was permitted, and the City reviews construction plans for consistency with "the conditions of approval specified in applicable development orders". Those conditions can govern elevations, materials, setbacks, screening and landscaping — things a building code does not address. It is community-specific, so the only reliable answer about yours comes from the City.

Through the City. Development orders are property- and community-specific documents, and we deliberately publish nothing about the contents of any particular one because none was read for this page. Establishing which applies to your address is the first thing we do on a Palm Beach Gardens project.

It can be found inconsistent, which is a different thing from being unsafe. The City checks consistency with the Land Development Regulations and the development order before issuance, so a design that satisfies the Florida Building Code perfectly can still fail to match what the community was approved under.

Consistency with the LDRs and with the conditions of approval in the applicable development order. In practice that concentrates on what a place looks like — elevations, external materials, hard surfaces, screening — which is why external work is where the question usually arises and interior-only scopes are usually simpler.

Before issuance. The City's wording is "prior to the issuance of building permits and Certificates of Occupancy", and the departmental approvals only follow "after consistency has been determined". So it is a gate rather than a parallel check.

They are revised and resubmitted, and the submission rejoins a queue the City says is processed in the order received. That is the practical reason to design against the approval from the start: the cost of an inconsistency is not just the redraw, it is the place in the queue.

Almost certainly not, and it matters to say so. The City's wording is that Forestry, Finance, Fire, Police, Engineering, Code Enforcement, Public Works and GIS must approve issuance of "all commercial, and certain residential" permits. The qualifier is the City's. Most ordinary residential interior work will not engage that route — but the City does not publish which residential work does, so it is a question to ask rather than an assumption to make.

Ask the Building Department at the outset, on (561) 799-4210. We do this before writing a programme, because the answer changes how many approvals stand between a completed design and an issued permit.

The City describes its Building Department as "a centralized operation, housing all of the services relating to building and permitting activity". The consistency review is performed by Development Compliance staff, and the departmental approvals involve the departments named above — so several parts of the City touch a permit even though the building activity itself is centralized.

We stop and tell you, before it is covered up. There is an additional question here: earlier work may also be inconsistent with the development order, not merely unpermitted, and those are resolved with the City rather than quietly reconciled on site.

Often yes, and it changes the programme rather than the price alone. Containment, protection and phasing all cost days. The honest version of this conversation happens at the site visit, where we can look at where the work is relative to where you sleep and cook.

Not without checking. In a city that reviews plans for consistency with what the community was approved under, an external material substituted on site is a different kind of decision from a like-for-like swap. We verify against the approval before ordering, which is when it is still free to change.

Because for a remodel the same square footage can differ several-fold depending on what is behind the wall, and in this City also on how many approvals the scope engages. A published rate would be a guess. You get an itemised figure in writing after a site visit, and it says what happens if something is found during demolition.

We did not find a fee figure published by the City that we could verify, so this page carries none rather than repeating one from elsewhere. Ask the Building Department, and whatever it comes to appears itemised on your proposal.

We do not publish a number, because the City does not publish one. What it does publish is more useful: requests are processed in the order in which they are received during normal business hours. That tells you the lever is completeness, not urgency.

Against the issued permit, discipline by discipline, booked as the work reaches them. Where a Certificate of Occupancy is involved, the City applies the same consistency and departmental approval structure to its issuance as it does to the permit.

No, and we will not do it. Board goes up after the rough-in inspections have actually passed. Reopening finished work is expensive everywhere, and in a city with a queue processed in the order received the administrative recovery is slow as well.

It gets closed out. We do not leave permits open, because an open permit stays attached to the property and reappears at sale, when it is somebody else's leverage rather than an administrative detail.

The permit record, the approved drawings, anything confirming consistency with your development order, the product approval documentation for the envelope, and the closeout. In a community governed by a development order, the approval correspondence is worth as much at resale as the permit itself.

Yes — across Palm Beach, Broward and Miami-Dade, 104 municipalities in total. The routes differ genuinely between them: Palm Beach Gardens checks consistency with a development order before it looks at the code, most of its neighbours do not, and those differences are a working detail for us rather than a surprise.