A kitchen is a small job with a full review attached.
Your client is living in the house while you work, and every day the job runs long is a day in someone's living room. The permit and the inspection window come off your truck; your crew keeps working.
Call and talk to a permit specialist — scoped to remodelers.
What your projects run into
- Residential alteration and addition permits
- Electrical, plumbing, and mechanical trade permits
- Home improvement contractor licensing and renewals
- Zoning review for setbacks, lot coverage, and additions
- Certificate of appropriateness in historic districts
- Lead-safe renovation certification on pre-1978 homes
- Deck, porch, and structural alteration permits
- Open-permit research and close-out
Where the time goes
- A certificate of appropriateness that adds a review cycle for windows already ordered
- An open permit from a previous owner's contractor surfacing the day you file
- A homeowner taking a day off work for an inspection window that spans the whole afternoon
Each of those is days or weeks on a calendar you don't control. Handled early, most of them never happen.
We are not the outfit that tells you to build it and see whether anyone notices. Work that needs a permit gets one, and work that does not gets a straight answer instead of an invoice.
Straight answers
Do I need a permit to remodel a kitchen or bathroom?
Kitchens and baths are exactly where that line gets drawn, and every county draws it somewhere else — then redraws it when the code edition changes. Guessing wrong costs twice: once for the stop-work, once for the re-inspection. Call with the address and the scope before you book a crew.
Should the homeowner pull the permit instead of the contractor?
No. A homeowner-pulled permit moves inspection responsibility and liability onto your client, and reviewers in most jurisdictions ask why the licensed contractor is not the applicant.
How long does a residential alteration permit take?
Simple interior work is over the counter in some jurisdictions and a multi-week queue in others. What decides your schedule is not the first submission — it is whether there is a second one.
Call and talk to a permit specialist
(240) 344-5075Ten minutes on your project. You leave with the permits and licenses it needs, in order, with the clocks that run on each.