Navigating Miami-Dade Building Codes for Whole-House Renovations by Miami architect

Maria Luisa Castellanos
May 16
3 min read

Whole house remodel in South Miami — Whole-house interior remodeling

As a whole house renovation architect, let me explain before you start a whole house renovation in Miami the three very important things you need to look at before you do anything else:

(1) Are you in a flood zone?

(2) What kind of structure is holding up the roof of your house?

(3) Is it on a sewer line or septic tank?

What does your Miami whole-house renovation architect say about the house in a flood zone?

In case you don’t know, if you have a mortgage on your house and are in a flood zone, your insurance company will require that you carry flood insurance. And why would that concern me so much? Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) will be the entity that will supply the flood insurance.

On residential properties, FEMA's National Flood Insurance Program (NFIP) offers maximum coverage limits of $250,000 for building and $100,000 for contents for residential properties. But even more critical is the maximum that FEMA allows for renovations.

The property appraiser’s records for your property in Miami-Dade County will give you the fair market value of your property, broken down by the land value and the building value. Just put in the address or your name in this link: https://www.miamidade.gov/Apps/PA/PropertySearch/#/ .

FEMA only allows you to budget 1/2 of the building value for renovation. For example, if your property has a fair market value of $929,000 but the building value is only $187,000, then you are only allowed to renovate your house with 1/2 of $187,000 or $93,500. This is Miami, $93,500 is not a realistic budget to do a whole house remodeling. Then what?

Many, if not all, building departments in Miami-Dade County accept a way of going around this, but you must do some additional work. You must get your own property appraisal and not just any property appraisal. It must use the “Cost Approach”. This method estimates the value of a property by calculating the cost to replace or reproduce the improvements (buildings, structures, etc.) on the land, then adding the estimated value of the land itself.

As you can imagine, that same house that is fully depreciated by the county on its tax rolls, now only valued at $187,000, will cost a lot more to rebuild new. Let’s assume it’s a 1,200 SF house in Coral Gables. At $300 per square foot, that would be $360,000. So now your budget of $180,000 is much more realistic. It may not get you everything you want to do, but you can certainly do more than with a $93,500 budget.

Now, let’s deal with your second issue?

You want to remove walls inside the house, but can you? Is it possible?

Wood trusses were invented around 1959 or 1960. This means that a house built before then would likely have internal support like interior bearing walls or internal steel columns. Either way, you have to deal with these partitions. You cannot just tear out these walls, or your roof will collapse. There are several ways to work with these, but the important thing here is that you must have your structural engineer develop a solution.

Third issue – septic tank

Many people find this hard to believe, but most of Miami has houses on septic tanks. Just a few areas have sewer lines. For example, Little Havana has many sewer lines, but half of Coral Gables does not. The newer, larger developments in the western areas of the county have sewer lines.

So, what does this mean to you? Generally, as long as you are not adding additional square footage to the house and more bathrooms, this will not affect you. But if you are considering adding, say, a master bedroom suite with a new bathroom and your house has a septic tank from 1970, it will likely have to be upgraded or replaced. A new septic tank today is about a $25,000 investment, more or less.

Now, that you got those 3 main issues out of the way, you can plan what exactly you want to do with the house – a bigger, more modern kitchen, larger impact doors on the back of the house, more modern bathrooms, a better laundry room, modernize the front for curb appeal, etc. Dream big and then call me. My name and number are below.