Residential Permits in Barrie

We make them, at no extra charge. Comments from the examiner at the City of Barrie Building Services come to us, and we revise the sheets, reply to each point and resubmit until the permit is issued.

Any that build, add on or change the grade on a lot the LSRCA regulates, such as an addition, a garden suite, a new house or a pool. The west of the city is under the Nottawasaga Valley Conservation Authority. Ontario Regulation 41/24 counts site grading and building or enlarging a structure as development activity, which needs a permit from whichever authority regulates the lot. Each authority has to publish maps of its regulated areas and review them at least once a year. On a Barrie lot we check each authority’s maps against the survey before the site plan is drawn, then prepare the application from the same drawings as the permit set.

Yes. Residents can apply for residential building permits online through APLI, the City’s online application tool, which gives real-time status updates and automatic email notifications about their application. We keep track of those updates through the review and tell you as soon as the permit is issued.

Yes. We take on residential permits across Barrie, including Allandale and Painswick, within an hour of our Richmond Hill office. The first consultation is free, by phone or on site.

Three things to start: property address; what you want to do, in your own words; and a survey of the lot, if you have one. Send those and we tell you what the City of Barrie Building Services will ask for before we quote.

It fixes the envelope before any room is drawn: how close to each lot line you can build, how tall, and how much of the lot you can cover. For most Barrie houses those limits come from By-law 2009-141, and in the Allandale Major Transit Station Area from the Community Planning Permit System instead. The City of Barrie Building Services will not issue a permit for drawings that break them, so we read them off your survey first.

Yes, and it is worth deciding at the start. Barrie allows a house plus up to three additional units in a residential zone, inside, attached or in a separate building such as a coach house or a garage. If you are legalizing a basement unit now, we place its entrance, services and fire separation so a later unit is not boxed out, and each stage then goes to the City of Barrie Building Services as its own application.

Rarely. By-law 2014-115 only regulates trees in a woodlot of half an acre or more, so on a typical house lot an addition or a garden suite can be placed without a tree permit. If the project is part of a development application, that changes, and we check the trees with the City before fixing the site plan for the City of Barrie Building Services. Either way we draw the trees near the work, since their roots decide where a footing or a trench can run.

Possibly. A walkout or a below-grade entrance means excavating and regrading beside the house, which Barrie governs under its site alteration by-law, apart from the permit the City of Barrie Building Services issues. The entrance usually serves one of the three additional units a Barrie lot can take, so we test the dig against the by-law while the unit is laid out and draw the new grades on the same site plan.

No. Barrie is a single-tier city, so the City of Barrie Building Services carries out the whole building permit review with no county or regional layer above it. Approvals from outside the City depend on the lot rather than the county, such as an LSRCA permit near a regulated watercourse, and the wiring goes to the ESA for its own permit. We tell you at the first visit which of those your address brings.