As-Built Surveys in Pinole, CA

Pinole's building stock splits into two documentation problems, and we handle both. In the old town core — a commercial district with roots in the rancho era of the 1800s — storefront buildings have passed through generations of owners and uses, and reliable drawings essentially do not exist. Renovating one of these buildings, whether for a new restaurant tenant or a facade and seismic upgrade, starts with an as-built survey. We capture the structure with a Trimble terrestrial laser scanner in a single visit and draft floor plans, sections, and elevations in DWG from the point cloud, or build a Revit model at LOD 200 or 300 when the project is going into BIM. The scanner records the building as it actually is — irregular walls, settled floors, non-square corners — which is precisely what matters in structures this old.

The hillside subdivisions above the valley present the opposite problem: the houses are newer, but the sites are hard. Split-level and stepped-foundation homes on sloping lots are genuinely difficult to measure by hand — multiple floor elevations, decks cantilevered over grade, understories that are half crawlspace and half habitable. For remodels and additions on these properties, the laser scanner captures interior, exterior, and the surrounding grade in one coordinated dataset, so your architect gets accurate section cuts through the whole assembly, from ridge to slope. That is the difference between designing an addition that works with the hillside and discovering the real floor-to-grade relationship during excavation.

When a Pinole project needs the site as well as the structure — common for hillside additions where setbacks and slope both constrain the design — we pair the as-built with boundary and topographic work, researching recorded maps through the Contra Costa County Recorder and County Surveyor in Martinez. For shoreline-margin properties near the bay, we can also flag whether a parcel falls in a state-mapped liquefaction zone under the Seismic Hazards Mapping Act, which your engineer will want to know early.