Question 1

Is Oconee County zoned or not?

Accepted Answer

Both answers are true, which is why the question needs rephrasing. The Zoning Enabling Ordinance is adopted, it is administered by a Zoning Official, it has a Board of Zoning Appeals, and Section 38-1.3 makes it applicable within the unincorporated areas of Oconee County. But Section 38-10.2 puts every parcel into the Control Free District as its initial district, and in that district use "shall not be regulated by this Chapter". The county's own page says all parcels in Oconee County are zoned Control Free until rezoned. S.C. Code Section 6-29-330(A) permits exactly this: a county may exercise its planning powers "in the total unincorporated area or specific parts of the unincorporated area". So the useful question is not whether the county is zoned. It is whether this parcel is. Look the tax map number up on the county's GIS parcel viewer and read the zoning classification, or ask Planning & Zoning, before you make an offer — and get the answer in writing if a large detached shop is central to your plan.

Question 2

Can the shop be bigger and taller than the house?

Accepted Answer

On Control Free land, yes as far as zoning is concerned, and that is unusual enough to be worth stating carefully. Section 38-9.3 lists the ordinance's dimensional requirements — lot size, front, side and rear yards, buildable area — and then says the control free district is exempt from that section. The district itself has no dimensional table and no height cap. So nothing in Oconee's zoning measures an accessory building against the dwelling the way many South Carolina counties do. What still governs is real: the structural code for the span and the clear height you want, the flood chapter if any of the pad is in a mapped hazard area, the 65-foot height limit and 2-unit-per-acre density inside the Lake Keowee/Jocassee overlay, the septic layout, and any covenant recorded against your deed, which the county does not enforce and does not check. And if the parcel has been rezoned out of Control Free — into TRD, AD, RRD or another district — the ordinary district standards apply and this answer changes. Confirm the classification first.

Question 3

Can I build it as a farm building and finish it out later?

Accepted Answer

No, and Oconee County has put its answer in writing on the form itself. S.C. Code Section 6-9-65 exempts farm structures from the building code, but defines a farm structure as one built on a farm "other than a residence or a structure attached to it". A barndominium is a residence, and the shop half under the same roof is attached to it, so neither is ever a farm structure. The exemption also has to be claimed before construction by filing an affidavit with the building official, and it evaporates on conversion. The county's Affidavit for Farm Structure reprints the statute and then adds its own position: a structure built under the exemption and later converted to residential use "would be in violation of State law and the Oconee Building Code" and must first be brought up to the current technical codes. In practice that means a shell built to no code, with no footing inspection, no framing inspection and no engineered drawings on file, has to be opened up and proved after the fact. It is the most expensive way to save money on a permit that exists.

Question 4

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

Accepted Answer

Ask the Oconee County building official, in writing, and be suspicious of any number quoted without one. South Carolina does not use the national maps for houses: Regulations 8-1202 and 8-1203 replace the residential code's wind and seismic sources with the Building Codes Council's own county maps. The Council has approved maps for 35 of the 46 counties. Oconee is one of the eleven it has not — the others are Anderson, Cherokee, Greenville, Greenwood, Laurens, McCormick, Pickens, Spartanburg, Sumter and Union. The Council's page tells the building official to consult a hazard tool where no map exists, and its own 2024 staff comment records that the ATC Hazards by Location site "ceased operation on December 31, 2024", pointing users at the ASCE Hazard Tool in its place. From 1 January 2027 the 2024 modifications move the code text itself to that tool. Until then the honest position is that no South Carolina authority publishes a design wind speed or seismic design category for Oconee County, the local official has the delineation power, and the figure belongs in the plan-review correspondence before the frame is ordered rather than in a builder's brochure. The same goes for ground snow load and frost depth: the state's residential code leaves those cells of Table R301.2 to the jurisdiction, Oconee publishes none, and the 12-inch minimum footing depth below undisturbed ground in Section R403.1.4 applies regardless.

Question 5

Could my land end up zoned after I buy it?

Accepted Answer

Yes, and the mechanism is worth understanding because it is unusual. Land leaves the Control Free District only by petition or by Council action, and the petitions do not need everyone. Under the Planning District Method, the signatures of 15 percent of the owners of parcels in one of the county's seventeen Planning Districts — whose boundaries follow the service areas traditionally used by local fire stations — can start a process that ends in a new zoning map for the whole district, with a survey of owners and a Planning Commission recommendation along the way. Under the Small Area Method, owners of at least 200 combined acres, signed by 51 percent of the owners and representing 75 percent of the acreage, can petition to rezone their area; a platted subdivision or a cluster of small parcels can do it at 25 acres or 20 parcels. The county's FAQ acknowledges that up to 49 percent of the owners in an area may not have signed. And County Council can initiate a rezoning of any parcel at any time under Method 3. None of that unbuilds a lawfully built structure — the ordinance treats an existing lawful use as non-conforming until it is willfully abandoned for a year — but it can change what you may add later. If your plan depends on a future second shop, a home business or an outbuilding, build it or permit it while the ground rules are the ones you bought under.

Question 6

Septic and water — who permits it and what is different in the Upstate?

Accepted Answer

The county does not do septic. Its Building Codes page says so directly, listing septic design, inspection and approval under what the division does not do. Onsite wastewater is permitted by the South Carolina Department of Environmental Services under Regulation 61-56, and two things differ from the Lowcountry. First, above the Fall Line — all of Oconee — Section 61-56.104 requires backhoe pits rather than borings alone, so the evaluation is a machine on site, not a hand auger, and the parcel has to be cleared, cornered and the house location staked before anyone comes out. Second, suitability turns on soil morphology, not a percolation test: Section 61-56.200.1 asks for soil texture, depth to restrictive horizons and depth to the zone of saturation, and the long-term acceptance rate comes from textural class. You may hire a licensed Professional Soil Classifier privately and file the soil report with the application rather than wait in the department queue. Watch the setbacks on a lake parcel: 75 feet from the mean high water of an impounded body of water, 15 feet back from the top of the slope of any cut or embankment two feet or more high where the trench sits above the invert, and 5 feet from the building and from the property line. And note the trap that catches edge-of-town acreage: a septic permit cannot issue where public sewer is accessible, however rural the parcel feels.

Question 7

I am looking at lake frontage. What changes?

Accepted Answer

A great deal, and it applies even though the parcel is Control Free, because Section 38-10.2 keeps overlay districts in force there. Within 750 feet of the full pond contour of Lake Keowee or Lake Jocassee — 800 feet above mean sea level on Keowee, 1,110 on Jocassee — the Lake Overlay caps residential net density at 2 dwelling units per acre, caps building height at 65 feet above finished grade, and forbids altering the grade beyond what structural soundness requires, which is the provision that bites hardest on a big level pad cut into a slope. Waterfront parcels whose property line falls within 25 feet of full pond must establish a 25-foot natural vegetative buffer measured perpendicular from that contour, recorded on a plat in the Register of Deeds as a dedication running with the land in perpetuity — triggered at sale or transfer, and again at the first building-codes inspection of a new or expanded structure. Inside the buffer a view lane may take no more than 15 percent of the area, trees over six-inch caliper at four feet up may not be removed without a forester's or arborist's hazard certification, and trees may be limbed to half their height on an approved removal plan. Lake Hartwell frontage sits outside the overlay, but the septic setback from mean high water still applies. Add the county's three-foot freeboard and the no-basement rule wherever the mapped flood hazard reaches the site.

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