San Francisco Remodeling FAQ

We Do Construction builds whole-home renovations and ADUs in San Francisco. The scope we are built for is comprehensive: structural reconfiguration, whole-system mechanical, electrical and plumbing replacement, kitchens and baths, and finish work, all managed under one fixed-price contract. We do not take small repairs, cosmetic refreshes, or commercial work. That focus is visible in the city’s own permit record. San Francisco issued 24,890 building permits in 2025, and 22,949 of them cleared over the counter with a median of zero days. Only 1,168 required full plan review, at a 185-day median. Our projects live almost entirely in that second category, where scope design before filing decides the schedule. If your project is a single-room refresh, a firm built for that work will serve you better and cost you less. Source: SF DBI Building Permits dataset, computed by We Do Construction, August 2026. See our full home renovation and ADU pages.

We take projects across San Francisco, with concentrated work in Pacific Heights, Presidio Heights, Cow Hollow and the Marina, Noe Valley, Bernal Heights, Russian Hill and Nob Hill, Sea Cliff, St. Francis Wood, Castro and Eureka Valley and Sunnyside and Glen Park. Neighborhood matters more here than in most cities. 44.7% of San Francisco’s 420,054 housing units, some 187,797 homes, were built before 1940, and planning overlays, historic status and lot conditions change block by block. A citywide average price tells you very little about your parcel. Two houses of the same size four blocks apart can carry different review paths, different foundation conditions and different structural assumptions, and the cost consequence of that is measured in six figures rather than in percentage points. We price and permit against the specific block, not the citywide median. Source: U.S. Census ACS 2024, cited in our San Francisco remodeling data.

We Do Construction is a California design-build firm holding CSLB license #1096552, working in San Francisco and Los Angeles from an office at 1528 Union Street, San Francisco. One team carries a project from feasibility pricing through design, permitting, construction and certificate of occupancy under a single fixed-price contract. The structure exists to remove the seam that causes most remodeling disputes. When the firm that priced the work is the firm that drew it and the firm that builds it, there is no gap between design intent and constructability to argue about later. Existing conditions get investigated before a number is committed, drawings get a constructability pass before they go to permit, and long-lead procurement is identified before the permit is filed rather than after. The result is that the number you sign is built on an investigated building rather than on assumptions about one. Reach us at (415) 416-5494 or office@wdconstructions.com.

Yes. We coordinate the full project team, including the architect, structural engineer, interior designer and every trade contractor, under one point of accountability. You hold one contract and work with one project manager rather than refereeing between a designer and a builder who each priced a different version of the same house. In practice that changes sequence, not just paperwork. Existing conditions are investigated before design commits, so structural and systems constraints shape the drawings instead of surfacing during demolition. Every drawing set gets a constructability review before it goes to DBI. Long-lead items are identified and procured against the permit timeline rather than discovered when they become the critical path. One contract also means one party carries the risk when design and construction disagree, which is where a split arrangement usually turns into a dispute. For how this compares to hiring an architect and a general contractor separately, see design-build versus a general contractor in San Francisco.

We Do Construction holds California State License Board license #1096552, and we are bonded and insured. You do not have to take that on faith. Every active California contractor license is publicly searchable: enter the number at the CSLB license lookup and you will see license status, classification, bond status and any disclosable complaint history. Verify it for every firm you are considering, not just ours. An expired license, a lapsed bond or a classification that does not cover your scope are all visible in thirty seconds and all disqualifying. A certificate of insurance is available on request and can be issued naming your property and any additional insured your lender or HOA requires. Ask for it before signing, not after, and confirm that general liability and workers’ compensation are both current. An uninsured injury on your property can become your liability, which is the actual reason this question matters rather than a paperwork formality.

A luxury whole-home renovation in San Francisco runs $800,000 to $2,000,000 and up on a fixed-price design-build contract. Three things set where you land in that band: the structural condition of the existing building, how much of the mechanical, electrical and plumbing scope moves, and the finish tier. Two independent instruments are worth reading together. The 2025 Cost vs Value Report prices a midrange major kitchen remodel in San Francisco at $97,667. The city’s permit filings show a $35,000 median declared valuation across the 512 kitchen-remodel permits issued in 2025. Both figures are accurate. One measures what gets built, the other measures what gets declared for fee purposes, and the gap between them is why declared valuations are a poor budgeting tool. Anyone quoting you a whole-home number off permit records alone is reading the fee basis and calling it a price. Sources: Cost vs Value Report 2025 and SF DBI Building Permits.

Down-to-studs renovation of a San Francisco Victorian or Edwardian runs $400 to $800 per square foot. The spread is driven by how much structure moves and how many legacy systems have to be replaced rather than by finish selection alone. At the tier we work, individual rooms price separately from the whole-house rate. Kitchens land between $150,000 and $400,000 with custom millwork, stone and engineered openings. Primary baths run $80,000 to $220,000. Common line items inside a pre-war renovation include knob-and-tube rewiring at $10,000 to $30,000 and seismic bolt-and-brace work at $3,000 to $7,000, with hillside lots costing considerably more. Per-square-foot pricing is a sanity check, not a quote. Two houses of identical size on the same street can differ by a third depending on foundation condition. Full breakdown in the true cost of a luxury San Francisco remodel.

San Francisco prices building permits off declared project valuation, not off ambition or square footage. Under Building Code Table 1A-A, a $1,000,000 residential alteration pays roughly $14,000 in combined permit and plan-review fees, which is about 1.4% of valuation. That figure is the floor, not the total. Planning review fees apply separately when scope touches the exterior envelope or changes use. School impact fees apply on added square footage, with ADUs under 500 square feet exempt statewide. Section 311 neighborhood notification carries its own cost and adds calendar time. Budget permit cost as a percentage of valuation from the first feasibility conversation rather than treating it as a closing expense. On a whole-home project it is a real line item, and it scales with every valuation increase a change order produces. Detail in our 2026 cost breakdown.

California law, not contractor preference, sets the outer limits. Under Business and Professions Code Section 7159.5, the down payment on a home improvement contract cannot exceed $1,000 or 10% of the contract price, whichever is less, and the contract must state that cap in 12-point boldface type. Progress payments may never exceed the value of work actually performed and materials actually delivered. That rule is the single fastest way to read a bid sheet. A payment schedule front-loaded ahead of the work is not aggressive negotiation, it is a licensing violation, and it tells you what the rest of the relationship will look like. We structure payments against completed, verifiable milestones for exactly that reason, so what you have paid at any point in the job matches what has actually been built and inspected. Ask any firm you interview to walk you through its payment schedule against the construction sequence before you sign. Reference: CSLB guidance on home improvement contracts.

Most whole-home renovations at this scale are funded through a construction loan, a renovation mortgage or a home equity line, and each releases money in draws rather than a lump sum. The lender inspects completed work before releasing each draw, which means the money follows the construction, not the contract signing. That mechanism happens to align with California law. Section 7159.5 already prohibits progress payments that exceed the value of work performed, so a properly structured lender draw schedule and a legal payment schedule describe the same thing. Where owners get into trouble is a lender draw calendar that assumes a construction sequence the permit timeline cannot support. We build the payment schedule against the permit-first sequence so draw requests land when the inspected work actually exists. Bring your lender into the feasibility conversation rather than after design.

A change order is the only lawful path to a price above the contract number, and in California you control it. Under Business and Professions Code Section 7159, a change order must be in writing, signed by both parties before the added work begins, and must state the scope, the dollar amount, and the effect on both schedule and progress payments. An unsigned change order is unenforceable against you. The paperwork is the protection. Change orders come from two places. Owner-directed scope changes are a choice. Concealed conditions inside a pre-war building are not, and that is what a contingency exists for. We size the contingency to the era of the building, hold it in the owner’s name, and spend it only against documented conditions with photographs and an engineer’s note where structure is involved.

A luxury whole-home renovation in San Francisco runs 12 to 24 months and up from first design conversation to certificate of occupancy. Pre-1920 construction, steep lots and historic districts all add review time before a single wall moves. The permit clock is the part most schedules get wrong. In 2025 the city issued 24,890 building permits, and 22,949 of those cleared over the counter at a median of zero days. The 1,168 that required full plan review ran a 185-day median. Whole-home work with structural moves lands in the second group. Which path your project files under is decided by scope design before submission, which is the part a design-build firm actually controls. Design decisions made in the first month set the permit calendar for the following year. We sequence permit-first and issue a property-specific written schedule before construction begins. Source: SF DBI Building Permits, computed August 2026.

Read two clocks. The permit clock is the one that surprises people: the median San Francisco ADU permit issued in 2026 took 251 days from filing to issuance. That is a real improvement, down from 601 days in 2023, a 58% reduction in three years, but it is not the 60 days the statute describes. Construction is the shorter half. A typical garage conversion runs 12 to 18 weeks of build once the permit is in hand. State law sets the review windows: a 15-business-day completeness review under SB 543 and a 60-day ministerial decision on a complete application, with no discretionary hearing and no neighbor notification. The gap between 60 statutory days and a 251-day median is almost entirely application completeness, which is the part you control. Source: SF DBI Building Permits, ADU-flagged records.

Ask this question of every firm you interview, and be suspicious of a fast answer. Most residential schedule overruns trace to three causes: a permit path chosen after design instead of before, long-lead items ordered too late to matter, and concealed conditions that nobody investigated before pricing. We attack all three structurally rather than contractually. Existing conditions are investigated before a number is committed. Scope is designed toward the permit path it will actually file under. Long-lead procurement is identified before the permit goes in, not when it becomes the critical path. A property-specific written schedule is issued before construction begins, so there is a baseline to measure against instead of a verbal estimate to argue about. A firm that will not put a schedule in writing before starting is telling you something. Ask what the written schedule covers, how it gets updated, and what notice you receive when a milestone moves.

We manage the complete permit process: submission, plan check, correction responses and inspections through certificate of occupancy. You are not the one sitting in a queue at 49 South Van Ness. San Francisco has one building department, the Department of Building Inspection. Work that touches the exterior envelope, expands the building or changes use also routes through SF Planning, which can include Section 311 neighborhood notification. We file and track both, and we design scope around which path it will trigger rather than discovering the answer in plan check. That sequencing is worth real money. The difference between a permit that clears over the counter at a zero-day median and one that enters full plan review at a 185-day median is scope design before filing. Source: SF DBI Building Permits, 2025 issuance year, computed August 2026.

Usually both, and the answer is set by scope rather than by budget. Interior-only work that does not change use generally needs DBI review alone, and a large share of that work clears over the counter. Anything that touches the exterior envelope, expands the building footprint or changes the use of a space routes through SF Planning first, which can include Section 311 neighborhood notification for many exterior alterations. ADUs are the notable exception. State law makes them ministerial, which removes discretionary review from the path entirely. The practical consequence is that a design decision made in week two can add months in month six. Moving a rear wall two feet may cost less in construction than the review it triggers. We map the permit consequence of each scope option at feasibility, before drawings commit you to a path.

Article 10 historic districts and individually designated landmarks add a preservation review at SF Planning before the project reaches DBI plan check. That is a real addition to the calendar, and it is survivable when the scope is designed for it. Scope that respects character-defining features, meaning the street-facing facade, original window pattern, cornice and entry sequence, clears review substantially faster than scope that fights them. Interior reconfiguration behind a preserved facade is frequently approvable where an altered street elevation is not. The failure mode we see most often is a design developed without checking status, then redrawn after preservation review pushes back, paying for the drawings twice and losing a season. We identify historic status during feasibility and design the permit set around it from the start. Context and figures in our San Francisco remodeling data.

Almost certainly not. San Francisco’s mapped coastal zone is a narrow band along the western edge of the city near Ocean Beach. Most of the city, including every neighborhood where whole-home renovation is common, sits well outside it and no Coastal Development Permit applies. The Marina District is the one that trips people up. Despite the name it is not in the coastal zone, and a builder who tells you a Marina project needs a Coastal Development Permit is describing a different city. That specific error appears often enough in Bay Area remodeling content that it is worth checking against. For the small number of westside parcels genuinely inside the mapped zone, the requirement is real and we confirm status at feasibility before design proceeds. Ask any firm to show you the parcel on the map rather than telling you the answer.

Yes, and it is a materially different project from a single-family renovation. San Francisco’s Rent Ordinance covers most multi-unit buildings with a certificate of occupancy issued before June 1979, and where tenants are in place, the work carries notice requirements, habitability obligations and Rent Board procedures that sit on top of the building permit. That layer shapes sequencing more than it shapes construction. Scope is often phased to keep units habitable, and the permit path has to be designed against occupancy rather than against an empty building. This is one of the few areas where we tell owners to bring in their own counsel early. Tenant-facing decisions carry legal exposure that a contractor cannot advise on and should not be improvising. We scope and sequence the construction; your attorney handles the tenancy questions. Bring both parties into the feasibility conversation at the same time, because the legal path and the construction path constrain each other.

No. California ADU law prohibits San Francisco from requiring replacement parking when a garage is converted to an accessory dwelling unit. The city cannot condition your permit on rebuilding the parking space somewhere else on the lot. That single provision is what makes garage conversions the most cost-efficient ADU path in San Francisco. On a typical city lot there is nowhere to relocate a parking space without eating the rear yard, so a replacement-parking requirement would functionally kill most conversions. Without it, the existing structure, foundation and street frontage all become assets rather than obstacles, and the drawing set stays comparatively light because the shell already exists. The tradeoff is real and worth naming: you are giving up off-street parking permanently in a city where it carries resale value. That is a decision to make deliberately at feasibility, not a detail to discover during design.

ADUs with less than 500 square feet of interior livable space are exempt from school district developer fees statewide. ADUs of 750 square feet or less pay no impact fees at all. Those thresholds are set in state law and they do not scale gently. The consequence is that unit size is a fee decision before it is a design decision. A 760-square-foot unit and a 740-square-foot unit are nearly identical to live in and are not identical to permit. Crossing a threshold for twenty square feet of floor area can add fees that would have paid for better millwork throughout the unit. We model the fee consequence of unit size during feasibility, while size is still a variable, rather than after drawings have committed you to a number. Bring the question up before the first floor plan, not after.

Yes, and it is usually more efficient than sequencing the two. Running them together means one mobilization, one set of trades on site, one construction schedule and one accountable team rather than two disruptions separated by a year. The permitting runs on different tracks, which is the part that has to be managed deliberately. The ADU is ministerial under state law with no discretionary review. The primary-home renovation may route through SF Planning depending on scope. Filing them as coordinated but separate permit sets lets the ADU move on its own clock instead of waiting behind the slower review. The scheduling benefit is real: site access, scaffolding, utility work and inspections all get shared, and you live through one construction period instead of two. We coordinate both permit sets and both build sequences under one contract. See our ADU and garage conversion page.

Steep lots in San Francisco routinely trigger soils reports, engineered foundations and seismic strengthening. Cripple-wall bracing is the minimum on most pre-war hillside homes, and the steepest sites need engineered retaining work, drainage design and sometimes pier-and-grade-beam foundations. The cost impact is significant and it is knowable in advance. Bolt-and-brace seismic work runs $3,000 to $7,000 on a straightforward lot and considerably more on a hillside parcel where the retaining and drainage scope compounds it. None of that is a surprise if the structural walk-through happens before pricing. The failure mode is a number committed from a plan set without anyone standing in the crawlspace. We price hillside structure at feasibility from a physical structural walk-through, so the foundation scope is in the contract number rather than in a change order six weeks into demolition.

More disruptive than most homeowners expect and more manageable than they fear, and the difference is entirely in the setup. On an occupied renovation the controls that matter are negative-air containment at the work zone boundary, dedicated dust filtration rather than plastic sheeting alone, hard-surface protection on every route the crew walks, and a daily clean-down. The neighbor-facing side is separate work. Street occupancy for dumpsters, material deliveries and scaffolding requires permits from SFMTA, and on the dense blocks where we work, staging is genuinely constrained. Construction hours are limited by city ordinance. We tell owners to plan for the ordinary reality: your crew arrives early, the loudest phases are demolition and structural work, and the neighbors you warn in advance are the neighbors who do not file complaints. If you are staying in the house, decide early which rooms stay sealed and where the kitchen goes.

Closeout is a document handover, not just a final walkthrough. You should receive the punch list signed off, the certificate of occupancy, permit records, as-built drawings, equipment manuals, finish and material specifications for future matching, and subcontractor and manufacturer warranty documentation for every installed system. Keep that package with your property records. It is what a future buyer’s inspector will ask for. California statute sets an outer floor regardless of what any contract says. Claims for patent defects, meaning ones a reasonable inspection would reveal, generally run four years, and latent defects generally run ten years, under Code of Civil Procedure Sections 337.1 and 337.15. Ask any firm you interview for its workmanship warranty term in writing before signing, and confirm it separately from manufacturer warranties, which are not the same thing. A manufacturer covers the product; workmanship covers the installation, and most callbacks are installation.