As-Built Surveys in Pleasant Hill, CA

Pleasant Hill is a postwar ranch suburb, and its remodel market runs on a simple constraint: almost none of these houses have usable drawings. Homes built in the 1950s and 60s were often permitted from minimal plan sets that no longer exist, and decades of owner modifications — enclosed patios, converted garages, kitchen bump-outs — mean the house standing today may differ substantially from anything ever drawn. Before an architect can design your addition or your designer can lay out an ADU conversion, someone has to document what exists. Our as-built surveys do that with a Trimble terrestrial laser scanner: one visit captures the entire house inside and out, and we deliver dimensioned floor plans, exterior elevations, and sections in DWG, or a Revit model when your design team works in BIM.

For ranch-house remodels the scan pays for itself in the details hand measuring misses. Low-slope roof lines, varying plate heights between original construction and later additions, out-of-square walls where an old porch was enclosed — these are exactly the conditions that generate change orders when they surface mid-construction. The point cloud records them all at survey grade, so your drawings show true geometry from day one. Garage-to-ADU conversions benefit particularly: existing slab elevations, header heights, and clearances determine whether a conversion pencils out under the ceiling-height and access requirements, and we can answer those questions from the scan data before design money is spent.

Because additions and ADUs in Pleasant Hill also trigger site questions — setbacks, lot coverage, drainage toward the city's creek corridors and flood channels — we frequently pair the building as-built with a boundary and topographic survey, researched through the Contra Costa County Recorder and County Surveyor in Martinez, so the architect gets house and site in one coordinated dataset.