As-Built Surveys in Piedmont, CA

Piedmont's older estate homes are large, finely detailed, and almost never accompanied by accurate drawings — a difficult combination for the remodels and additions that dominate work in this small enclave city. The houses ramble across hillside lots, with split levels, complex roofscapes, and interior trim that any alteration will be judged against. Our Trimble terrestrial laser scanner documents a full estate property in one visit: interiors, exterior elevations, roof forms visible from ground stations, and the terraced grounds around the house, all as a single registered point cloud with millimeter-level fidelity.

That fidelity matters in front of Piedmont's design review process, which examines exterior changes closely and expects drawings that represent the existing house truthfully. Scan-derived elevations show actual eave heights, window proportions, and ridge lines rather than idealized ones, so massing studies and story-pole exhibits start from defensible geometry. We deliver floor plans, sections, and elevations in DWG/DXF, Revit models at LOD 200 or 300, and E57/RCP point clouds for design teams that model in-house. Piedmont's mature landscaping — the hedges, oaks, and specimen trees that give the city its character — obstructs traditional sight lines, but the scanner works around vegetation by accumulating vantage points, capturing facades a total station could never see cleanly. Where an addition presses toward a setback on a hillside lot, we pair the as-built with a boundary and topographic survey so the design sits on surveyed lines rather than assumptions.

The point cloud remains on file after delivery, so questions raised late in design review are answered from the data, not from another site visit. Any recordable survey work associated with a Piedmont project is filed with the Alameda County Surveyor and Recorder.