Design Service

Site Plans.

Site layout and documentation built from survey data you provide — accurate, scaled, and ready for your township to review.

Site plans built on the survey data you provide

A site plan shows how your home or project sits on your lot — building placement, driveway layout, and the other site-specific details your township needs to see before issuing a permit. We're not a licensed surveying firm, so we don't establish or certify property boundaries ourselves. We produce residential site plans for new construction, home additions, accessory structures, pole barns, garages, ADUs, cabins, and other permitted projects across Traverse City, Grand Traverse County, Leelanau County, Antrim County, Benzie County, and surrounding Northern Michigan townships. If your building department or township requires a plot plan, proposed site plan, or building placement drawing as part of a permit application, we can produce it from your survey data. What we do is take the survey data you already have — a recorded boundary survey, or in some cases LiDAR or satellite elevation data when that's sufficient for the project — and build the site layout and drawings on top of it.

If you don't have a survey yet, that's the first step before we can put together an accurate site plan. We can talk through what you'll need at consultation.

What this can include

What's needed varies by township and project type. Depending on your project and the data available, this can include:

  • Building footprint and placement on the lot
  • Driveway and parking layout
  • Zoning setback research — reviewing township ordinances, land use maps, and confirming requirements directly with the zoning administrator where needed
  • Utility locations (well, septic, electric, gas) as shown on the survey or other data you provide
  • Proposed finished grade for new home construction — when a topo, LiDAR, or other elevation survey is provided as a starting point
  • North arrow, scale, and required notes

What this does not include

We do not perform land surveying or establish or certify legal property boundaries, and we don't produce stamped civil engineering documents (drainage calculations, stormwater design, septic system design). Where a project needs any of that, it's outside our scope. Finished grade design is offered only for new home construction where elevation survey data already exists; without that data, we can't generate an accurate grading plan.

Common site plan applications

  • New home permit applications
  • Addition and accessory structure permits
  • Site plans prepared for township review as part of a zoning variance request
Related Services

Often paired with this work.