Exterior Remodeling and Outdoor Living in San Jose, CA

Every service on this page happens on the weather side of a Santa Clara County house. A deck ledger bolted to a rim joist with nothing flashed behind it, a replacement window set into an opening with no sill pan under it, a siding board butted tight down to a walkway with no clearance above grade: three different trades, one failure, and the repair bill in each case is framing rather than finish. That is why Avis Builders and Design groups these five services under one heading instead of selling them as unrelated jobs.

The second reason is sequence, which is why Avis Builders and Design prefers to draw the deck, the structure over it and the yard around it at the same time. A new deck almost always raises a pergola question before the framing is done, because the post locations and the footings under them have to be sized for the pergola while the deck frame is still open. Landscaping runs last for the same kind of reason: grading, drainage and anything buried go in before anything finished sits on top of it. Getting that order wrong in a Los Gatos or Saratoga backyard turns a second visit into demolition.

Avis Builders and Design holds CSLB #1142220, classification B, General Building, and every job on this page is permitted and inspected under that one license. California defines a Class B license under Business and Professions Code section 7057 as the license for a structure requiring at least two unrelated building trades, which is a fair description of a deck with lighting in it or a siding job that turns into window replacement once the wall is open. Where a specialty trade is required, it is performed by the appropriately licensed subcontractor under the general contract.

Santa Clara County soil is the other thing these jobs have in common. Expansive clay swells through the wet months and shrinks through the dry ones, so piers under a deck or a pergola have to reach past the layer that is still moving and be sized for the bearing under your own yard rather than to a generic detail. The same movement is what opens the gaps that exterior paint is then asked to bridge.

How exterior jobs run together

The most common combination in a San Jose backyard is a deck and the yard around it. Decking, pavers and concrete get designed as one surface, the grading and the drainage are planned once instead of being reconciled after the fact, and pergola posts land on footings that were sized to carry them rather than on a slab that was never meant to. A typical residential patio slab is thin, unreinforced and has no footing under it, so a post anchored straight to the surface puts uplift into a few inches of concrete.

Siding and windows are the other pair that travel together on a Bay Area house. Both sit in the same drainage plane, and opening one usually exposes the other: probing for failed siding is how rot around a window head gets found, and pulling a window is when the flashing lap above it becomes visible. Where the two are done in the same visit the wall gets closed up once, in the right order, with one crew answering for the result. Title 24 fenestration performance is documented off the NFRC label on the unit rather than promised, so what was specified is what can be checked.

Exterior painting is the finish on all of it, and it is booked as a preparation job rather than a coating job. Failed material is found by probing rather than by looking, clearances at grade and at the roof line get corrected before a brush comes out, and the sequence is what the finish actually rests on.