The Garage Plan Shop Blog

When building a new garage, it is possible that your city, county, province or local municipality might require that your garage plans are sealed or stamped by an engineer or an architect. Our garage blueprints do not come with an engineer’s or architect’s seal or stamp on them. They are considered pre-drawn, stock plans. This means they are designed to meet the national building codes in place at the time each plan was created. We cannot guarantee that our garage blueprints will meet all local building codes and requirements for your specific area. Because our plans are sold and built all over the US and Canada, it is impossible for our designers to ensure the blueprints will meet all local codes for every location, city, county, municipality, etc. Therefore, our plans do not include an engineer’s or architects seal or stamp, as the seal or stamp is a local requirement. If you need to send or receive large paper documents such as blueprints, you may use paper cores to protect them during transport.

To fin the best advice from an experienced architect, visit https://www.archute.com. You may also consult a commercial electrician to review the electrical design for your garage and make sure it complies with local codes. Once the design is approved, you may start looking for contractors to build your garage. One of them is a commercial roofing contractor to help build and install the roof.

The items required for the engineer’s or architects seal or stamp in one part of the country are completely different than the requirements for a customer building the same plan in another part of the country. Often the requirements that coincide with a seal or stamp for a particular state, province, city, etc., are influenced by climactic and geographic elements that are specific to the area where the plan is built making them local requirements. For example, someone building a garage in certain parts of California will need engineering to meet seismic codes, while a customer building the same plan in the Rocky mountains may need engineering for wind and snow load. It will be up to you or your builder to hire a local engineer or architect to review and seal or stamp the garage plans before obtaining building permits. This design professional must be licensed in the state or province where the garage will be built. We recommend finding someone who can review the blueprints and provide an engineer’s or architect’s seal or before you actually purchase plans. Sometimes the design professional providing the seal or stamp will have a preference as to which plan package he/she works with, and this will influence which blueprint package you purchase. Most likely he/she will want the CAD file or PDF because it is much easier to work with the electronic format when it comes to adding extra notes and elements to the plan that are necessary to meet local building codes. The only way to be sure about what plan package to purchase is to ask your local design professional before you make a blueprint purchase. There is information about this topic in our FAQs should you need to reference it later. Additionally, you can find other helpful information about our blueprints in our Resource section.

Tags: architect’s seal, engineer’s stamp, garage blueprints, garage plans