Question 1

Can the shop be bigger and taller than the house in Greenwood County?

Accepted Answer

Taller, no. Bigger, only up to a point, and only if it is a separate building. Section 6-3-109 caps every detached accessory structure on a property, cumulatively, at "25 feet in height or the height of the primary structure, whichever is less, and 1,200 square feet in gross floor area cumulatively or 50 percent of the gross floor area of the principal structure, whichever is greater." The height comparison takes the lesser of the two, so a detached shop can never rise above the roofline of the house it serves and never above 25 feet however tall the house is. The floor-area comparison takes the greater of the two, so a 2,000 square foot dwelling supports 1,200 square feet of detached shop and a 3,600 square foot dwelling supports 1,800. Acreage does not change either number. There is one route that avoids the cap entirely and it is the ordinary barndominium form anyway: put the shop bays and the living space under one continuous roof. Then there is no accessory building, only a dwelling with a large garage, and the RDD schedule sets no maximum height for a principal building at all. That building sits inside the principal-structure setbacks — 50 feet from the right-of-way, 10 feet side, 40 feet rear in RDD — rather than the ten-foot accessory setbacks, and it carries the residential code's separation, fire and energy requirements throughout because the shop is part of the dwelling. Draw it that way, then take the drawing to Planning on (864) 942-8636 before anything is ordered.

Question 2

What wind speed and seismic category should my engineer design to here?

Accepted Answer

Ask the Greenwood City/County building official in writing, and treat any figure quoted without one as unsourced. South Carolina does not use the national maps for houses: modification IRC 2021-04 rewrites Section R301.2.1 to take the ultimate design wind speed from "the previously published maps by the South Carolina Building Codes Council", and IRC 2021-05 does the same for the seismic design category. The Council has approved maps for 35 of the 46 counties. Greenwood is one of the eleven it has not — the others are Anderson, Cherokee, Greenville, Laurens, McCormick, Oconee, Pickens, Spartanburg, Sumter and Union. The county's own building chapter does not fill the gap: Title 6 Chapter 1 adopts the technical codes, sets fees and prescribes penalties, and contains no design-criteria table at all. Both modifications let the local building official delineate the category within the jurisdiction so long as it does not surpass what the Applied Technology Council website provides, and the Council's map page says the same for a county with no map — but the Council's own staff comment on the 2024 cycle records that "the ATC Hazards by Location site ceased operation on December 31, 2024", with users pointed to the ASCE Hazard Tool instead. So the honest position is that no South Carolina authority publishes a design wind speed or seismic design category for Greenwood County, the local official holds the delineation power, and the figures belong in the plan-review correspondence before the frame is ordered. The same goes for ground snow load and frost depth: the residential code leaves those cells to the jurisdiction, Greenwood publishes none, and the code's own 12-inch minimum footing depth below undisturbed ground applies regardless.

Question 3

Who actually issues the permit — the county or the city?

Accepted Answer

A single shared department does, for both. Section 6-1-1(d) of the Greenwood County code makes "the city and county building official" the administrative and enforcement official for the adopted technical codes, and the county's own department index links Building Inspection and Permitting through to the Greenwood City/County Building Department at 520 Monument Street on (864) 942-8424. The fee schedule the county publishes is headed with that department's name. Planning is arranged the same way: one Greenwood City/County Planning Department serves the county, the City of Greenwood and the Towns of Ninety Six, Troy and Ware Shoals, staffing a 15-member Joint City/County Planning Commission — seven county appointees, five city, and one each from the three towns — and a Joint City/County Board of Zoning Appeals. Two practical differences survive the merger. First, a City of Greenwood business licence is required to pull a permit inside the city; the department states that for work in Greenwood County a business licence is not required, though the permit still is. Second, the offices are in different places: permits and inspections at 520 Monument Street, planning and zoning at the County Airport Annex, 1025 Deadfall Road. Applications, inspection requests and payments have all run through the CitizenServe portal since 18 August 2025.

Question 4

What will the permit cost, and how is the figure worked out?

Accepted Answer

From a valuation table, and the county takes whichever number is higher. The department's published schedule says the value "shall be determined by either the standard Building Valuation Data table (BVD table) or the estimated value of the work covered by the permit provided by the applicant at the time of application. The higher of the two valuations shall be used to calculate the building permit fee." The BVD table is the International Code Council's, on August 2026 cost data, with South Carolina's regional cost modifier of .85 applied. That matters for a barndominium, because the ICC table prices by occupancy group and construction type rather than by what your builder actually charges, and a large unheated shop bay under the same roof as the dwelling is not free in that arithmetic. The fee bands themselves: $30.00 where the valuation is $1,000 or less; $30 for the first $1,000 plus $5 for each additional thousand or fraction up to $50,000; $275 for the first $50,000 plus $4.00 per additional thousand to $100,000; $475 for the first $100,000 plus $3.00 per additional thousand to $500,000; and $1,675 for the first $500,000 plus $2.00 per additional thousand above that. Commercial plan review is 50 percent of the construction or alteration permit fee. Re-inspections are $50. Moving a structure is $100 and demolition $50. And the schedule is explicit that where work starts before the permit issues "the fees shall be doubled", which does not excuse anything else.

Question 5

I am looking at Lake Greenwood frontage. What changes?

Accepted Answer

More than on most South Carolina lakes, because the county owns this one. Lake Greenwood was created between 1935 and 1940 by Buzzard's Roost Dam and has been Greenwood County's ever since; Duke Power, then Santee Cooper from 2007, then Lockhart Power Company from 2020 have generated power under agreement with the county rather than owning the water. The county's Lake Management Department issues permits for encroachments on the lake, registers existing encroachments, administers shoreline management and assists in complying with the FERC licence, from the Airport Annex on (864) 943-2648. So a dock, a ramp, a boat lift, a seawall or a bank stabilisation project is a county permit, separate from the building permit. The zoning ordinance also reaches the water. Section 6-3-109 sets the accessory-structure rear setback on a lakefront lot at "50 feet from the 440-foot contour line or property line, whichever is greater" — and the same section allows accessory uses in the front, side or rear yards on a lakefront lot, which is a relaxation elsewhere in the ordinance and a tightening at the water's edge. The WD waterfront development district's own development-standards table gives a single-family dwelling a 40-foot lakeside setback from that same 440-foot contour, with a 35-foot maximum building height, a 10,000 square foot minimum site, 50 feet of lot width, a 20-foot front yard, 10-foot side and 40-foot rear. Read those together and the detached shop stands ten feet further back from the water than the house does. The city/county engineer approves construction drawings for boat houses, docks and lifts on Lake Greenwood, and a Land Disturbance form is required if the parcel is in a Land Disturbance area of the lake.

Question 6

Is Greenwood County zoned, and what does the district under my parcel actually allow?

Accepted Answer

It is zoned, countywide, and has been since 1986 — the Land Use Element of the Greenwood City/County Comprehensive Plan says so and adds that the only areas in the county without land use standards were the towns of Hodges and Troy. That makes Greenwood different from several Upstate neighbours where large blocks of ground sit outside any zoning map. But being zoned here is less restrictive than it sounds, because the district under most rural parcels is the Rural Development District, and RDD is unusually permissive by design. Section 6-3-47(a) states that the district's purpose "is not to restrict the use of land, but to regulate the manner in which land is developed", and § 6-3-47 permits a building or premises to be "used for any purpose, unless elsewhere prohibited by this chapter", subject to the performance and development standards. The 2010 Land Use Element measured RDD at 68 percent of the county's land area, the largest single district, and described it as allowing "basically any type of land use designation with minimal design standards." What binds instead are the dimensional and performance rules: a one-acre minimum lot for a dwelling, a 50-foot setback from any street right-of-way, 10 feet at the side and 40 at the rear, and a 35 percent residential impervious-surface limit. Two cautions. That same Land Use Element recommends rezoning RDD ground as growth reaches it, so the district today is not a promise about the district in a decade. And the county also carries AG-1, AG-2, AG-3, FA forest agricultural and WD waterfront districts on rural land, each with its own schedule — so confirm the district on the tax map number with the Planning Department before you make an offer.

Question 7

What is the ground like, and will it take a septic system?

Accepted Answer

Mostly good, with a belt through it that is not, and the septic answer matters more than the foundation one. The dominant soils are Cecil, mapped at 65,194 acres as a major component, and Pacolet at 18,797 — the well-drained kaolinitic red Piedmont clays that carry a slab without special measures. Against that, Greenwood sits on the Piedmont's mafic belt and the acreage is substantial: 20,960 acres of Enon, 4,287 of Helena, 3,847 of Iredell and 702 of Winnsboro, roughly 29,800 acres of shrink-swell ground, with the Enon block among the largest of that series anywhere in the state. On the foundation side that means expansive-soil design rather than a standard slab detail, and Atterberg limits with an expansion index rather than an assumption. On the septic side it can end the plan outright: S.C. Regulation 61-56 § 200.2 provides that soils "identified as having substantial amounts of expansible layer clay minerals or smectites are unsuitable" for onsite wastewater systems, and the same section treats massive or platy structure the same way. Onsite wastewater is permitted by the South Carolina Department of Environmental Services, not by the county. Greenwood is above the Fall Line, so R.61-56 § 104.1 requires backhoe pits rather than borings alone, and § 200.1 judges suitability on soil morphology — texture, depth to restrictive horizons and depth to the zone of saturation — rather than on a percolation test. You may hire a licensed Professional Soil Classifier privately and file the soil report with the application instead of waiting in the department queue. Do that before closing, not after, because on mafic ground the answer can be no.

Question 8

Can I build it as a barn first and finish it into a house later?

Accepted Answer

No, and the statute closes the door in its definition rather than leaving room to argue. S.C. Code § 6-9-65(A) defines a farm structure as one built on a farm "other than a residence or a structure attached to it", and expressly excludes a structure "originally qualifying as a 'farm structure' but later converted to another use." A barndominium is a residence, so it never qualifies, and the shop half of a shouse never qualifies either because that half is attached to the residence. Even for a genuinely detached, genuinely agricultural barn the relief is conditional: § 6-9-65(C) requires the owner to file an affidavit with the building official before construction stating the intended use, and § 6-9-65(D) leaves the jurisdiction free to require a building permit anyway. FEMA flood standards apply to a farm structure regardless, by the express terms of § 6-9-65(B). Greenwood's zoning ordinance does treat a barn as a distinct thing — the first listed accessory use in § 6-3-109 says a barn "may be located in any agricultural, forest or rural zoning district and no primary structure is required" and that barns "may be larger than 900 square feet" — but that is a zoning permission about where a barn may stand, not a building-code exemption for a house. Build it as a dwelling from the first drawing. That is also the cheaper route in practice, because a building put up to barn standards and converted afterwards has to be brought up to the residential code anyway, usually by taking things apart.

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