As-Built Surveys in Petaluma, CA

Petaluma has one of the most intact 19th-century commercial downtowns in Northern California, and that is exactly the building stock that punishes tape-and-sketch as-builts. The brick and iron-front blocks along Petaluma Boulevard and Kentucky Street have been altered for a century and a half: floors added and removed, storefronts rebuilt, party walls shared between buildings that were never square to each other. Along the river, the old feed mills, warehouses, and industrial sheds near the turning basin are being converted to offices, restaurants, and residences, and those structures were built to a working tolerance, not an architectural one. In both cases the design team's first real problem is that no drawing on file describes the building that is actually standing there.

Our Trimble terrestrial laser scanner answers that in one mobilization. We capture the interior and exterior at millions of points, register the scans into a single coordinate system, and hand the architect a building that has been measured rather than assumed: walls out of plumb by the amount they are actually out of plumb, floors that sag where they sag, ceiling heights that vary room to room, and the real relationship between a party wall and the neighboring structure. For seismic retrofits and unreinforced-masonry work, that geometry feeds directly into the structural engineer's analysis. For adaptive reuse, it means the tenant improvement fits the first time instead of getting field-adjusted at framing.

Deliverables include the registered point cloud in E57 or RCP, scan-to-CAD floor plans, reflected ceiling plans, sections and exterior elevations in DWG/DXF, and Revit or other BIM-ready models at the level of development you specify. Because the entire building stays in the cloud, later questions get answered from the data instead of a second site visit. See our Petaluma 3D scanning page for the capture side, or our guide to scan-to-BIM versus traditional as-builts.