The request comes from whoever signed the permit
Section 113.1.2 of the Virginia code settles this in two lines: "When construction reaches a stage of completion that requires an inspection, the permit holder shall notify the building official." That is a signature, not a trade. It is the builder on a house he took the paperwork out for, the property owner on a shop building permitted in their own name, the sub who pulled a separate permit for one piece of the work. A job title decides nothing here.
Section 113.1.1 puts the access gear on that same person, ladder and scaffolding included. So before a date goes on a calendar we write down who owes the phone call, because the job where nobody owed it is the job that sits. Whether your pour has an inspection attached to it in the first place is a different question with a different answer.
Virginia creates a duty to inspect and hangs no clock on it
Section 113.1.3, headed "Duty to inspect," reads in full: "Except as provided for in Section 113.7, the building official shall perform the requested inspection in accordance with Section 113.6 when notified in accordance with Section 113.1.2." There is a duty. There is no time attached to it. Nothing in Virginia's code promises that anybody will be standing at your trench by a particular day.
The one real clock lives in that exception. Section 113.7 says that where the building official "is unable to make the inspection or test required by Section 113.3 or 113.4 within two working days of a request or an agreed upon date," the official "shall accept reports for review" from a third party inspector. The same section runs a second two working day clock in the other direction: a refusal to approve such a report has to be in writing inside two working days, with the reason stated.
Read the catch before you plan around it. That route only works with an inspector who meets that building official's written policy on third party qualifications, which Section 113.7.1 requires every official in Virginia to keep, and no county around here publishes an approved list. Grayson County's own third party policy, dated March 17, 2020, sets the bar where a homeowner will feel it: it wants a Virginia registered design professional, an architect or an engineer, or somebody working under one's direct supervision, and it says third party use "shall be pre-approved except when this department has not performed an inspection within two full working days of the inspection request." So in Grayson the pre-approval step falls away once two full working days pass, but the design professional requirement does not, which makes lining one up a question for the day the permit is issued, not for pour morning.
What the counties around here actually publish about timing
Four counties, four different amounts of published information, and one of them publishes two rules that disagree with each other. None of this is a service promise from anybody. It is simply what each county has written down.
- Floyd County runs a dedicated inspection line, 540-745-9359, which is a different number from the department's general line at 540-745-9358. Its Building Inspections page says inspections may be scheduled Monday through Friday, that "A 24 hour notice must be given in advance on ALL inspections," and that no inspection is made the same day it is called in. A county news post dated March 11, 2024 says inspections run Monday, Wednesday and Friday only and asks for requests 48 hours ahead. Both sit on the county's own site, so call the inspection line and ask which one is current. Floyd's permit application also carries the line that focuses a homeowner fast: "(E911 will NOT be issued until a footing inspection is complete)"
- Grayson County takes an inspection request through its online permitting portal, and the portal itself warns: "Submitting an inspection request does not schedule an inspection. We will review your request and follow up with you." No notice period and no cutoff time is published. The Building Department is at 276-773-2322, and extension 103 reaches Becky Kirk, the Permit Technician
- Wythe County publishes a number and an email route and stops there: "If you have any questions or to schedule an inspection, please call the Building Inspection Department at 276-223-4505 or email." Building Official Kyle Taylor is at 276-223-4511
- Carroll County publishes nothing at all about requesting an inspection. Re-checked on September 11, 2026 against the Building Official page and all nine of the county's Construction Guide documents: no line, no form, no portal, no notice period, no cutoff. Gary Bergeron is the Building Official, at 276-730-3016, and asking him is the whole procedure. Inside town limits the Town of Hillsville issues its own building permits, so the town is the office to ask there. Our Carroll County permit page has the rest of that desk
North Carolina hangs its clocks in different places
Across the line the timing language sits in the General Statutes. G.S. 160D-1104(b) lists among an inspection department's duties "the making of any necessary inspections in a timely manner," with no number attached to timely. G.S. 160D-1104(c) adds that in performing the inspections the state building code requires, "the inspector shall conduct all inspections requested by the permit holder for each scheduled inspection."
Two more provisions change how a week gets planned there. G.S. 160D-1104(d2) says a department shall not charge a fee or fail an inspection of residential work "if the permit holder cancels a scheduled inspection more than one business day before the scheduled inspection," which is real money on a footing that rains out. And where a homeowner took the permit out on their own place under the owner builder exemption at G.S. 87-1(b)(2), G.S. 160D-1113 says no inspection is conducted without that owner being present, unless the plans were drawn and sealed by an architect under Chapter 83A of the General Statutes. That homeowner cannot send the crew and head to work.
What actually happens when the concrete goes in first
Start with the part that is certain. Section 113.1 of the Virginia code says, in words the statute behind it uses as well, that a building "shall not be deemed in compliance until approved by the inspecting authority." Nobody approves a footing they never saw. So an uninspected footing is not a footing with a paperwork problem. It is a footing that is not in compliance, and it stays that way until somebody signs it off.
What the code hands the official from there is three things. A stop work order under Section 114.1, where once it issues "the affected work shall cease immediately." A written notice of violation under Section 115.2, which has to carry a reasonable period on its face for the correction to happen in. And the end of the job: Section 116.1 makes the certificate of occupancy wait on an approved final inspection, so an unapproved footing sits under everything and blocks the finish rather than only the start.
The version you will read online is that the work simply has to come back up. That sentence is not in Virginia's code. The words people are half remembering, "Work shall not be done beyond the point indicated in each successive inspection without first obtaining the approval of the building official," come out of the model code's own administration chapter, and Section 101.4 says Virginia's code is its own Chapter 1 plus Chapters 2 through 35 of the IBC. Model Chapter 1 is not in it. Virginia's nearest sentence is in Section 113.6, and it points forward rather than backward: defects "shall be corrected and reinspected before any work proceeds that would conceal such defects."
North Carolina is genuinely different on this one point. Its administrative rules carry an "Approval required" section whose first sentence reads: "Work shall not be done beyond the point indicated in each successive inspection without first obtaining the approval of the code enforcement official." Pouring past an inspection there is a breach of a named section. Virginia has no section written that way, and nothing found in its code hands an inspector the power to order poured work dug back up either. That is an absence, not a provision forbidding the order, and neither state's rules tell you how your particular official will handle concrete already in the ground, which makes what comes next a conversation with the building official. That uncertainty is why a footing of ours gets no truck and no start time until the county has put a date on the inspection, and why the name of whoever phones that request in is written down before the job starts.
Three questions to ask on the day the permit is issued
Ask all three in one breath, because they are what a pour date actually gets built on, and because the counties here publish so little that the counter is the only place to get them. Then the date goes on the calendar and our written estimate carries it.
- How do you want the footing inspection requested, and who is calling it in
- How much notice do you want, and which days of the week are you running inspections
- Do you keep a list of approved third party inspectors, since that is the Section 113.7.1 written policy and the answer to it is what makes the two working day fallback in Section 113.7 usable