Your house is dry now. Somebody still has to build it back, and that somebody is us.
SOS Restoration of Ventura County rebuilds what the loss took out: framing, insulation, wall board, texture, paint, casing, doors, cabinets, counters and floor, on one written fixed price, under CSLB #1131134. County ground and all ten cities, Oxnard to Ojai. Call (805) 427-9039 whenever it suits and the walk-through gets booked on that call.
Does the same company that dried it also build it back?
Yes, and it is the same crew rather than a partner firm with a similar name on the door.
Reconstruction is not an add-on to the emergency work here. It is the sixth of six lines this company runs, next to sewage, storm damage, mold, fire and smoke, and water, and it is the one the other five are working toward. Demolition and drying run under IICRC #70194273. Everything after runs under CSLB #1131134, which is one phone call instead of two contracts you have to introduce to each other.
Nobody here explains why that split deserves a homeowner’s attention. Cleanup and reconstruction are separate trades, priced apart, listed apart, and often bought from separate companies. A firm can be excellent at pulling water off a slab and hold no license to hang one sheet of rock. When the machines come off the floor, that gap is where families sit for weeks calling strangers. The emergency side of what we do hands straight across, because the same company wrote both lists of work.
The Mountain Fire took my house. Is it too late to start?
No. That rebuild is still open ground out here, and the county has propped two doors open for it.
In 2024 a fire started near Balcom Canyon out by Somis, ran to 19,904 acres and destroyed 243 structures, 182 of them homes, most on unincorporated land around Camarillo. People are still framing out there.
Two things matter if you are one of them. The county removed the zoning clearance step for fire rebuilds, so the application goes straight into Building and Safety instead of queueing twice. And the Board of Supervisors waived a list of permit fees for these rebuilds, running to the end of 2026 and belonging only to whoever owned the parcel the day the fire came through. It does not travel with a sale. A small planning team stays assigned to these files, reachable through Ventura County Building and Safety at (805) 654-2888. Smoke that never touched a flame is its own conversation, and the fire and smoke work covers what gets cleaned before anything closes up.
What actually gets put back, and in what order?
Rough work first, finish work second, and the order is not negotiable, because an inspector has to see the middle of it.
A house from the sixties has one gate standing ahead of all of it: nothing comes down until the laboratory answers on the old material, and what gets tested before anybody opens a wall covers that gate. Past that gate, structural repairs and cut framing go back first. Then whatever lives inside the cavity is restored and left visible: supply and drain lines, wiring, ducting. That is where the city walks the open wall and signs. Insulation goes in behind that signature, then wall board, then texture.
Texture is the step that separates a repair from a patch you notice forever. Knockdown, orange peel, a hand-troweled skip: whatever is on your walls has a rhythm, and carrying it across a seam takes a sample, a practice board and a plasterer who has matched one before. Guess at it and you leave a rectangle that catches the afternoon light forever. Then paint, base and casing, doors hung on their own hardware, cabinets set and shimmed, counters templated only after the boxes are level, flooring, fixtures last. Like for like is the default: what was there, restored to what it was.
Who files the permit here, and how long does the review take?
We do, in whichever of the eleven Ventura County jurisdictions your house sits in, and the wait runs from ten working days to nine weeks.
Plan check is the desk where your drawings wait for somebody to approve them, and it is the stretch nobody warns you about. Eleven counters run this ground: the ten cities, plus the unincorporated county, which keeps its own Building and Safety with a window in Ventura and a second in Thousand Oaks. They do not behave alike. Camarillo stopped accepting paper plans altogether, so everything uploads, and its fee sheet carries surcharges of 17.89 percent and 11.34 percent on top. Its building department is contracted out, as Moorpark’s is, and Fillmore’s review too. Here is what each publishes. Four of the eleven publish nothing, and those rows say so.
| Jurisdiction | First plan check review, as published |
|---|---|
| Moorpark | 10 working days, 5 on resubmittal |
| Port Hueneme | Up to 15 working days |
| Simi Valley | 20 to 25 working days |
| Ventura | 21 working days, electronic submittal |
| Unincorporated county | Approximately up to four weeks |
| Santa Paula | About four weeks, on a document dated 2006 |
| Oxnard | 95 percent of first reviews inside nine weeks; express track two to four weeks |
| Camarillo | Not published |
| Thousand Oaks | Not published |
| Fillmore | Not published |
| Ojai | Not published |
While we are being exact: the number that circulates online about patching so many square yards of wall board without a permit exists nowhere here. Not in the ten city codes, and not in the county’s exemption list, which runs to seventeen items and never mentions wall board. Oxnard and Ventura publish a counter figure, both handout practice rather than ordinance. And in Ojai, repairing more than a tenth of a roof inside one year pulls the whole roof up to the highest fire rating the code recognizes, so an eleven percent repair quietly becomes a full replacement.
Why is the rebuild one closed price when the drying was billed by the hour?
Because a rebuild sold by the hour is not a legal contract in California.
State law will not let a home improvement agreement stand without a heading reading Contract Price and the amount under it in dollars and cents, and that amount has to cover the entire cost, profit, labor and materials together, with any finance charge on its own line. So the construction half reaches you as one number agreed before anybody picks up a tool. The mitigation half is metered, because hours and machines are what it consumes, and it starts at $61 an hour on the water side. What pushes the closed number up or down, and why nobody here will quote it sight unseen, is laid out on the rebuild cost page.
Three protections ride along with that fixed number, and they are law, not courtesy. The deposit is capped at a set ceiling or a tenth of the contract, whichever is smaller, far below what the contractors who appear in a driveway after a fire tend to ask for. Past it, nobody may request or accept money beyond the value of work already performed or material already delivered, and the payment schedule has to be written in and tied to work you can point at. And on a repair contract for a home damaged where an emergency has been declared, you get seven business days to cancel. A local declaration by a city or the county starts that clock; it needs no governor and no president.
The insurance company says I have a year to rebuild. Is that the whole story?
Not necessarily. After a declared emergency the floor is three years, and nobody in this county publishes that.
The insurance code fixes how long a homeowner has to collect full replacement cost, counting from the first check, the one written for the secondhand value of what was ruined. Ordinarily it is twelve months. Where the loss relates to a declared state of emergency the code says not less than thirty-six, with further six-month extensions for good cause, naming permit delays, material shortages and a shortage of available contractors among the qualifying reasons.
Read against a Ventura County rebuild, that changes what a family is willing to wait for. The claim is decided inside the insurance company; the policy is a contract between you and them. We measure, photograph and itemize the work, room by room and line by line, so the document you file matches the house actually standing there. Send the photos through and a technician drives out with a meter and tells you which walls are wet for real. No charge, no obligation.
How do I check that whoever I hire can legally do this work?
Two things, and both are checkable from your own phone in about a minute.
The first is the license number on the advertising. California requires it in every construction contract, every subcontract and call for bid, and every form of advertising there is. A company with nothing to show is telling you something before you dial. Ours are CSLB #1131134 for construction and IICRC #70194273 for the cleanup side.
The second is what that number is allowed to cover, because not every builder’s license reaches every part of a house. A general building license turns on a project needing at least two unrelated trades, and the code is explicit that framing and carpentry do not count toward those two. The narrower residential remodeling license sounds close and is not: it may not make structural changes to the load-bearing parts of an existing building, footings, foundations, bearing walls and roof structures included. So a fire that reached a bearing wall, or water that reached a footing, sits outside what the narrow one can contract for. Ask which one is behind the number you were given, and ask before anybody quotes a house.
Where does your job actually end?
At the walk-through, with three things sitting past it that were never ours to settle.
We carry it to the far end: framing through final coat, and a walk where anything you point at gets fixed before our crew loads out. Structure is one: a change to how the building carries its weight goes to a structural engineer first, and the framing then follows the sheet that comes back sealed. Sign-off is another, because California does not let a contractor approve their own work; the card is signed by the jurisdiction’s inspector. Last, anything the loss did not cause. Move the island, widen a doorway, add an outlet: glad to, on a separate contract, kept clear of the damage estimate, because a remodel buried in a claim puts every honest line of the paperwork under suspicion.
Water damage
Mold
Fire & smoke
Storm damage
Sewage cleanup
The cities we drive to for this work
Eleven permit counters cover this county: the ten cities and the county itself for the ground in between. We file in whichever one your address answers to.
Can't call right now? Send it and we call you.
Your phone number is the only thing we really need. Everything else just helps us send the right crew with the right equipment.
The last morning on a rebuild is quiet: no plastic, no machines, and a room that gives nothing away about what happened in it. Call (805) 427-9039 anywhere in Ventura County, walk the open house with our crew chief, and the whole thing comes back to you as one written number.