Grant Erwin writes:

I've been working for months to set up a small steel fabrication
business out of my home. Today I stopped by City Hall in the bucolic
little suburb I live in and found out that they certainly allow
businesses in homes, but none with welding. Ack. Anyone run into this
before?

Here is Palm Beach County, Florida, we have a "right to work in your
house" county law that overrides any local zoning nazis. This basically
sez you can run any business, that is otherwise lawful, as long as it
isn't apparent to the neighbors. For example, if I am permitted to weld
in my garage as a hobby, I should be able to do so for a living, if I
can keep it absolutely quiet. The key is doing work quietly in the
garage and not in the yard or in and out of the driveway. No signs or
customers calling. No advertising with your home address on it. It is
not that it has to be a secret, but just not apparent from the street.

If your zoning or whatever tries to prohibit this, then the following
factors are likely causes: (1) the established competition has gotten
the local gummint to legislate a restraint of trade to outlaw you
competing with them, or (2) the zoning busybodies have tried to outlaw
anything in a residential neighborhood. By "busybodies" I mean they
would literally like to prohibit things like writing or consulting over
the Internet for a living from the privacy of your home. The "right to
work" anti-zoning law here trumps that.

Now when you say "steel fabrication business out of my home", most
people are going to visualize a turbine-powered 20-foot gantry in your
side yard looming over a pile of rusty girders, steam locomotives, and
scrap metal. Maybe you just mean to make stuff you can hold at arms
length, but you're fighting a contrary assumption.

It may be that by the term "welding" there is some phobia over
compressed gases that is a pretext for zoning it absolutely out of
residential neighborhoods. Maybe you can find a definitional loophole
if you only do arc type welding.

You should carefully research what the overall zoning is in your
neighborhood. A lot of areas are so bad you can't fight it; the only
solution is to move. Sometimes you can do what you want as long as you
don't anger a neighbor (perhaps over something else) who then reports
you (happened to me in a previous locale).

If you are serious and want to have your rights, you will be much more
effective hiring a lawyer, once you know what your rights are. If you
don't want to pay for a lawyer, then you weren't that serious about it
to start with.