Nine phases, from the week you get your lot back to the day you get your keys.
Rebuilding a home you did not plan to rebuild is a strange kind of project. You are making design decisions while grieving, negotiating with an insurer while living somewhere temporary, and learning a permitting system most homeowners never encounter once. The work is technical, but the difficulty is rarely technical. It is that everything arrives at once, and nothing is in the order you expected.
What follows is the sequence as it actually runs. We have laid it out in phases because the order matters more than most people are told — a decision made in phase two determines what is possible in phase six, and reversing it later is expensive. Read it once through before you commit to anything.
The Nine Phases at a Glance
| Phase | Typical duration |
|---|---|
| 1. Settle the land | 3–6 weeks |
| 2. Understand your coverage | 3–12 months |
| 3. Decide how you want to build | 2–6 weeks |
| 4. Design against a real budget | 3–6 months |
| 5. Build the house on paper | 3–5 months |
| 6. Permitting and plan check | 2–7 months |
| 7. Site work and foundation | 2–5 months |
| 8. Structure, systems, enclosure | 6–10 months |
| 9. Finishes and occupancy | 4–7 months |
Phases overlap. Insurance runs alongside design rather than before it, and permitting often runs alongside long-lead procurement.
1. Settle the Land Before Anything Else
Before design, before builders, before insurance strategy: confirm what your lot is. That means a current boundary and topographic survey, a geotechnical investigation, and a clear read on what the fire changed about your site conditions.
Fires alter soil. They remove the vegetation holding a slope together, they can change drainage patterns across a hillside, and on some Palisades lots they exposed conditions that were never documented because the original home predates modern requirements. A geotechnical engineer will tell you your foundation system, your setback constraints, and whether you have a slope stability issue that needs remediation.
This work costs a fraction of one percent of your project and governs a substantial share of your budget. Doing it first is the highest-return decision available to you.
Typical duration: 3–6 weeks.
2. Understand Your Coverage Honestly
Read your policy with someone who reads policies for a living. The numbers that matter are your dwelling limit, your extended replacement cost percentage if you carry one, your ordinance and law coverage, your additional living expense limit and duration, and your contents recovery.
Two things consistently catch people. First, ordinance and law coverage is what pays for the code requirements your original home did not have — sprinklers, current energy standards, wildfire-resistant assemblies. If it is thin, that gap comes out of your pocket. Second, additional living expense is usually capped in both dollars and months, and a full custom rebuild often outlasts the coverage period. Knowing that now changes how you plan your housing.
Expect the settlement conversation to run alongside design rather than before it. A detailed, itemized scope from a builder is the most persuasive document you can put in front of an adjuster, which is one reason to bring a builder in early rather than after drawings are complete.
Typical duration: ongoing, 3–12 months.
3. Decide How You Want to Build
You have two structural choices. You can hire an architect, complete a full design, then bid it to builders. Or you can engage a design-build partner who carries design and construction under one agreement.
The traditional path gives you a competitive bid on a finished set of drawings. It works well when the design is conventional and the site is straightforward. Its weakness on a rebuild is timing: you learn what the house costs after the design is finished, and if the number is wrong you redesign, which costs months you may not have.
Design-build prices continuously as the design develops. Constructability and cost are in the room while decisions are being made, so you find out that a detail is unbuildable or unaffordable while it is still a sketch. There is one point of accountability when something goes wrong, which on a rebuild — where site conditions are genuinely uncertain — matters more than it does on a typical project.
We are a design-build firm and we believe in the model, but it is not universally correct. If you have an architect you love and a design already substantially complete, the traditional path may serve you better. What is not advisable on a fire rebuild is finishing drawings in isolation and hoping the market prices them where you need.
Typical duration: 2–6 weeks to select.
4. Design Against a Real Budget
Schematic design establishes the footprint, the massing, the relationship to the slope and the view. This is where the house is truly determined, and where the most consequential cost decisions get made — usually without anyone naming them as cost decisions.
Structural openness, floor-plate complexity, the number of corners in the exterior wall, how much of the house cantilevers, how far the foundation steps down the hill: these set your cost long before anyone chooses a faucet. A house can be made less expensive at the schematic stage in ways that do not compromise it. The same savings attempted at the finish stage means cheaper materials in a house that is already too expensive to build.
Ask for a cost model at the end of schematic design and again at the end of design development. If your team cannot produce one, that is information.
Typical duration: 3–6 months.
5. Build the House on Paper
Construction documents are where the project gets resolved. Structural engineering, mechanical and plumbing layouts, electrical, Title 24 energy compliance, waterproofing details, and the wildfire-resistant assemblies required in a very high fire hazard severity zone.
This is also where digital coordination earns its cost. Modeling structure against mechanical and plumbing before anything is framed catches the conflicts — a beam through a duct run, a shear wall where the plumbing stack needs to go — that otherwise get discovered by a framer at seven in the morning and resolved with a change order.
Long-lead items are identified here and ordered here. Windows, structural steel, custom millwork, and certain appliances routinely run twenty to forty weeks. A rebuild that waits until framing to order windows has already added a season to its schedule.
Typical duration: 3–5 months.
6. Permitting and Plan Check
Your drawings go to the Department of Building and Safety, and depending on your location they also go to the Fire Department, the Bureau of Engineering, Grading, and — west of Pacific Coast Highway or within the coastal zone — the California Coastal Commission.
Rebuild pathways can move faster than a standard new build, particularly where the project stays within the original footprint and height. Expanding beyond it generally means a full discretionary review, and that difference can be six months or more. It is worth understanding precisely which side of that line your design falls on before you finalize it.
Expect corrections. Every project receives them. What separates a six-week plan check from a six-month one is whether your team anticipated the reviewer's questions in the drawing set and responds to corrections in days rather than weeks.
Typical duration: 2–7 months, highly variable.
7. Site Work and Foundation
Excavation, shoring where required, caissons or footings, retaining walls, drainage, waterproofing, underground utilities. On a hillside lot this is the phase with the most genuine uncertainty, because the ground reveals itself only when opened.
It is also the phase where contingency exists. Groundwater that was not in the report, rock at an unexpected elevation, a neighboring slope requiring temporary support — these are not failures of planning, they are the nature of building into a hill. A good geotechnical investigation narrows the range of surprises. It does not eliminate them.
Waterproofing is invisible, unglamorous, and the one system where saving money is never worth it. Everything that goes wrong with a hillside house ten years later begins with water.
Typical duration: 2–5 months.
8. Structure, Systems, and Enclosure
Framing goes up, then mechanical, electrical, and plumbing go in, then the building gets closed — roof, windows, weather barrier, cladding. Inspections punctuate each stage, and the house cannot proceed past any of them until it passes.
The milestone that matters emotionally is the day the house is dried in. The milestone that matters practically is the rough inspection sign-off, because until systems are approved nothing can be covered.
Your fire-resistant assemblies are installed here: ember-resistant vents, Class A roof, non-combustible soffits and cladding, rated glazing, and the sprinkler system. These are the elements that will decide how your home performs in the next event, and they are worth walking with your builder while they are still exposed.
Typical duration: 6–10 months.
9. Finishes, Close-Out, and Occupancy
Drywall, millwork, tile, flooring, paint, plumbing and lighting trim, cabinetry, appliances, landscape and hardscape, and the systems commissioning that verifies everything actually works together. Then final inspections, the certificate of occupancy, and the punch list.
This phase feels slow because progress becomes less visible while the number of trades increases. It rewards a builder who sequences carefully. It punishes late selections more than any other phase — a tile decision made in month twenty-two can hold up four trades behind it.
Typical duration: 4–7 months.
What the Whole Thing Takes
From the week you regain your lot to the day you move in, a full custom rebuild in the Palisades generally runs two and a half to four years. Roughly a third of that is design and permitting. The rest is construction.
That range is honest rather than encouraging, and we would rather give you the honest one now. The homeowners who struggle most are not the ones whose projects took three years. They are the ones who were told eighteen months.
Nothing about this process is fast. The projects that finish well are not the ones that rushed the start — they are the ones that spent longer on paper and less time correcting in the field.
The three decisions that shape a rebuild more than any others are made in the first six months, before a single line is drawn in construction documents: the soils and foundation strategy, whether you stay within your original footprint, and whether your design is being priced as it develops. Get those three right and the remaining two years are manageable. Get them wrong and you will spend the rest of the project paying for it.
