ADU Surveys in Piedmont, CA

Piedmont is the one East Bay city where the ADU survey question answers itself: the city's ADU checklist makes a site survey the first required plan item on every application. And it is a demanding one — the checklist calls for dimensioned lot lines with coordinates, the street right-of-way, all existing structures, fences, and retaining walls, significant trees of 12-inch trunk diameter and up, grade elevations at building corners, existing floor elevations, roof eave and peak elevations, utilities and easements, and contour lines at 2-foot intervals. That is a combined boundary and topographic survey in everything but name, and on Piedmont's steep, irregular parcels it is surveyor work in practice. The companion site plans add adjacent-property structures within 25 feet of the line and grade changes at the property line.

Piedmont's terrain makes the topographic half consequential. The city is effectively all hillside — winding streets, terraced lots, and mature landscaping that hides both the ground surface and the old retaining walls holding it up. Our Trimble laser scanner captures the full requirement in one visit: millions of measured points produce the 2-foot contours, the corner and floor elevations, the eave and ridge heights, and the neighboring structures, while our boundary work establishes the lot-line coordinates the checklist asks for. Detached ADUs here are capped at 18 feet of height measured against existing grade, so the elevation data is not a formality — it decides what you can build.

Deliverables are a stamped site survey sheet formatted to the city's checklist plus a layered DWG base map for your designer. Piedmont parcels record through the Alameda County Recorder, and where a project grows beyond the ADU — additions, major remodels — the same scan supports our as-built surveys without a second mobilization.