The shape of Sunset District
Because the plan repeats, we can be unusually precise about time out here. Garage level, interior stair, living room at the front behind a picture window, kitchen at the rear, two bedrooms and a bath between them, and in perhaps half the houses a lower level finished sometime after the war. Knowing the shape in advance means a crew arrives with the right number of people instead of discovering the layout on the day.
What varies is moisture and sand. Blocks toward Ocean Beach take grit through every door seal and a marine layer that never quite burns off; up near Grand View Park the houses sit higher, drier and windier. Inner Sunset addresses close to Golden Gate Park fall between the two. We shift where the extra minutes go — grout and reveals out west, floors and door tracks nearer the park.
The building stock here
The signature building is a stucco row house, roughly 1,100 to 1,600 square feet on the living floor, put up between the mid-1920s and the late 1940s and sharing a wall or a narrow gap with its neighbors. Ceilings are eight feet, floors are oak under decades of finish, and the bathroom keeps its original tile more often than people expect. The garage below holds laundry and the water heater. Steady marine humidity means grout, reveals and closet backs earn regular effort.