Permits and Process by Jurisdiction

This guide covers the jurisdictions where we build most of our kitchens: San Francisco, Marin County and its towns, Santa Clara County and the Peninsula cities, the City and County of Sacramento, Placer County, El Dorado County, Nevada County with the Town of Truckee, Sonoma County, and the Lake Tahoe basin under the Tahoe Regional Planning Agency. Each has its own page below. Each page was written against the jurisdiction’s own published permit pages, fetched at the time of writing; where a department’s site could not be reached, or where its page does not answer the question, the page says so instead of guessing.

Three rules govern what is written here. No fee or review time appears unless a jurisdiction published it and we read it. No jurisdiction is described as exempting cabinetry unless its own page lists cabinets or the finish-work category that contains them. And nothing is asserted about PineWood beyond what is true: we have built cabinetry since 2006, we operate under CSLB License #1095293, our workshop is in Rocklin, our crews travel statewide to install, and on the Nevada shore of Lake Tahoe we supply cabinetry for a Nevada-licensed contractor to install.

Read the sections below for the shape of the subject — the exemption, the triggers, the permit holder, and how our six-phase process absorbs all of it — then go to the jurisdiction page for your address.

The Contractors State License Board puts the baseline plainly: no building or structure may be erected, constructed, enlarged, altered, repaired, or moved unless a permit has first been obtained from the building official. In the same breath it notes that code requirements vary in different cities and counties around the state and sends you to the local building department. That second sentence is the reason this guide exists. The same kitchen, in a home of the same age, can be a no-plans portal permit in one jurisdiction and a plan-check submittal in the one across the creek.

The variation is not in the code itself. Every jurisdiction in this guide enforces the California Building Code and the California Residential Code, and the Residential Code’s Section 105.2 — the work-exempt-from-permit list — is the text most of them reproduce or point to. The variation is in three local decisions: which agency is the building official for a given address, what that agency says about the gray area between finish work and a remodel, and how it chooses to take an application. Those three decisions are what each jurisdiction page in this cluster documents, and each statement on those pages is tied to the jurisdiction’s own published page.

The first decision — who the building official is — is also the one homeowners most often get wrong, because postal addresses and city limits do not match. Mill Valley’s own permit instructions tell applicants to confirm the address is in the City of Mill Valley and not an unincorporated area before applying. Sacramento’s building FAQ has a question titled, in full, “Is my address in the City jurisdiction?” Carmichael and Fair Oaks have Sacramento addresses and Sacramento County permits. Kentfield and Greenbrae have Marin addresses and county permits while Larkspur, a few blocks away, issues its own. Before anything else, settle which office you are dealing with.

Structure and layout. San Francisco’s routing page lists kitchen remodel (changing layout, floor plan or removing walls) among the permits that need plans, and its online kitchen-or-bath permit is available only where the work will not involve removing or moving walls. Palo Alto’s instant kitchen permit is limited to work within the existing footprint and stops the moment the project involves changes to walls, windows, doors, or structure. An island that needs a new beam over an opened wall, a pantry carved from a closet, or a peninsula that relocates a doorway all cross this line, and all of them are routine in the kitchens we build.

Plumbing. Moving a sink, adding a prep sink, relocating a dishwasher, or running a gas line to a new range position is plumbing work, and every jurisdiction in this guide permits it separately. Woodside’s FAQ defines a permit as required to alter or repair any electrical, gas, mechanical or plumbing system. Sacramento County’s FAQ lists gas line, sewer, and water service among permit-required projects. San Francisco requires a permit before cutting into or replacing pipes and limits who may apply for one. Cupertino requires plumbing permits for installation or replacement of plumbing fixtures. A cabinet layout that keeps every fixture where it is avoids all of this; a layout that moves one fixture does not.

Electrical. New circuits for a range, an induction cooktop, under-cabinet lighting on its own circuit, or a relocated refrigerator are electrical permits. Palo Alto’s instant permit allows changes to outlet count but requires a residential load calculation if a circuit is added and excludes any project that needs a service panel or subpanel upgrade. San Francisco requires an electrical permit before installing new wiring. Sacramento County names electrical panel and circuit work among permit-required projects. The practical consequence for a cabinet design is that the appliance plan and the circuit plan are the same drawing.

Exterior and historic. A new window over the sink, an enlarged opening to a deck, or a change to a façade is exterior work, and in San Francisco it can bring the Planning Department into the review on Article 10 landmarks and in historic districts. The Planning Department’s own bulletin on Certificates of Appropriateness states that interior alterations are exempt from a Certificate except for publicly owned landmarks whose designating ordinance requires interior review — which, for a private kitchen, means the cabinetry itself is not Planning’s concern, but the window above it may be. The Lake Tahoe basin adds a regional layer on top of all of this, covered on its own page.

Our process has six phases: Discovery and Consultation, Conceptual Design, Design Development, Final Specifications, Fabrication, and White-Glove Installation. Permitting attaches to the first four and the last, and the shape of the attachment is the same in every jurisdiction. During Discovery we take laser measurements and 3D scans, photograph existing conditions, and map the electrical, plumbing and HVAC systems that affect the design. That survey is where a project is first sorted: a layout that keeps every fixture and circuit where it is, or one that does not. If the address is in a historic district, on a landmark, in the Tahoe basin, or in an HOA with its own review, that is also recorded here, because it changes who reads the drawings.

Conceptual Design is where the permit category is actually decided, usually without anyone calling it that. Choosing between an island that needs a new circuit and one served by an existing receptacle, or between a sink that stays on the exterior wall and one that moves to the island, is choosing between a finish-work project and a permitted remodel. We say so at the time, because the difference is measured in weeks of someone else’s plan review and in trades that are not ours. Design Development then produces the detailed technical drawings, and Final Specifications the shop drawings and approved samples. For a permitted remodel, the drawings a building department wants — existing and proposed floor plans, electrical and plumbing plans, structural where structure changes — are drawn by the designer, architect or engineer the project already has, and our shop drawings are coordinated against them. Menlo Park’s published kitchen-remodel submittal list is a good example of what that set contains.

Fabrication happens in our Rocklin workshop and does not wait on a permit; a permit governs work in the building, not work in the shop. What fabrication does wait on is a frozen dimension set, and on a permitted remodel the walls, rough plumbing and rough electrical have to be where the approved drawings say they are before we commit to final dimensions. Installation is where the permit closes: the building permit’s final inspection, in San Francisco’s words, cannot be scheduled until the electrical and plumbing work passes final inspection. Our installation crews travel statewide from Rocklin, and on a permitted project the installation date is set against the inspection sequence rather than against the day the cabinets are finished.

The Tahoe Regional Planning Agency describes four levels of environmental review on its own FAQ — Exempt, Qualified Exempt, Minor Project, and Standard Project — and states that if the planned work falls under an Exempt category, no TRPA review or permit is required. For other categories an application or declaration form is needed. TRPA has also delegated permitting authority for certain projects, through memoranda of understanding, to Placer County, El Dorado County and the City of South Lake Tahoe, so that a homeowner in those jurisdictions can obtain the TRPA permit from the local building department; the agency’s page notes that projects visible from the lake or major roads may still go through TRPA directly. The Washoe County and Douglas County MOUs are listed on that page as currently inactive.

For a kitchen on the California shore, the practical effect is that the local department is still the counter you visit, but the exemption question has two answers rather than one. Interior cabinetry is not addressed on TRPA’s FAQ, and the Tahoe page in this cluster says so rather than inferring. For the Nevada shore, our role is supply only: cabinetry is built in Rocklin and installed by a Nevada-licensed contractor, because the California license does not cross the state line.