Home Remodeling in Santa Clara, CA
Home Remodeling in Santa Clara, CA
Avis Builders and Design is a licensed general contractor working across Santa Clara and the rest of Santa Clara County.
- Licensed & Bonded, CSLB #1142220
- TREX PRO & TimberTech PRO Certified
- Free In-Home Consultation
- Rated 5.0 on Google
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Santa Clara is a compact city, a little over eighteen square miles of mostly flat ground at around seventy feet of elevation, and it is the third largest city in the county with roughly one hundred and twenty-seven thousand residents at the 2020 census. Most of what a remodeler opens up here is postwar: single-story ranch houses on regular lots, built quickly in the 1950s and 1960s, with the same original service capacity and the same three-bedroom footprint repeating down the street.
Those houses are now being asked to hold households that live nothing like a 1958 household did. Avis Builders and Design takes that work on as the general contractor of record under California license CSLB #1142220, classified B, General Building. That is the classification the state issues for projects involving two or more unrelated trades, which is what a remodel becomes the moment framing, plumbing and electrical sit under one contract. The register shows the license current and active, with a $25,000 bond and workers' compensation through the State Compensation Insurance Fund.
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One thing about Santa Clara catches homeowners, and a fair number of contractors, off guard. The city owns its own electric utility, Silicon Valley Power. A service upgrade, a new meter, a panel relocation or the electrical feed for an ADU is therefore coordinated with the city's own utility rather than with the investor-owned utility that serves most of the surrounding cities. It is a separate process, and it belongs in the plan at design stage rather than surfacing at rough-in.
On a project whose critical path runs through the panel, that single piece of local knowledge is worth more than any finish selection. Building permits go through the City of Santa Clara Permit Center, and we prepare the submittal, answer plan check and attend the inspections as part of the job. The first visit is a free in-home consultation at your house. If the project goes ahead the work carries a labor warranty, third-party financing is available, and there are discounts for seniors and for veterans. Call (408) 208-0551 or email info@avisbuildersanddesign.com.
Remodeling & general contracting in Santa Clara
Building a deck or outdoor space in Santa Clara instead? See deck building in Santa Clara.
What we build in Santa Clara
Most Santa Clara kitchens we are asked about are in a ranch house, and the request is the same one: take out the wall between the kitchen and the room behind it. That is a framing question first. If the wall is bearing, a beam and posts replace it, and on a slab the posts need a pad footing cut and poured beneath them. The second question is almost always electrical, because an induction range, a modern oven and the rest of a current kitchen load can outrun the original service.
In this city that conversation runs through Silicon Valley Power, so we start it early. Bathroom remodeling on a slab is a drain problem before it is a tile problem. The existing waste line decides where a toilet can sit without cutting concrete, and moving it is a saw-cutting, repiping and repouring sequence that has to be priced honestly rather than discovered halfway through. In the Old Quad, on a raised foundation, there is more room to move fixtures, but old cast iron and old galvanized supply lines usually turn up once the floor is open.
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Room additions and ADUs suit these lots, which are regular and generally flat, but the electrical feed and the sewer lateral connection decide feasibility long before the floor plan does. We check setbacks, lot coverage and service capacity before drawing anything, and the utility coordination is part of the plan. Decks, patios and pergolas work well on this flat ground, and the company builds as a TREX PRO contractor, which sets how the composite decking is specified and how the substructure beneath it is detailed.
Where a deck attaches to the house, the ledger connection, the flashing and the footings are what an inspector examines first. Window and door replacement is one of the highest-value jobs in the ranch tracts, because the original aluminum sliders and single-glazed units are still in a great many of them. Flooring, interior painting, exterior siding and painting, and landscaping usually follow the structural work rather than lead it. Design and 3D planning come first, so the layout is agreed before demolition and the contract describes a job you have already seen.
Santa Clara homes, and what that means for a remodel
Santa Clara starts at Mission Santa Clara de Asis, founded in 1777, and the city incorporated on July 5, 1852. The mission and Santa Clara University, the oldest university in California, still anchor the middle of town, and the street grid around them is the oldest thing a builder here works inside. That grid is the Old Quad. The name comes from the quadrangle of the original town of Santa Clara as it was laid out in J.
J. Bowen's 1866 survey, and the neighborhood is bounded on the west by Scott Boulevard, on the south and east by Newhall Street, and on the north and east by the railroad tracks. Its houses run to Folk Victorian, Queen Anne and Craftsman work from the turn of the last century and the decades either side of it, under mature street trees. At the other end of the city's timeline sits Rivermark, where three builders began a master-planned development in 2002 on land along the Guadalupe River.
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Between those two ends lies most of the housing stock: ranch tracts put up by production builders through the late 1950s and early 1960s. An Old Quad house and a Rivermark house are separated by well over a century, and the work is not comparable. In the older grid you find raised foundations with cripple walls, plaster on wood lath, chimneys of unreinforced masonry that are rarely worth keeping in service, generous ceiling heights, and rooms sized for a household that did not own a refrigerator.
Opening up a plan there means first establishing what is actually bearing, which in a house of that age is not always where a modern eye would guess. In the ranch tracts the constraints invert. Slab on grade means the waste lines were cast into the concrete. A low roof pitch limits what an attic can carry and where a duct can run. Two-by-four exterior walls hold little insulation by current standards, and the main panel was sized decades before anyone plugged in a car.
In Rivermark and the newer infill the framing is engineered and the envelope is tighter, so the questions shift to lot coverage, to whether the development carries design guidelines of its own on top of the city permit, and to not compromising an air barrier that was built to a later standard. The ground here is flat, so the seismic questions are about the house rather than the slope. Foundation bolting and cripple wall bracing come up constantly in the Old Quad.
In the tracts it is the load path under whatever beam replaces a removed wall, and on a slab that usually means saw cutting and pouring a pad footing the original builder never installed. Permits are issued through the City of Santa Clara Permit Center, and anything structural goes to plan review. The electrical portion of the submittal is where the municipal utility comes back into it, which is why we raise the service question early rather than at rough-in.
California's Title 24 Part 6 Energy Code went to its 2025 edition on January 1, 2026, and how far it reaches into a given project depends on how much of the envelope and how many systems the scope touches. For orientation, the rest of the city is what most people picture from the freeway: Levi's Stadium, California's Great America, Intel's headquarters, and the Our Lady of Peace Shrine visible from U.S. Route 101. The residential work sits behind all of that, in the grid and the tracts.
Official permit information for Santa Clara: City of Santa Clara building permit information.
Serving the Santa Clara community
Licensed & Bonded
CSLB #1142220
Santa Clara County
Santa Clara sits inside our core service area, not at the edge of it.
Real Reviews
What our customers say
Wonderful company that helped build a railing on our deck. Shay, from Avis Builders and Design, was prompt, answered all my many, many questions, and helped to create a wonderful final product. Everything was explained well and the price was very reasonable. I cannot recommend them enough!
We recently hired Avis Builders and Design to make long needed repairs and restore the finish on our redwood deck. Everything went smoothly from start to finish. Project manager Shay assessed the job and made sure all our questions were answered and needs met for a fair price. Oscar and crew mate were on time, courteous, and efficient and completed the work as outlined in our contract. Very happy we chose Avis to do the job. Definitely recommend Avis Builders.
We contacted Avis Builders and Design because we wanted to remodel several areas of our home, including the kitchen, bathrooms, flooring, painting, and a few other updates throughout the house.
Shay was great to work with from the beginning. He explained everything clearly, helped us understand our options, and made the whole process feel much more organized. There were a lot of details to figure out, but Shay helped coordinate everything, including the design side and communication with the engineer when needed.
The team did a great job, paid attention to the details, and we're very happy with how everything turned out. We would definitely recommend Avis Builders and Design to anyone looking for a reliable remodeling contractor.
FAQs
Frequently asked questions: Santa Clara remodeling
Who issues building permits for a remodel in Santa Clara, CA?
The City of Santa Clara Permit Center. The application goes in under our general contractor license, and we prepare the submittal, answer plan check comments and attend the inspections. Anything structural goes to plan review. Because Santa Clara owns its electric utility, the electrical portion of a project is coordinated with the city rather than with the utility serving the neighboring cities, which is a step we plan for at design stage.
Does the city-owned electric utility change how a Santa Clara remodel is planned?
It changes who you coordinate with, and that matters whenever a project needs more electrical capacity than the house currently has. Silicon Valley Power is owned by the City of Santa Clara, so a service upgrade, a new meter, a panel relocation or a new feed for an ADU runs through the city's own utility. We raise the service question during design instead of at rough-in, because on a lot of remodels the panel is the item the schedule actually depends on.
Do you work on the older houses in Santa Clara's Old Quad?
Yes. The Old Quad is the grid of the original Santa Clara town site as surveyed in 1866, and the houses in it are Folk Victorian, Queen Anne and Craftsman work rather than tract construction. That means raised foundations, cripple walls, plaster on wood lath, unreinforced masonry chimneys and framing where the bearing lines are not always obvious. We investigate before we specify, so the structural picture is understood before a scope is priced rather than after demolition.
Can you build an ADU in Santa Clara, CA?
Yes. Accessory dwelling units and room additions are a regular part of the work here. An ADU needs its own foundation, framing and envelope, a drain connection back to the existing sewer lateral, and an electrical feed the property can actually support. On these lots, setbacks and lot coverage usually decide the footprint and the service capacity decides the timeline, so both get checked before anything is drawn.
How do I get a quote for a Santa Clara remodel?
Start with the free in-home consultation. We come to the house, walk the space, look at the foundation, the panel and whatever the project touches, and talk through the real scope. There is no cost and no obligation. A written estimate follows from that scope, because site conditions and materials decide the number and a figure given before anyone has seen the house is not a price. Call (408) 208-0551 or email info@avisbuildersanddesign.com.
Which areas near Santa Clara do you also cover?
We work across Santa Clara County and the wider Bay Area. That includes San Jose, Sunnyvale, Mountain View, Cupertino, Campbell, Saratoga and Los Gatos, along with Milpitas, Palo Alto, Los Altos and points further up the Peninsula. Santa Clara sits in the middle of the service area.
Where We Work
Serving Santa Clara County and the greater Bay Area
Where We Work