As-Built Surveys in Berkeley, CA

Berkeley's brown-shingles and early-1900s houses are beloved precisely because they were built by hand — and that means rooms are seldom square, floors slope, and no two window heads sit at quite the same elevation. When an architect starts a remodel from hand measurements of a building like that, the errors surface during construction, where they are most expensive. Our Trimble terrestrial laser scanner records the house as it truly is: millions of points capturing every out-of-square room, racked wall, and settled sill in a single visit, with millimeter-level noise rather than inch-level guesswork.

Berkeley is also serious seismic-retrofit territory. The Hayward fault crosses the city — it famously split UC's Memorial Stadium — and engineers designing soft-story and foundation retrofits need trustworthy existing-conditions documentation: cripple-wall heights, foundation offsets, floor-level surveys that show how far the structure has already drifted. We deliver those as dimensioned plans, sections, and elevations in DWG/DXF, as Revit models at LOD 200 or 300, or as the raw point cloud in E57/RCP for firms that model internally. In the Hillside Overlay district, where the city routinely requires surveyor-stamped site plans and setbacks are argued in fractions of a foot, an as-built pairs naturally with a topographic survey of the lot, its retaining walls, and the shared driveways typical of the switchback streets.

One scanning visit covers the whole property, and anything the design team later realizes it needs — a stair riser count, a chimney offset, a ceiling height in a back bedroom — comes out of the point cloud without remobilizing. Where a Berkeley project extends into boundary work, resulting maps and records are filed with the Alameda County Surveyor and Recorder.