3D Design & Planning in San Jose, CA

Moving a sink across a room is a completely different job on a raised foundation with a crawlspace than it is on a slab. A model that skips this step produces a layout that photographs well, gets priced, and then gets abandoned. **The layout gets tested rather than just drawn.** This is where the hours go. A standard-depth refrigerator projects past the cabinet run and a counter-depth one costs more and holds less, and you can see which trade-off you can live with once the box is sitting in the model at its real size.

Upper cabinets get checked against the window head and against the return-air grille nobody remembered. The backsplash gap gets checked against the tile you chose, because a run of tile that has to be cut into a thin sliver at the top looks like a mistake for as long as you own the house. The range hood needs a duct path, and it has to go somewhere real: up through a cabinet, into a soffit, or through a joist bay to an exterior wall or the roof.

Lighting gets positioned against the island edge and the stool spacing rather than dropped in on a symmetrical grid. Sightlines get checked from the places you actually stand, starting with the front door. **What a model is good at, and where it stops.** It is very good at geometry, sequence and clearance. It is less reliable on color, and it is worth being straightforward about that. A screen is backlit, monitors are not calibrated to each other, and a render can make a warm white look cool or flatten out the grain in a wood.

Physical samples still matter. Take them into the room they are going in and look at them at the times of day you use that room, because a north-facing kitchen in January is a different room from the one in the render. The same caution applies to props: ask whether the faucet, the pull and the light fitting in the image are the specific products being quoted or stand-ins chosen because they were in the library. **Additions and ADUs are where a model earns the most.** Inside a kitchen you are solving a layout.

On an addition you are also solving massing: the height of the new plate line, how a new roof intersects the existing one, where a valley lands, whether the new ridge stays under the height limit and clear of setbacks, and what the addition does to daylight in the rooms behind it. Height limits, setbacks and lot coverage rules are set by whichever jurisdiction the address falls under, and they differ, so this gets confirmed for your address before the massing is fixed.

For an ADU there is a second layer: the entry path, privacy from the neighboring lot, and how power, water and drainage get from the main house to the new structure without tearing up everything in between. **Then the model has to become a real drawing set.** A rendering is not a permit document. What plan check wants is a floor plan, exterior elevations, sections, construction details and schedules, and for structural work, calculations stamped by a licensed engineer.

Bay Area seismic requirements are a live part of that: shear wall locations, holdowns and the connection hardware all have to be specified and shown, not implied. Additions and alterations also carry California Title 24 energy documentation, and CALGreen governs the construction waste side. The section drawing is where the honest detail lives, showing how framing members, connections and fixings actually go together, and it is the part of the set a homeowner rarely sees and the inspector always does. **Where it gets submitted, and what happens after.** A San Jose address goes to the City of San Jose's building department.

Santa Clara, Sunnyvale, Cupertino, Campbell, Los Gatos, Saratoga and Mountain View each run their own, with their own submittal requirements and their own plan-check queue, and an address in unincorporated Santa Clara County goes to the County. Avis Builders and Design files the permit and manages the inspections as part of the job. From there, the model stops being a sales tool and becomes the reference the crew works against, which is the point at which the effort spent arguing about a cabinet run on screen pays for itself.