Berkeley homes are old, and water finds old pipe first
SOS Restoration of East Bay covers Berkeley, from the flats to the hills. We draw the water off, then build it back. Bilingual crew; looking is free. Half the houses here went up before 1940, which changes what we check. Call (341) 220-0032.
Somebody answers and a van leaves. Looking is on us. CSLB #1131134 · IICRC #70194273
and the van is loaded before the call ends
the whole arc, from the first hour to the last coat
across Alameda and Contra Costa counties
IICRC #70194273
Why does a Berkeley house's age matter?
Berkeley is one of the oldest housing stocks in the Bay, and the walls prove it. A drip caught the same day is a plumber’s work, not ours.
Because the median Berkeley home dates to 1941.
84.6 percent of Berkeley’s 54,202 homes went up before 1980, and 49.4 percent before 1940. Residential lead paint was banned in 1978. The median house here sits in that window, so we sample before we cut.
Who serves the water here?
EBMUD, for both the tap and the sewer.
The East Bay runs on five water agencies, and Berkeley draws on EBMUD for supply and wastewater alike. Naming the right one saves the first hour, the one that decides whether the floor is saved.
The house shifted. Does that matter?
It can, because the Hayward Fault runs right under the city.
The fault crosses Berkeley on its 75-kilometer line, and its last major quake was in 1868. That is why Berkeley has had a mandatory soft-story ordinance since 2014. It changes the permit to close a wall.
Will a permit be required?
Ask before cutting; the soft-story rule can reach the repair.
Berkeley issues its own permits, and on a soft-story building the seismic rule may attach to the work. A rebuild accounts for that from the first sketch, so the job never stalls.
What do you handle in Berkeley?
All six, and the age of these houses shapes most.
Old paint, old pipe. What comes out first?
A sample, before a scraper or a saw touches anything.
In a house built before 1978, lead and asbestos are presumed until a test says otherwise. Opening a wall without sampling is the exception in a city this old. We test, then work.
Who closes the wall again?
We do, one crew, holding both licenses.
Drying carries IICRC #70194273; the rebuild carries CSLB #1131134. One outfit owns both ends. Tell the dispatcher what the house needs.
Where our crews go
Berkeley climbs from the bay flats into the hills, and the houses climb with it: brown-shingle homes on the slopes above campus, stucco bungalows down toward the water, and a hillside that lets go in a wet winter. Oakland runs along its whole southern edge, and El Cerrito is minutes up the same shoreline.
Rather write it than talk? Leave it here and we call you back.
The number is the part that matters. The rest just tells us which crew to send and how far up the road they are going.
A pre-war Berkeley wall hides water and worse, so read it early. Call (341) 220-0032 and a crew heads over.
Sewage, storm damage, mold, fire and smoke, water, and the reconstruction that follows them, for Oakland and the twenty-four East Bay cities around it. Any hour, any day. Se habla español.