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.
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.
Talk to a permit specialist
Ten minutes on your project. You leave knowing the approvals it needs, in what order, and what each review will take. Or send the address, scope, and plans and we start from there.