What documents we needed before building a house in Uruguay

This is the route our family actually followed. Other routes may exist and some may be easier. I went to the offices with my parents, translated and ended up learning far more about the process than I expected.

Marking the plot boundaries with an agrimensor

The first thing we learned was that the exact plot boundaries had to be marked. In Uruguay that job is done by an agrimensor. We found several firms on Mercado Libre, sent the cadastral number and were quoted about $700 to mark four corner points after a wait of a few days.

The visit itself took about fifteen minutes. They drove steel stakes into the four corners and left. It was quick, but without those points everything else felt provisional.

Connecting electricity through UTE

Next came electricity and water. At UTE, the state electricity provider, we were told we needed one of three things: more than a year of paid UTE bills under a contract, a deposit of about $1,000, or a guarantor who had been paying for electricity for more than a year.

We did not have the required payment history and did not want to freeze $1,000 as a deposit, so we used a guarantor.

UTE gave us a list of certified electricians allowed to install the meter setup. The electrician visited the plot, prepared the plan and documents, and installed a small pole, meter and grounding. On the fifth day the physical work took about forty minutes and cost $800. UTE then took about another week to connect it. We also paid the company roughly 5,000 pesos, about $130 at the time.

Connecting water through OSE

For water we went to OSE with the plot documents and signed the initial papers. They said an inspector would visit within two weeks. Before that, we had to dig the hole for the meter box ourselves. Only after the inspection could we sign the connection contract.

After the inspector came, OSE asked us to return. The connection bill was about $900. They offered instalments over a year, which we accepted, and told us to expect the actual connection within a month. The curious part was that the bill had already started while we were still waiting for water.

The building permit and the price of an architect

Getting permission was not a simple visit to one office. We needed an architect and their signatures. Architects around Piriápolis and the department quoted from $7,000 upward; one in Montevideo quoted $12,000. Many also required us to use their own construction crew, while we wanted to hire builders ourselves.

The biggest shock was BPS. We were told that the charge on a completed house of roughly 70 m² could be around $15,000–18,000. That figure changed the whole budget.

Why autoconstrucción did not work for us

We learned about autoconstrucción: when a family builds with its own labour, the BPS treatment can be different. But we were told that the application required certificates showing that the people doing the work were builders. Our parents did not have those certificates, so this route closed for us after a month of stress.

We decided to move in stages and first obtain what we could from the intendencia, the departmental government.

An architect 200 kilometres away—and a missing licence

A Uruguayan neighbour gave us the contact of an architect who lived about 200 kilometres away in a small town. Her fee was roughly $4,000 plus travel. My parents supplied a house plan from the internet for her to redraw in the required Uruguayan format. We paid $2,000 upfront and agreed to pay the other $2,000 when the house was finished.

She worked for several weeks and travelled to discuss the project, charging $100 for each trip. Halfway through, we discovered that she did not have the sanitation licence required in Maldonado for the plumbing drawings. We had to find a second professional, who completed that part for $700.

The intendencia accepted the plans before finishing its review

After more than a month, the architect came with us to submit the drawings at the intendencia office near the market in Piriápolis. We paid a fee of about $400 and received a paper saying construction work could begin. The plans themselves would still be reviewed for months, and any violation found later would have to be corrected.

That intendencia paper was not the final green light. We still had to take the file to BPS. The two routes explained to us were building as a family under the relevant rules or hiring registered workers and preparing for the BPS charge. Because our parents had no builder certificates, we had to find people with local construction experience who could be registered.

That was our paperwork route. The next chapter was finding builders, dealing with the height difference across the plot and finally starting the foundation: /en/dom/poisk-stroiteley/.