Living through it

The question nobody asks early enough

Owners spend months on the design and the budget and frequently decide the living arrangements in the last fortnight. That is the wrong way round, because whether you stay or move out changes the cost, the schedule and how much of your life this project takes.

It also changes the design. A project that has to be built in stages so that you always have a working kitchen and bathroom is a different project from one that can be built in the most efficient order. Deciding that at the start is worth real money.

Can you stay?

Rear addition: frequently yes, with a sealed dust wall, and it will cost more and take longer. You lose the back of the house, the noise is real, and there will be weeks when access is awkward.

Vertical addition: usually not. The roof comes off, and a building without a roof in a San Francisco winter is not a home.

ADU or ground-floor conversion: usually yes, if you live above it. You lose the garage, the noise comes up through the floor, and there will be periods with no water or power.

Soft-storey retrofit: usually yes, including in an occupied apartment building — that is what the programme was designed to allow. Noisy, disruptive, and you lose parking for the duration.

Gut renovation or new construction: no.

In every case we will tell you plainly at the estimate stage rather than letting you find out in month four. Eight months of rent somewhere else is a large financial fact and it belongs in the budget from the beginning.

Dust, noise and hours

Construction dust on an old building is not ordinary dust. Demolition of plaster, old flooring and anything containing asbestos or lead requires containment, negative air, and in the case of hazardous materials a licensed abatement contractor working under its own rules.

What we do as standard where you are staying: sealed dust walls rather than plastic sheeting taped to a doorframe, negative air machines in the work area, floor protection along every route, and a daily clean of the parts of the house you are living in rather than a clean at the end of the week.

Noise has legal hours in San Francisco, and we work within them. Within those hours it is genuinely loud, and some operations — concrete cutting, jackhammering a foundation, driving pins — are loud in a way that makes a house unusable while they happen. Where those are scheduled, you get told in advance so you can be somewhere else.

The neighbours

On an attached lot, your project happens in their house too. They hear it through a shared wall for a year.

It is worth being deliberate about this for two reasons. The decent one is that it is somebody else’s home. The self-interested one is that a neighbour who feels ignored is the neighbour who requests discretionary review, and that costs you months — so being good about it is also, straightforwardly, the cheaper option.

What we do: introduce ourselves before the work starts rather than after the first complaint, give a named person and a number, keep the street and the shared spaces clean, and tell them when the loud weeks are coming. What you should do: talk to them before the Planning notice arrives in their letterbox, not after.

Where excavation happens next to a neighbour’s foundation there is a further layer, because their building has to be protected and sometimes monitored. That is a legal relationship as well as a technical one and it is established early, in writing.

The things nobody warns you about

Decision fatigue is real. You will be asked to choose several hundred things, many of them in the same month, and the last fifty will feel impossible. The fix is to decide the big ones before construction starts, which is also the fix for the schedule.

The middle is the worst part. Demolition is exciting and the finishes are satisfying. The four months in between, when the house is a frame full of pipes and nothing visible changes for weeks, is when people lose heart. Knowing that in advance genuinely helps.

Storage. Everything in the affected part of the house has to go somewhere for a year, and in this city that is a real cost that nobody puts in the budget.

Parking. If you have a garage and we are working in it, you do not have a garage. In most of San Francisco that is not a minor inconvenience.

The last five per cent takes fifteen per cent of the time. The punch list, the final inspections, the one part on back-order. It is universal, it is not a sign anything has gone wrong, and it is worth expecting.

What we promise about communication

The single thing owners most want on a long project, and least often get, is to not be surprised.

So: a named person you can telephone, who answers. A written schedule that gets updated rather than quietly abandoned. Bad news the day we know it rather than at the next meeting — a delay told early is a scheduling problem, and the same delay told late is a trust problem. And a written change order before the work happens, never after.

None of that is remarkable. It is just that on a project measured in years, it is the difference between a hard year and an unbearable one.