A 4.0
Multifamily renovation
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.
Construction End to end 8–24 months
A 4.1 Schedule
How long this actually takes
Drawn at real proportion. If the bars before construction look long, that is the point of publishing them — it is the part of the calendar nobody warns you about.
Schedule Multifamily renovation
| Phase | Duration | Timeline |
|---|---|---|
| Design CP | 12 weeks | |
| Entitlement | 8 weeks | |
| Permit CP | 16 weeks | |
| Construction CP | 44 weeks | |
| Closeout | 5 weeks |
- Design
- Entitlement
- Permit
- Construction
- Closeout
- On the critical path
About 17 months, and unusually for this site the construction bar is the longest one. That is the occupancy: the work is staged unit by unit around people who are living there, and a staged sequence is a longer sequence. Entitlement is short because interior renovation rarely changes the exterior.
CP marks a phase on the critical path — one that moves the finish date if it slips. The critical path is marked with an outline and a label rather than a colour, so it is still readable in black and white and to a colour-blind reader. Every schedule on this site, side by side, is on the schedule page.
Work on an occupied apartment building is not a bigger version of work on a house. It is a different discipline, and the thing that makes it different is that people are living twenty feet from the work, every day, for months.
That single fact governs the sequence. Water cannot be off overnight. Heat cannot be off in January. A tenant cannot be without a working bathroom. Access to a unit requires notice in writing with a legally defined period, and that notice is not a courtesy — it is a requirement with consequences attached. Noise has hours. Common paths have to stay usable, and they have to stay usable for somebody with a pushchair or a walking frame.
It also governs the money, and this is the part owners most often underestimate. The same kitchen costs more in an occupied building than in an empty one, because the work has to be broken into stages that can be started and made safe within a day, materials have to be carried rather than staged, and a crew of four spends part of its day not building.
In San Francisco there is a further layer: what you may do, what the tenant is entitled to, and what a renovation means for a rent-controlled unit are legal questions with real consequences. We are builders. We will tell you honestly where the construction question ends and the legal question begins, and we will not guess at the second one.
A staged renovation depends on a sequence of units becoming available in an order. One tenant who cannot accommodate the schedule — for reasons that may be entirely legitimate — breaks the sequence and can add months. Plan for it at the start, build the sequence with float in it, and be honest with yourself about which units are actually available and when.
Establish these first
- The building
- Units, storeys, age, and whether it is in the soft-storey programme.
- Occupancy
- Which units are occupied, which are vacant, and whether any unit will be vacated during the work. This is the single largest driver of cost and sequence.
- The scope per unit
- Whether every unit gets the same work, which allows a repeatable sequence, or whether each is different, which does not.
- Building systems
- Whether plumbing risers, electrical service, heat or the roof are in scope. These are the items that cannot be done unit by unit.
- Your legal position
- Established with your own counsel before construction, not during it. We will build to whatever that position requires.
What you receive
Permit set, tenant notices and schedules, inspection records, as-builts
Plus the things that are not documents: a schedule you can plan around, a written allowance for anything genuinely unknown, and a named person who answers the telephone. See how the money works.
A 4.2 Prices
What this scope costs
Planning ranges, wide on purpose. The full sheet with every scope on it, and a note on what moves a number to the top or the bottom of its range, is on the prices page.
| Item | Description | Unit | Range |
|---|---|---|---|
| D.10 | Unit renovation, occupied building Kitchen, bath, finishes, staged around tenants | SF | $420–$780 |
| D.20 | Unit renovation, vacant unit The same scope, without the staging premium | SF | $330–$600 |
| D.30 | Plumbing riser replacement Whole stack, per storey, with unit reinstatement | EA | $18,000–$52,000 |
| D.40 | Electrical service upgrade Service, panel, unit sub-panels | LS | $45,000–$160,000 |
| D.50 | Common area and entry Stair, lobby, corridors, lighting, accessibility | LS | $60,000–$240,000 |
| D.60 | Roof replacement Tear-off, deck repair, membrane, flashing | SQ | $1,400–$3,200 |
| D.70 | Exterior envelope and windows Siding, waterproofing, windows, per unit | EA | $28,000–$95,000 |
| D.80 | Tenant protection and staging Dust walls, protection, temporary provisions, per unit | EA | $4,500–$18,000 |
Units are SF square foot of the area being built, LF linear foot, CY cubic yard, SQ roofing square (100 SF), EA each, LS lump sum. A square-foot rate is for the area of new or renovated space, not for the whole house.
Prices are USD planning ranges for San Francisco residential work, exclude design and engineering fees, city permit and impact fees, geotechnical and hazardous-materials assessment, furnishings and any applicable tax, and assume normal access and no undisclosed conditions. Durations are planning ranges that assume no discretionary review and one round of plan-check corrections. They are published so an owner can plan before spending money on drawings. They are planning ranges, not a bid. Reviewed October 2026. A price and a schedule for your project come from a written proposal against a defined scope. See the disclaimer.
A 4.3 Questions
Questions about this scope
Specific to this kind of project. The general ones — contracts, deposits, allowances, change orders, insurance, who does what — are on the FAQ page.
Can we do this with tenants in place?
Usually yes, and it is more expensive and slower than doing it empty. The construction is staged into pieces that can be started and made safe within a day, water and heat outages are planned and noticed, common paths stay usable, and the crew works within noise hours. The premium over the same work in an empty building is real and it is in the estimate rather than discovered later.
What notice do tenants get?
Whatever the law requires, in writing, and we build the schedule around that rather than the other way around. In practice that means a written schedule of work per unit issued well in advance, written notice before each entry, and a named person a tenant can call when something goes wrong — which it will. A contractor who treats tenant notice as an obstacle rather than as the sequence is a contractor who will cost an owner far more than the notice periods do.
What happens to a rent-controlled unit if we renovate it?
That is a legal question, and the honest answer from a builder is: ask a lawyer who does this in San Francisco, before construction rather than during it. What is or is not permitted, what a tenant is entitled to, and what a renovation means for a controlled unit are consequential and specific, and a wrong answer is expensive in a way that no amount of good building fixes. We will build to whatever position your counsel establishes.
Can the building systems be done unit by unit?
Some can and some fundamentally cannot. A kitchen is a unit-level job. A plumbing riser runs through every unit in the stack, so replacing it means being in all of them, in order, within a window. An electrical service upgrade means an outage for the whole building. Those items drive the schedule and they are the ones to plan first — a sequence built around the unit work and then interrupted by a riser is a sequence that will not hold.
A 0.0 The other scopes
The other four
Each accented by the phase that dominates its schedule, which is where you should expect the surprises.
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
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
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 project is most likely to go sideways.
Trico Construction, LLC · 981 Howard St, San Francisco, CA 94103