Track lighting in Beverly Hills is rarely about getting light into a room. It is usually about lighting art, architecture or a specific surface, in a house where the ceiling is part of the finish and cannot simply be patched. Three things raise the bar here, and none of them is the track. The ceiling is a finish, not a substrate Much of the older housing here has plaster over lath, ornamental plaster, coffered or beamed ceilings, or detailed cornice work. Some of it is origin

Temecula and Murrieta grew fast, and most of the housing went up in a compressed window from the mid-1990s through the mid-2000s. Whole neighborhoods were built by the same builders to the same plans in the same years. For a lighting upgrade that is genuinely useful, because the ceiling behind the drywall is predictable in a way it never is in older Los Angeles stock. What a house of that era actually has Copper branch wiring with a proper equipment ground. The ungrounded-cir

In Riverside County, shade is not a design flourish. It is the difference between a backyard that gets used four months a year and one that gets used ten. Afternoon sun here is punishing from late spring through early fall. An uncovered patio on the west side of a house is unusable from about two in the afternoon until sunset, which is exactly the window most people want it. So the shade decision deserves more thought than it usually gets — and the three main options are trea

Almost nobody builds an entire backyard at once, and there is nothing wrong with that. Phasing is how most good yards get built. What goes wrong is phasing without a plan — treating each phase as a separate project. That is how a patio gets cut open in year three to run a gas line, and how a perfectly good concrete pour becomes a demolition line item. Phase the spending. Do not phase the plan. The rule that governs everything Anything that goes under a finished surface goes i

Most backyard projects start with a picture. Someone saves images, a designer draws something beautiful, and then reality arrives in the form of a setback, a soils condition or an easement, and the design gets cut down piece by piece until it is a smaller version of something that never fit. There is a better order. Five things about your lot are already decided. Find them first and design inside them, and you get the whole thing instead of a compromise. 1. Where the water go

Every construction project changes after it starts. That is not a sign of bad planning — it is the nature of building something in the physical world on top of conditions nobody could fully see. What separates a project that stays under control from one that does not is not whether changes happen. It is whether each one gets priced, approved and written down before the work is done. The planning that precedes all of this is in your construction project planning checklist. The

Homeowners ask how long a project will take. It is the right question with the wrong shape, because a construction schedule is not a duration. It is a chain, and the chain has a small number of links that decide everything. For the decision checklist before a project starts, see your construction project planning checklist. This is about what happens once it does. The order, and why it cannot be rearranged Approvals. Permits, and in an HOA community the architectural committe

Don't be a DIW...(Do It Worselfer)... At some point, even the most serious professional needs help, it's construction after all, and construction is not something that it's done alone. It's much worse for a DIYer. In bathroom remodels, there are some simple DIYer tasks that can be done by yourself and sometimes relying on little help from your spouse, kids, friends, and neighbors... ...but the fact is that you will run into situations in which a Pro could solve easily. The F

Kitchen cabinets seem to be a really difficult build, but kitchen cabinets are super easy to build! Kitchen cabinets are nothing but wood boxes. When your budget is tight, but you need quality, the only option you may have is doing it yourself! Kitchen cabinets can be a very expensive item, and low cost options are very limited. If you buy some Chinese-made brands of cabinets, all that you are going to get is some particle board boxes stapled together. Those fall apart in a f

Learn How Building Permits Made Easy Solving The Real Problems Renovations without permits can become a real headache. That is why we felt to make a video to address a real problem, which is - - why we have unpermitted structures and how to make building permits easier to get! Can People Build Without Permits? Why do people try to build without permits? If you live in Los Angeles and the adjacent cities, the short answer for the first question is NO! You cannot build structu

HPOZ for those who accidentally fell upon this page, means Historical Preservation Overlay Zone. For those who purposely searched and found us here, this acronym is the theme of many nightmares of homeowners in certain areas in Los Angeles, especially if you seek to get HPOZ approval, and get permits to accomplish any construction or renovations on you property. Historical Preservation Overlay Zones are not only found in Los Angeles, in fact these areas are also found all ove

We are proud to maintain the same name that started it all by doing additions and remodels from the very beginning. Our founder started all the way down on the bottom of the totem pole and worked his way up in construction one step at the time, and in a few years he was already, building additions and remodeling entire homes. For this reason we know all that could go wrong and correct situations accordingly before it is a problem. The owner himself is still involved in each p

There are many lessons to learn in the building contracting business, even if you think that you have already learned all of them, there will always be a new one lurking around the corner. This job is going well as planned, we are building some partition walls, installing hospital-style track for curtains, installing one door and one window. It all seems simple and straight forward enough, so when we drew the work agreement and had the client sign it, we never thought that, s