As-Built Surveys in San Francisco, CA

Very little in San Francisco was built to the drawings that survive, if any survive at all. The fire that followed the 1906 earthquake destroyed most of the city's public records, and a large share of the housing stock — the Victorians and Edwardians of the Mission, Noe Valley, the Haight, Pacific Heights, and the Western Addition — went up before or immediately after it, then absorbed a century of unpermitted remodels, garage insertions, and rear additions. Architects planning a renovation, a vertical addition, or a soft-story retrofit need to know what is actually there: how far the walls lean, where the floors sag, how the building meets its neighbors along a shared property line, and how the facade steps with the hill. Measuring that by hand in a zero-lot-line row house is slow and error-prone; scanning it is not.

Our Trimble terrestrial laser scanner captures every room, the light wells, the facade, and the rear yard as a registered point cloud, and we produce what the design team needs from it: floor plans, reflected ceiling plans, exterior elevations, building sections, and full Revit models at the level of detail the project calls for. For Planning submittals we measure the details that matter to review — existing heights, bay projections, front-setback averaging with the neighbors, the eave and ridge lines that drive Residential Design Guidelines analysis — directly from the cloud. For commercial work, SoMa and downtown office-to-residential conversions, mixed-use buildings along the neighborhood commercial corridors, and Dogpatch and Bayview industrial buildings being adapted all need accurate existing-conditions models before structural engineers can size the changes.

The as-built can be tied to a boundary survey on CCSF-CS13 so that property-line walls, eave overhangs, and bay windows over the sidewalk (which Public Works regulates under its minor encroachment permit rules) are located relative to the legal lines, not just to each other. Deliverables are the point cloud (E57/RCP), DWG/DXF drawings, and Revit models. See also our San Francisco condo conversion surveys, which use the same scan for unit-plan exhibits.