Drywall Contractor in North Hollywood, CA

The North Hollywood station is the eastern terminus of the Metro G Line busway and a stop on the B Line subway, and that intersection has pulled a decade of housing development toward it. Metro approved District NoHo, a joint development on roughly fifteen acres at the station that is planned for about 1,481 residential units with more than twenty percent below market rate, along with retail and around 500,000 square feet of office, built out in phases over roughly fifteen years. Projects of that scale run on repetition, and repetition is where a framing and drywall crew either earns its schedule or loses it. We staff those jobs to a unit cycle and hold it.

Podium construction here follows a familiar pattern. Concrete or steel at the ground floor with parking and retail, then four or five levels of wood frame above, with light gauge steel wherever a rated corridor, shaft or stair enclosure demands it. Our scope on those buildings usually covers the interior wood or metal stud partitions, the rated corridor and unit demising assemblies, shaft wall around elevators and mechanical risers, exterior gypsum sheathing behind the weather barrier, and the full drywall hang, tape and finish. On a unit by unit cycle the finish schedule is what determines whether the building hits certificate of occupancy, so we track it by floor rather than by trade.

The theater and production side of NoHo is a separate discipline. Small performance spaces, black boxes, rehearsal rooms, recording rooms and post production suites all sit in converted commercial and industrial shells along Lankershim Boulevard and the surrounding blocks. Those buildings were not designed for what is happening inside them now, which means new partitions that are simultaneously rated for fire, isolated for sound, and stiff enough to carry rigging or wall mounted equipment. We frame heavier gauge stud where loads demand it, install the backing before the board rather than after, and detail the ceiling so lighting positions and cable runs do not compromise the assemblies.

Then there is the older housing. A large share of North Hollywood apartment buildings date to the 1950s and 1960s, and many are the classic tuck under type with open parking beneath the living units. City of Los Angeles Ordinance 183893 requires seismic retrofit of wood frame soft story buildings permitted before January 1, 1978 that have four or more dwelling units over an open ground floor, a program covering roughly 13,500 buildings citywide. The structural work is a specialty trade, but the retrofit tears open ceilings, soffits and garage walls, and closing those back up correctly, including any rated separation between parking and dwellings, is our part of the job.