General Contractor in Santa Monica

Most homes we open here are older than the code they now have to meet. Once the walls come off, framing, electrical, plumbing, mechanical, and finish trades all land on the same footprint in the same few weeks. We carry the permit and run those trades in sequence under our own supervision, with licensed specialty contractors on the trades that require them. You get one crew lead on site and one person to call when something changes.

Lots are tight and neighbors are close. We stage material to keep the street clear, protect the surfaces we are not touching, and clean the site at the end of every working day.

Santa Monica runs its own building authority. Permits for work inside city limits are reviewed and issued by the City of Santa Monica. The City puts it plainly: a building permit is authorization from the City to allow a permittee to begin the proposed construction, alteration, demolition, or repair of a building or structure.

The part that stalls remodels is sequencing. The City requires plan review to be complete and every applicable City approval to be secured before it issues the permit. So the question is never only whether the work needs a permit. It is which approvals your scope triggers, and in what order. We answer that before the work is priced, not halfway through demolition.

Santa Monica adopted a Seismic Retrofit Ordinance in March 2017 and runs a Seismic Retrofit Program under it. The City identified five building types across the city that are vulnerable to severe damage or collapse in a moderate or large earthquake. The City reports that the large majority of those cases are soft story buildings with tuck-under parking. Owners of covered buildings receive an Order to Structurally Analyze Potentially Seismically Vulnerable Building and must analyze the structure against Santa Monica Municipal Code standards.

If your building carries one of those orders, retrofit scope and remodel scope touch the same framing. They belong on one sequence, not two. We coordinate with your structural engineer so walls open once and close once.

I walk the property myself, measure, and photograph before anything is quoted.

You get a written scope with the trades broken out and the milestones named.

Payment follows named milestones you can stand in front of and verify.

One crew lead owns the schedule. Changes go in writing before they go in the wall.

A daily photo record follows the project so you can see it from anywhere.

We close with a walkthrough and a punch list we finish, not a list we argue about.

We take rebuild calls from Santa Monica and the surrounding coast. I will tell you straight what we can scope and what nobody can promise. We do not handle insurance matters, and we do not predict permit dates. What I can do is walk the site, document conditions, and hand you a scope you can act on.

Free on-site estimate, no obligation. Call (949) 558-9738 and I will come look at the work myself.