Service areas

Custom Home Builder in New Castle County, Delaware

New Castle County is the one part of Delaware where the ground under a house changes completely from one end of the county to the other. North of the fall zone you are building on crystalline rock and clay-heavy soil. South of it you are back on the coastal plain sediments that cover the rest of the state. That line runs through the middle of the county, and it decides more about a foundation than any other single factor.

The fall zone, and why it matters to your footings

Northern New Castle County is the only piece of Delaware in the Appalachian Piedmont. The bedrock there is hard crystalline rock: Baltimore Gneiss, Wissahickon schist, Cockeysville Marble, the Setters Formation. Above it sits weathered saprolite and soil with noticeably more clay than anywhere else in the state. Practically, that means excavation can hit rock, basements are normal and usually worth building, and footings bear on material that behaves very differently from sand.

Drop below the fall zone, roughly south of the Newark and Wilmington line, and the crystalline rock dips away under coastal plain sediment. From Bear and Glasgow southward you are on sandier, better draining ground, closer to what we build on daily in Kent and Sussex. A lot in Claymont and a lot in Middletown are both New Castle County addresses and they want two different foundation approaches.

Zoning runs on the Unified Development Code

Unincorporated land in the county is governed by Chapter 40, the Unified Development Code, and administered by the New Castle County Department of Land Use. The residential districts break into a few families worth knowing before you go under contract on a lot:

Suburban (S) and Suburban Transition (ST). The growth-area districts, moderate to moderately high density, generally where sewer is available or planned.
Suburban Estate (SE). Low density and specifically not served by sewer, written to keep single-family houses on large lots. If you have bought acreage, this is often the district, and it means septic.
Neighborhood Conservation (NC). A set of districts written to hold the character of neighborhoods that already exist. The number after the letters tracks lot size, so NC5 covers the older tight-knit blocks and NC40 covers the large-lot end. Infill in an NC district is judged against what is already on the street.

The Department of Land Use takes questions at 302-395-5400, and we will make that call on your behalf before you buy if you want the zoning read confirmed.

Glasgow, and why it does not have its own page

Glasgow sits at the junction of Route 40 and Route 896, immediately west of Bear. We build there and we are happy to quote there, but we have not written it a separate page, because doing so honestly would mean repeating the Bear page with the name changed.

The reason is that the two places are the same building environment in every respect that affects a quote. Both are unincorporated New Castle County land, so both go through the Department of Land Use under the same Unified Development Code districts. Both sit below the fall zone on the same coastal plain soils. Both are largely served by county sewer, with private systems only at the rural edges. Both are about an hour and thirty-five minutes from our office.

If your lot has a Glasgow address, the Bear page is the one that describes your project. Anything genuinely specific to your parcel, and there usually is something, we would rather work out from the parcel number than guess at in advance.

Who actually issues the permit

New Castle County has more incorporated municipalities than the other two counties, and that changes who you deal with. Wilmington, Newark, Middletown, the City of New Castle and Elsmere all run their own permitting. Build in Bear, Glasgow, Claymont or the unincorporated land between the towns and it is the county Department of Land Use instead. Two lots fifteen minutes apart can sit under entirely different review processes, different fee schedules and different inspection schedules.

Sewer coverage is wider here than anywhere else in Delaware, so many lots skip the septic process. Where there is no sewer, the on-site system is permitted by DNREC's Ground Water Discharges Section, not by the county, and the soil evaluation has to be done by a licensed Class H evaluator before anything else moves.

Towns

Where we build in New Castle

New Castle County sits at the top of the state, so our crews run up I-1 and Route 1 rather than working out of the yard each morning. Expect roughly an hour and a half from our Millsboro office to most of the county.

The rest of Delaware

We build in all three counties. See Kent County and Sussex County, the full service area list, or go back to the homepage for completed work and how we price a build.

Thinking about building in New Castle County?

Send us the parcel number and we will tell you what we find before you spend anything. Zoning district, sewer or septic, who reviews it, and whether the lot will take the house you have in mind.

Request a Free Quote 302-242-4007