Project Takeovers
When the Plans
Have Already Been
Rejected
A plan check correction letter is not a death sentence. It is a diagnostic. The question is whether the original designer can read what the plan checker is actually saying — and whether the project can be corrected, redesigned, or rescued. We take over rejected projects every month. We are the firm other firms’ clients call when the corrections do not stop coming.
Service
Plan Check Corrections & Takeovers
Service Area
All of Los Angeles County
Direct Line
The Problem
Most Stalled Projects
Are Not Stuck for the
Reason the Owner Thinks.
An owner gets a correction letter. The original designer responds. Another correction letter comes back. The cycle repeats. By round three, the owner is calling us — usually frustrated, usually behind on their construction schedule, sometimes already paying interest on a construction loan that has not started construction.
What we find when we read the correspondence is almost always the same. The original designer has been responding to the surface of each correction without addressing the underlying issue the plan checker is pointing at. The plan checker is not arbitrary. The plan checker is asking the same question in different ways, hoping the designer will eventually understand it. Each round of corrections is a clearer version of the same point.
The fix is not more drawing. The fix is reading the corrections correctly the first time we see them — from the perspective of someone who has worked on the other side of the plan check counter.
How We Approach It
Diagnose Before Redrawing
We do not start by redrawing. We start by reading. The existing plan set, the correction letters, the agency correspondence, and any prior submittals all get reviewed before a single sheet is touched. That diagnosis usually takes a few days. It saves months.
01
Read the Corrections
We map every comment in every correction letter to the underlying code section, ordinance, or review standard the plan checker is invoking. The actual issue almost always becomes clear once the comments are organized.
02
Decide: Correct, Redesign, or Restart
Sometimes the project can be corrected. Sometimes it needs targeted redesign. Sometimes the plans have to be rebuilt from scratch. We tell the owner which it is, and why, before any further fee is committed.
03
Document for Approval
When we resubmit, the package is organized to answer the corrections explicitly. Cover sheets, response narratives, and revision clouds make the plan checker’s job easy — which makes the next correction letter shorter or absent.
Real Projects
Takeovers That Worked
We are careful about which takeover projects we accept. Some are easy — the prior designer simply missed something obvious. Others are not. The honest read at the start tells us which is which.
An Approval Another Designer Could Not Secure
Brought into a stalled Mount Washington project after the original designer ran out of strategies in front of the Specific Plan’s review process. The path forward was not in the existing drawings. It was in how the proposal needed to be reframed for the board. We did the reframing. The project moved.
Toe-of-Slope Setback Compliance
A hillside ADU project where multiple prior consultants said the retaining wall setbacks made the unit impossible. The setbacks were real. The reading of them was wrong. We took over and the project was approved as designed.
What This Page Does Not Promise
Sometimes the Honest Answer Is Start Over
Honest Counsel
If the existing plans are too far off the actual approval path, fixing them costs more than rebuilding them. We will say so directly — and we will tell you why.
We have read takeover packages where the right answer was to throw out the existing plans entirely and start with a fresh design. That is uncomfortable for the owner to hear. It is also, occasionally, the truth. When it is, we say so.
The alternative — pretending the existing plans can be salvaged when they can’t — just delays the inevitable while billing the owner for the delay. We do not work that way. The owner’s real interest is the project that gets built, on the shortest path, with the lowest total cost. Sometimes that path runs through new drawings.
Related Work
Where Else We Operate
Stalled Project
Plans Stuck in Corrections?
Send us the correction letters and the existing plan set. The first read costs nothing. We will tell you whether the project can be corrected, needs redesign, or should be rebuilt — and what each path looks like in time and cost.