The new Coop in Ramsi received its building permit 176 days after the design contract was signed. What took longest was not the building but the junction: the Transport Administration approved the road design after two rounds of revisions.
Building permit 26 August 2026 · construction tender September 2026
Viljandi Tarbijate Ühistu, a consumer cooperative, wanted a new shop in Ramsi to replace the old one. The current sales floor is 237 m²; in the new building it is 423 m². The new building also has storage rooms and staff facilities on the upper floor. A detailed plan for the plot had been adopted in January 2026.
The building itself was simple: a single-storey sales hall and a two-storey storage and staff wing. The location made it difficult. The plot lies within the protection zone of national road 24158, and a raised junction with a new pedestrian crossing is being built next to the shop. The Transport Administration needed the junction levels and the stormwater drainage resolved. Four parties were involved in the procedure: the Transport Administration, the Rescue Board, the water utility and the rural municipality as the permitting authority.
We went through the junction design directly with the Transport Administration's specialist and submitted it in full: long section, cross sections, drainage divide and gully inlets. After that, approval came within a day. We resolved the Rescue Board's comments in the third version of the fire safety design. The main design and the architectural and structural detailed design were completed during the procedure, so the tender documents were ready by September.
The building permit and the permit to demolish the old buildings were issued on the same day, 26 August 2026. It took 176 days from contract to permit: 99 days of design and 77 days of procedure. The project went to construction tender in September.
Views from the project's BIM model. Move the slider or use the arrows.
1/8Foundation and floor slab
From contract to building permit, in days. Our work is shown in green.
The law gives the authority 30 days from the application to issue a building permit [EhS § 42(5)]. In Ramsi it took 77 days, because the road design had to be revised between approval rounds. All procedure time limits are listed in the guide How long does it take to get a building permit?.
The building permit did not mean the design was finished. A shop where more than 50 people can be present at once needs an independent review of the building design [Reg. 62 § 3(2)(6)]. The client ordered it for the main design. The reviewers went through seven parts of the design and raised more than 100 comments. The construction tender used the design that had passed the review.
Comments on heating and ventilation arrived while the permit was still being processed. One of them pointed out that the specification referred to an outdated version of the smoke control standard.
Architecture, interiors and fire safety. The architectural part alone had 32 rows, many of them with several questions.
The principal designer went through every row and marked what we would do: fix it, add it, keep it with a justification, or wait for input from the client or another design part. The architect got this as an action list, drawing by drawing.
Part by part, with reply tables: architecture, interiors, site plan and water supply on 19 Sep, structures and HVAC on 22–23 Sep, electrical on 24 Sep.
A bidder asked whether the 120 mm cold room panels could be replaced with 100 mm ones. Our answer: only with the panel manufacturer's data, a recalculated cooling load and the client's written consent. Otherwise the design applies.
Fire doors needed smoke tightness in addition to fire resistance, for example EI 30-S200 or EI 30-Sa. For every door and window we wrote requirements: thermal transmittance, sound insulation, air permeability, watertightness, wind load resistance and security class. The contractor chooses the product, but the requirement has to be in the design.
Setting-out dimensions for openings, floor falls, drain levels, ventilation grille labels. We answered by one rule: the drawing or specification states a requirement or a reference product. “The contractor will sort it out” is not an answer.
For the hot water circulation pump, the heating part referred to the water supply part and the water supply part to heating. We agreed the pump belongs to heating and removed the duplication. In the same way, one smoke vent was missing from the electrical part.
We did not agree with everything. Where a solution came from the client's store standard, we kept it and gave the reasoning in the reply table. Examples are the antistatic floor covering in technical rooms and the safety film on glazing.
Every reply was checked against the drawings. Before sending, we compared the reply table with the revised drawings. That caught errors that would otherwise have reached the reviewer's follow-up check: a wrong product code in a panel name, and a reply that promised one thing while the drawing showed another.
Source: design review non-conformity tables and the designers' replies, 6 Aug–24 Sep 2026
The warehouse wall is 0.5 m from the plot boundary. That close to the boundary, a fire wall is normally needed. The rural municipality agreed that nothing will be built on the neighbouring plot closer than 8 m to our building. That keeps a sufficient separation distance, so the wall could stay an ordinary wall.
8 magreed distance to future buildings on the neighbouring plot
Source: Fire safety design; Regulation No 17 of the Minister of the Interior on fire safety requirements for buildings
We modelled the roof's moisture behaviour hour by hour over five years. Besides normal use, we checked two hard cases: a roof built with wet materials and a −18 °C freezer room below it. The mould index stayed below 1.0 in every case, and construction moisture dries out by the second or third year. The vapour barrier has a diffusion resistance of 1,500 m; RIL 107-2022 requires at least 2 m for roofs.
M < 1.0mould index in every scenario
Source: DELPHIN 6.1; RIL 107-2022 ch. 2, table 2.2; EN 15026
The old buildings had been entered in the register long ago, with no documents from which the demolition notice form could take its data, so the form would not go through. Instead of waiting for the register to be corrected, we applied for a building permit for the demolition. The permit came within a day and covered both buildings.
1 daydemolition permit procedure
Source: Building register; Viljandi Rural Municipality decision No 210, 26 August 2026
Let's go through what the authorities are likely to ask before we submit.
