Home Remodeling in New Castle County, DE

New Castle County holds most of Delaware's housing and nearly every era of it: brick rowhouses in Wilmington from the city's industrial run, the postwar neighborhoods of Brandywine Hundred north of the city, the 1980s and 1990s subdivisions of Pike Creek, Hockessin, Bear and Glasgow, and the two-story homes that have gone up south of the Chesapeake and Delaware Canal since 2000.

That history is why remodeling in this county is never one kind of job. A 1900 rowhouse in Wilmington, a 1956 split-level in Brandywine Hundred, a 1988 colonial in Pike Creek and a 2006 two-story in Middletown all have a kitchen and a bath, but the framing, the plumbing, the wiring and the rules are different in each.

Permits follow the same split. The Licensing Division of the county's Department of Land Use issues permits for the unincorporated areas, which is where most of the county's houses are. Hockessin, Pike Creek, Bear, Glasgow, Christiana, Claymont, Greenville and North Wilmington all go through the county office in New Castle. The incorporated towns and cities run their own permit offices: Wilmington, Newark, Middletown, New Castle, Delaware City, Elsmere, Townsend and Odessa among them. Several of those also have historic district review boards that pass on exterior changes before a permit is issued. Knowing which desk your address belongs to is the first step of any project here, and it is one Dawson's sorts out at the estimate.