Pole Barn Barndominium Concrete Slabs in Edgewater, FL

A pole barn barndominium slab in Edgewater waits for the house

Edgewater's Land Development Code won't allow an accessory structure without an existing principal structure. A detached pole barn counts as an accessory structure. That means a barn slab on an empty lot waits for the house, or goes in under the same plan.

That section also bans accessory buildings from front yards and caps you at two per parcel. In residential zones their combined area stops at 60 percent of the house. A shed of 200 square feet or less can sit 5 feet off the side and rear lines.

A barndominium you plan to live in is a different animal. Development Services decides which bucket your plan falls in, so phone them before we set forms. We'd rather hear the answer on a phone call than with the footing trench open. Our pole barn slab service page shows how we build the floor, and the Edgewater page covers our other work here. Send us your survey and the kit drawings, and we'll build the slab around what the city tells you. For the countywide permit picture, read our Volusia concrete permit guide.

The Patio/Slab Permit packet: size, job cost, survey and drainage

Edgewater uses its own Patio/Slab Permit application, and a barn floor goes through it too. You list the slab size and the job cost. You also attach a survey showing the slab, the drainage and the setbacks.

The form also carries two warnings that hit barn pads. Don't push new fill into a drainage easement. And a tree in the fill area may need its own removal permit, since the city requires one for trees 6 inches across or larger anywhere inside its limits. Walk the pad with a tape before you pick a corner of the lot.

The city's building permit fee resolution sets the fees: a $100 application fee for one and two family homes, a $75 minimum permit, and then $75 plus 0.0065 of the job valuation. Start without a permit and you owe 200 percent of the permit fee, and the schedule names driveways. Once the valuation is set, ask the Building Division for your exact number. The office takes applications by email, so you skip the line.

Acting as your own contractor? The Building Division can tell you what it wants from an owner-builder before we schedule the pour.

Sixty percent impervious: the lot math before you pick a barn size

Single-family zones R-1 through R-4 hold building coverage to 30 percent and total impervious coverage to 60 percent. The code lists asphalt, brick and wooden surfaces as impervious, and concrete goes in that bucket too. The barn counts against both. The slab, the driveway to it and anything else poured on the lot count against the second.

Try the math on a quarter-acre lot of 10,890 square feet. Thirty percent works out to 3,267 square feet of buildings. Sixty percent is 6,534 square feet of everything hard. A 30 by 40 barn eats 1,200 square feet of each. Add the house, the driveway and a patio, and a small lot fills fast.

Runoff matters too. A stormwater permit has to show how the lot holds the first half inch of rain on lots under 10,890 square feet, and the first inch on bigger lots, in sodded retention areas no deeper than 6 inches. On a 10,000 square foot lot that comes to 415 cubic feet. Structures under 1,000 square feet of total impervious area skip the stormwater permit, but only if no fill or excavation changes the runoff. A 30 by 40 slab blows past that line.

Zone A with no flood height, and fill that has to pay cup for cup

FEMA's flood map cuts Edgewater unevenly. We checked 61 sample points inside the city line: 67.2 percent landed in Zone X, 27.9 percent in Zone A, 3.3 percent in the shaded 0.2 percent chance zone, and 1.6 percent in Zone AE with a flood height of 5 feet. Zone A has no published base flood elevation, so your barndominium floor height takes a survey and a call to the floodplain office. Look up your parcel on the FEMA flood map before you buy a kit.

Edgewater's flood page is blunt: floodplain development needs a permit, and fill dirt counts. The land code also demands compensatory storage, "cup for cup," for fill placed in the flood zone below base flood elevation. Soil you add to raise a pad has to be paid back somewhere else on the lot. Under the Florida Building Code, new homes in a flood hazard area sit 1 foot above base flood elevation.

Here's another catch. The under-$7,500 permit shortcut from HB 803 doesn't apply to a property that touches a flood hazard area, and it never covers structural work. Both are spelled out in the flood zone guide.

Wet-footed sand: Myakka, Smyrna and Immokalee under an Edgewater pad

The soil data at those same 61 points shows Myakka fine sand at 18.0 percent, Daytona sand at 11.5 percent, Smyrna fine sand at 9.8 percent and Immokalee sand at 8.2 percent. Myakka, Smyrna and Immokalee drain poorly. Muck soils (Tequesta, Samsula and Gator) turned up at 9.8 percent of the points. About three in four points rated "very limited" for dwellings without basements.

That shapes the prep. Before we price a pad, we probe it. Muck and organic material come out. Buried debris and soft fill settle into dips that look like sinkholes under a floor. Clean fill goes back, compacted for uniform support, and the Florida Building Code caps clean sand fill under a slab at 24 inches without approval.

A barndominium floor also gets a 6-mil vapor retarder, because the code waives it only for unheated accessory structures. In Florida Shores, the right-of-way form says lots must grade toward the city street where possible, so we set the pad height to match that slope. The Mosquito Lagoon side of town is an Outstanding Florida Water, one more reason to keep runoff on your own lot.

Grade stakes, a 12 inch culvert and the inspection before your barn driveway pour

A driveway that crosses the city right-of-way goes on the Right of Way/Stormwater/Fill application. The form requires an inspection before the pour, and the Stormwater Department sets the elevation grade stakes before we grade. The use permit costs $75. Skip that inspection and we're pulling forms, not pouring.

Standard detail M-4 sets the apron: 3,000 psi at 28 days, over a base compacted to 98 percent with an LBR of 40. Detail R-27 lets a driveway run 9 to 24 feet wide in the right-of-way, and on residential property the concrete can go as thin as 4 inches if it's reinforced. At 14 feet wide or more, the driveway gets a control joint down its length. Where it crosses a drainage ditch, the pipe has to be at least 12 inches in diameter.

Two driveways must sit 10 feet apart edge to edge and at least 5 feet off the lot line. On lots under an acre, paving runs from the street to the garage or carport. On lots of an acre or more, it runs to the front setback line. Our Edgewater driveway page has the long version.

If your pole barn barndominium slab in Edgewater needs a driveway across the right-of-way, that's the order we follow. Looking for someone to lay slabs near you? Send us the survey and we'll start there.