As-Built Surveys in Lafayette, CA

Lafayette runs one of the stricter residential design-review processes in Contra Costa County, with ridgeline development rules and a review commission that scrutinizes how a remodel or addition changes building height, massing, and visibility from surrounding properties. Those questions can only be answered against accurate existing conditions: true ridge and eave elevations, true floor levels, true facade geometry. On Lafayette's wooded hillside lots — much of the town sits on the landslide-prone Orinda Formation, with large parcels sloping toward Lafayette Creek and Las Trampas Creek corridors — homes built in the mid-century decades have often settled and racked enough that the original drawings overstate how square and level the structure really is. Submitting design-review exhibits based on those old drawings invites corrections, resubmittals, and lost months.

We scan the entire residence with a Trimble terrestrial laser scanner in one visit, capturing interior rooms, facades, and roof geometry as millions of survey-grade points — including through the mature tree cover that makes conventional instrument sightlines tedious on wooded Lafayette lots. Deliverables are matched to the submittal: dimensioned floor plans, exterior elevations with verified ridge heights for ridgeline and height-limit analysis, building sections, and Revit models at LOD 200 or 300 for architects developing the design in BIM. Because ridge elevations come from the point cloud rather than an estimated extrapolation, the height calculations in your design-review package rest on measured fact. For projects that also need site grading and tree documentation, our topographic surveys extend the same scan data across the lot.

Along the Mt. Diablo Boulevard corridor — Lafayette's one substantial commercial strip — we scan retail and office buildings for tenant-improvement drawings and lease exhibits, where owners frequently hold no usable original plans. Every project includes the point cloud in E57 or RCP format for later verification without a second visit. As-built drawings are not recorded instruments, but any monument set or recovered during related boundary work is documented under B&P Code §8771 by Corner Record or Record of Survey filed with the Contra Costa County Surveyor.