Residential Construction, Additions & Seismic Retrofit · San Francisco, CA
The building takes a year.
Getting permission takes longer.
Every builder in this city will tell you about the construction. In San Francisco the construction is the short part. The stretch between your first drawing and your first day of demolition is where the schedule goes, where the budget goes, and where almost all of the misery is.
So the first thing on this site is the chart, at its real proportions, rather than a photograph of somebody else’s kitchen.
981 Howard St, San Francisco, CA 94103
Mon–Fri 8:00 AM–5:00 PM PT ·
CSLB licence number on request
San Francisco since 1973 ·
Woman-owned and family-operated
Schedule A A rear addition, typical
| Phase | Duration | Timeline |
|---|---|---|
| Design CP | 10 weeks | |
| Entitlement CP | 30 weeks | |
| Permit CP | 20 weeks | |
| Construction CP | 28 weeks | |
| Closeout | 6 weeks |
- Design
- Entitlement
- Permit
- Construction
- Closeout
- On the critical path
Roughly 18 months end to end, of which about 11 are before anything is demolished. Entitlement and permit overlap where they can; construction starts while the last permit revisions are still in. CP marks a phase on the critical path — one that delays the whole project if it slips.
Planning ranges for a project of this type, reviewed October 2026, assuming no discretionary review. The schedule page has one of these for each scope, plus what happens when a neighbour objects.
1.0 The argument
The most useful thing a builder can tell you is a date
You can get a price from four contractors in a fortnight. Try getting an honest answer to “when can I move back in” and watch what happens.
It is not usually dishonesty. It is that the answer depends almost entirely on a process the builder does not control — Planning review, neighbourhood notification, the possibility of discretionary review, plan check at the Department of Building Inspection, and on an older building, the structural path through all of it. A builder who has not been through it many times genuinely does not know, and one who has been through it knows the answer is uncomfortable.
Our value here is not carpentry. Plenty of people in this city can frame a wall. It is knowing, before a line is drawn, which parts of a design the Planning Department will object to, which will trigger notification, which will trigger a hearing, and which will go through without anyone looking twice. That knowledge is unevenly distributed and almost never written down.
Fifty-plus years of one family reading the same permit counter is not a marketing claim. It is the reason the first answer is usually the right one.
Discretionary review. Any neighbour can request that the Planning Commission take a second look at a project that would otherwise be approved over the counter. It is not common, it is not rare, and when it happens it adds months. Everything we do at the design stage is aimed at making it less likely — and we will tell you honestly at the first meeting how exposed your project is.
The five phases
- Design Design & feasibility
- Measured drawings, structural concept, what the site will actually allow 8–20 weeks
- Entitlement Planning entitlement
- Planning review, neighbourhood notification, and discretionary review if it comes 12–52+ weeks
- Permit Plan check & permit
- Building, Fire and Public Works review, corrections, and issuance 12–36 weeks
- Construction Construction
- The part everybody talks about, and frequently not the longest one 16–52 weeks
- Closeout Inspection & closeout
- Final inspections, certificate of final completion, warranty and records 3–10 weeks
Colour on this site means phase and nothing else. It never means important, recommended or new. Durations are planning ranges — see the schedule.
2.0 Work
Five kinds of project, five different schedules
They are not variations on a theme. An ADU and a rear addition are governed by different approval paths and the difference is measured in months, not weeks. Each is accented by the phase that dominates its schedule.
Adding to a San Francisco house — out the back, up a storey, or down into the ground floor. The construction is ordinary; the entitlement almost never is.
- You receive
- Permit set, structural calculations, final inspection sign-off, as-builts
A second unit in the ground floor, the garage or the back yard. State law has made the approval path faster and more predictable than almost anything else in this city.
- You receive
- Permit set, separate utility documentation, final sign-off, warranty package
Soft-storey retrofit, foundation replacement, shear walls and moment frames on buildings put up before anybody wrote the rules they are now judged by.
- You receive
- Engineer’s calculations, permit set, special inspection records, final sign-off
Renovating a small apartment building around the people who live in it. The sequence is set by habitability and access rules, not by what is convenient.
- You receive
- Permit set, tenant notices and schedules, inspection records, as-builts
A house on an infill lot, or a rebuild behind a facade the city will not let you remove. The longest schedules on this site, and the ones where entitlement dominates most.
- You receive
- Full permit set, structural and energy documentation, certificate of final completion
End-to-end spans are planning ranges from first drawing to final sign-off and assume no discretionary review. The phase tag beside each scope names the phase that usually dominates its schedule — which is where you should expect the surprises.
3.0 Compared
An ADU and an addition are not the same project
The construction is comparable. The path to permission is not, and state law is the reason. This is the single most useful thing to understand before you decide what to build.
Schedule B Ground-floor ADU
| Phase | Duration | Timeline |
|---|---|---|
| Design CP | 8 weeks | |
| Entitlement | 6 weeks | |
| Permit CP | 14 weeks | |
| Construction CP | 22 weeks | |
| Closeout | 4 weeks |
- Design
- Entitlement
- Permit
- Construction
- Closeout
- On the critical path
About 12 months end to end against 18 for the addition — and look at where the difference is. The entitlement bar has collapsed, and it is no longer on the critical path. State ADU law limits what a city can require and how long it can take, which makes this the most predictable residential approval path in San Francisco.
Both charts are drawn to the same scale of proportion within themselves, but the two projects have different total lengths; the axis labels underneath each one say so. We have deliberately not drawn them against one shared axis, because that would make the ADU bars look thinner than they are rather than shorter overall, which is a different and misleading claim.
4.0 The housing stock
Almost nothing here is new construction on a clear site
San Francisco is full of pre-1930 wood-frame buildings on narrow lots, attached on one or both sides, with a garage at the bottom and living space above it.
That last detail has a name: a soft storey. A ground floor with big openings and not much wall left to resist an earthquake, holding up two or three floors of house. The city has spent a decade requiring owners of these buildings to fix them, and a great deal of residential construction in this city is now either that work or work that has to deal with it along the way.
Working on those buildings is a particular craft. You are almost always underpinning, sistering, shear-walling or moment-framing something somebody put up before there were rules — and frequently before there were drawings. What is behind the stucco is a genuine unknown until it is open, and a builder who pretends otherwise at bid time is setting up a change order.
So we open things early where we can, we carry allowances rather than pretending, and we tell you which parts of the number are firm and which are not. The prices page is explicit about which is which.
What is usually behind the stucco
- A foundation that is not one. Unreinforced concrete, brick, or in the oldest buildings, redwood sitting on soil.
- Knob-and-tube wiring, still live, in a wall nobody has opened since the war.
- A previous addition nobody permitted, holding up something that matters.
- Dry rot at the rear, where a deck has been draining into the wall for thirty years.
- Asbestos and lead, which have their own regulatory paths and their own schedule.
None of these is unusual. All of them are cheaper to find in week two than in month six, which is the entire argument for an early investigation budget.
5.0 Where
San Francisco, and the Bay Area around it
The city is where the specific knowledge is worth the most, because it has the most specific process. We also work across the Bay Area, where the buildings are similar and the approval paths are frequently kinder.
What does not change with the address is the sequence, the way we price and the fact that the schedule is published before you ask for it.
Neighbourhoods and places
- San Francisco
- Noe Valley
- Bernal Heights
- the Mission
- the Sunset
- the Richmond
- Potrero Hill
- Glen Park
- Pacific Heights
- the Excelsior
- Daly City
- South San Francisco
- Marin County
- the East Bay
- the Peninsula
6.0 Standing behind it
What is on this site, and what is not
There are no photographs of finished kitchens on this website, no five-star badge, no award logos and no list of clients. Not because we have nothing to show, but because none of it is checkable by you, and an unverifiable claim on a marketing page is worth exactly nothing when you are deciding who to let into your house for a year.
What is published instead is the thing nobody else publishes: the timeline, the price ranges with their basis stated, what goes wrong and when, and how the money works. All of it is checkable against your own experience the moment the project starts.
Two things we will say because they can be verified: this is a woman-owned San Francisco family business, and it has been operating in this city since 1973.
Our California contractor licence number is provided on request and can be checked with the California Contractors State License Board in about a minute — and you should do that with every contractor you speak to, including us.
Trico Construction, LLC
981 Howard StSan Francisco, CA 94103- Telephone
- (415) 543-2100
- [email protected]
- Hours
- Mon–Fri 8:00 AM–5:00 PM PT
- Licence
- CSLB licence number on request
- In business
- San Francisco since 1973
Tell us about the building
What it is, roughly when it was built, what you want to do to it, and whether anybody is living in it. On a first call we can usually tell you which approval path you are on, what the realistic end-to-end schedule looks like, and what about your particular project is most likely to go sideways.
Trico Construction, LLC · 981 Howard St, San Francisco, CA 94103