Out past the city limits in Liberty County, the permit office is the county's

Once you're outside the limits of Liberty, Cleveland, Dayton, or one of the smaller towns, there's no city building department watching the lot, but the county still has a say. The Permit & Inspection Department handles building, culverts onto county roads, water meters, commercial work, mobile-home and RV parks, cell towers, pipelines, and septic. A metal barn on your own acreage is usually a light lift; anything the public drives into, or that ties into a county road or the floodplain, gets a closer look.

Two offices cover the county. The Liberty office is at 311 Travis Street, 936-336-4560; the Cleveland office is at 1616 County Road 3549, 832-579-1135. They'd rather field a question early than red-tag a foundation later, and they mean it about the timing. Start the work before you've squared away the permit and the county can charge double the fee.

The county is only one layer, too. A given project might also pull in a city, a utility, a floodplain rule, or a road-access question, so a quick call to the permit clerk before materials hit the site is the cheapest survey you'll ever run.