The permit that never got closed.

Coral Springs stopped building houses in 2003 and has been quietly altering them ever since. A Ramblewood or Maplewood ranch has usually been re-roofed twice, re-glazed, repiped and re-panelled by now, and the 1980s golf-course homes near Eagle Trace and the Coral Springs Country Club carry the same layers in a shorter span. Plenty of that was permitted. A water heater that moved rooms, a carport turned into a bedroom, a long-weekend window swap: usually not. None of it evaporates. An unfinished permit sits on the address until somebody finishes it, and most owners learn about theirs from a title search rather than from memory.

Permits are reviewed, issued and inspected by the City of Coral Springs Building Department through its online permitting portal, with zoning at Community Development in City Hall on West Sample Road. Above the city sits a second code authority: the Broward County Board of Rules and Appeals maintains the county's amendments to the Florida Building Code, certifies the plans examiners and inspectors who judge your job, and settles disputed code interpretations. Broward is High-Velocity Hurricane Zone territory, so glass, doors and roof assemblies need approved products documented. No historic board reviews a house here, but exterior color and roof tile answer to the city's approved lists.

We would rather read the record than guess at it. Before anyone talks money, we pull what the city holds on the address, walk the property, and put in writing which situation you are actually in: work that was built and never inspected, a permit issued for work never built, or work that never reached paper at all. Those are three different routes. From there it is a fixed written scope, our license on the application, and a supervisor in the room when the inspector arrives. Twenty-plus years in South Florida, 150-plus remodels and additions, all of them permitted and inspected. Lic. CGC1539072.