Our California ADU is finally coming along here at our primary residence. The other week I talked about building an ADU and went into detail about all the key players and people involved.
If you haven’t already, I highly recommend reading that post first. But if you’re like me and a blog tells you to do that you probably won’t.
This post will make more sense if you do. Fair warning.
Anyway, I also mentioned that we have been planning this project since late January.
That’s a full ten months of JUST planning!
This has been hard for me because I’m not the planning type. I like to just get started and figure things out along the way, adjust where I need to, and make it work.
This post is a follow up that details the timeline for each of the pieces in the planning phase.
I’ll then tell you how much cash we’ve had to spend on our California ADU before even getting started with the build.
Hopefully it helps others get an idea of what to expect while building their own California ADU.
Timeline For Our California ADU Planning Phase
It was December 2022 when I first walked with my dog past the ADU that was being built a few streets down from our home.
My wife and I knew we wanted to eventually build an ADU but we didn’t expect it to be so soon.
When I asked the general contractor what the build cost was going to be I was pleasantly surprised at how reasonable it seemed.
Suddenly, I was pitching my wife on building our California ADU before remodeling our actual house.
And it made a lot of sense.
We wanted to remove a soffit in our home that contained gas and electrical lines. We figured we’d have to trench that on the exterior to a separate part of the home.
This would likely be a problem.
Part of our remodel would entail hardscaping the exterior and redoing the front and back yards. But it made zero sense to do those things before the ADU… What if we’d have to rip it up to trench utilities?
Suddenly, the ADU build became the priority and we were quickly in touch with the woman that would become our architect.
ADU Architectural Design Timeline
Our initial contact with our architect was a phone call on January 10th, 2023 and we’d signed a contract with her just 6 days later.
That’s moving awfully quick on our end!
But again, she came highly recommended from the project down the road, understood city requirements, and some key players.
On top of all that, her fees seemed reasonable. Oh, and we also discovered that her son was extremely good friends with one of my wife’s second cousins.
Small town living!
We eventually had our first in-person meeting with our architect on January 23rd and things started moving from there. A week or so later she came out to take detailed measurements of our entire home.
These eventually ended up in some pretty cool, very adult-feeling blueprints.
If you’re wondering whether or not you need an architect for your California ADU, you clearly did not read my initial blog post 🙂
I talk all about that so, again, go back and read my post about who you’ll need to build your ADU.
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Preliminary California ADU Quotes
By April 18th we had detailed, preliminary architectural design plans for the ADU build.
This was a big milestone, not simply because it took about 3 months to get to this point, but it also allowed us to start having real conversations with contractors.
While general contractors still couldn’t give us detailed bids, these plans were enough to get ballpark estimates and be able to see who was going to be worth further conversations.
All told, we talked to several general contractors and received quotes from $185/square foot to $315/square foot.
Quite the range, eh!?
Preliminary architectural design also allowed us to start moving forward with next steps.
We reached out to the city to get an idea of fee estimates for plan checks and permits (more on that later), and we could now start on the structural engineering element of the ADU project.
But not before our soils report…
Soils Report Timeline
By May 10th we were reaching out to companies to do our soils engineering report.
We signed a contract with a company to complete the soils test on May 17th.
The contract said it would take “up to 5 weeks” which naturally means you’d expect it to be done sooner.
Afterall, how long does it take to grab a garden shovel, throw some dirt in a bag and run it through… well, whatever lab they run it through?
Apparently it takes longer than that.
After quite a bit of nagging we finally received the completed soils report back on June 26th. That’s a full 5 weeks and 6 days for those keeping track at home.
This was super annoying for us because the structural engineer’s work is 100% dependent on the soils report.
Had we known the soils report would take so long we would have started it earlier on in the design phase so once we had preliminary architectural plans we’d be moving along with structural.
ADU Structural Engineering Timeframe
Our structural engineer came to us through a reference from our builder.
We like our builder a lot and have gotten pretty friendly with her, so we felt like this would be an extra layer to keep our structural engineer accountable.
Update: We actually ended up having to fire our builder and completely pivot our California ADU project (lol!).
While we not-so-patiently waited for the soil people to run tests for (I assume) density or something, we signed a contract with our structural engineer on June 8th.
But, given how long it took our soil report to finish, and then some architectural tweaks, our structural engineer didn’t actually get started until July 5th.
We figured the structural engineering side of things would be pretty straight forward. With the soils report in hand it should just be some math, telling us we need to change something, maybe a little more math, and then PRESTO!
But somehow our ADU’s structural engineering component didn’t actually wrap up until October 6th!
My wife and I still can’t quite figure out why it took so long.
Apparently she was getting married and planning a honeymoon or something along those lines and things got delayed.
Frustrating?
Yes.
Anything we could do about it beyond hounding her?
Not really.
Unfortunately, with this many moving parts and doing something like this for the first time there will inevitably be delays and learnings.
We definitely had some changes we had to make regarding the one shared wall between our primary home and the ADU. So that took some back-and-worth.
But ultimately there could have been better communication on our structural engineer’s side. It seems she just had a lot on her plate and, once her personal life freed up a bit, things were moving pretty well during the city plan check phase.
California ADU City Plan Checks & Final Permits
Finally!
With our ADU architectural plans and structural engineering all done we were ready to submit our plans to the city for plan approval.
This exciting moment occurred on October 16th.
They told us they would have it back to us within 10 business days.
Riiiiiiight.
Well, they were (shockingly) pretty close! We had our response on October 31st.
Our builder was about as shocked as we were, saying she had never heard of a city turning around a plan check so fast.
But it wasn’t all rainbows and sunshine. As expected, there were some things we had to address both on the architectural and structural sides.
Fortunately the changes were minor. We turned them around quickly, and resubmitted on November 9th.
But while checking in on November 13th, we learned the plans were submitted to the wrong portal with the city so we had to resubmit everything that day.
Still, the city turned it around quickly and we received our response and full permit approval on November 21st.
So now all we have to do is pay the city’s plan check and permit fees and we’re off to the races. We’re officially ready to go and we’ve planned to start construction on December 4th.
What a journey!
Building this ADU… or rather PLANNING to build this ADU has been a challenge and it’s been expensive already.
How expensive?
Let’s dig in.
Total Costs To Get Our California ADU Plans Approved
Now that you understand all the pieces that have gone into building an ADU in California’s Central Coast we can talk about how much each of these components has cost us to date.
Here’s a quick table showing what we’ve spent so far during our California ADU design and planning phase:
To date, we have spent $23,438 on planning our California ADU.
In actuality, this number was supposed to be $30,757 (see ‘surprises’ section below).
Regardless, that’s a big number… at least to me. And it seems like a lot of money to spend on getting to what feels like the starting line.
Is it more than we expected?
Honestly, I’m not sure. Probably, yes…
The nice thing about the ADU planning taking 10 months is that this payment wasn’t due in one lump sum.
So instead of feeling immediately poor it was more like being bled dry by a low stakes slot machine.
We won’t have that luxury when it comes to the actual construction.
And we’re super excited to get rolling with that in less than a week. I plan to have another post about the actual ADU build timeline and costs as well.
But I’ll leave you with one more thing, some surprises we’ve had along the way.
Unexpected ADU Planning Costs
If you’ve ever done any type of home construction or remodeling you know two things for certain.
Everything will take longer than expected and will cost more than planned.
I assure you that checks out so far while planning to build our California ADU. Here are some fun little surprises we’ve had over the last 10 months of planning.
Understand Your Plans And Dimensions
During our first round of plan checks with the city my wife was looking over our architectural plans.
It was the middle of the night and all of a sudden she’s walking out to our backward with a tape measure.
Here we go…
Well, turns out the pergola we wanted to add coming off the back of our home and into our yard was only like 4 feet wide.
Four feet isn’t much of an overhang, and we thought it was odd. How did we miss this?! We definitely didn’t want to be huddling under a tiny 4 foot pergola.
Well, it turns out that our architect didn’t screw up. Our required setbacks only allowed for these dimensions given the proximity to our “property line”.
Yes, I’m putting “property line” in quotes there because our legal property line is about 3-4 feet further into our yard than our neighbor’s fence that’s been there for some 40 years.
I know a thing or two about acquiescence and property lines and fences (weird, right?). In short, I’m quite certain that our new, true property line is where the fence is.
But that doesn’t matter for now. We’re not going to take on that battle today. Instead, we’re scrapping the pergola until after the ADU is done and then we’ll figure it all out.
Fun!
Unplanned Solar Requirement
I’m not certain that California requires solar when building a smaller, city approved ADU.
But they definitely require it for “new construction”. And given the size of our ADU footprint (1,030 sq feet) we were required to have solar.
We planned to do solar at some point, but we didn’t want to incur the cost just yet.
Too bad!
For now we’re doing the bare minimum to meet the requirements but it’s still costing us about $14,000.
In the table above you only see the costs we’ve had to incur to date. For solar that’s our deposit and permit fees.
City Plan Check & Permit Fees
Speaking of fun fees, our city attempted to pull a fast one on us.
Back in June we were doing our homework, trying to get an idea of what building this ADU was really going to cost us.
We pushed the city to give us an estimate on plan check and permit fees based on our architectural plans.
They quoted us $3,811.25 which seemed extremely reasonable. And we have that in writing:
But then, after we received our final approval just the other week, the city also handed us a bill for $11,732.
WTF?!
Turns out the woman that gave us the original $3,811 figure somehow completely screwed up. Nobody knows why because she no longer works there (hmmm…).
My wife went into city hall and cried to someone at the desk that had zero power and an even lesser amount of empathy.
So she left and we emailed some higher-ups that seem to kind of maybe care, likely only because they are city elected officials.
And after a fair bit of back-and-forth and stress we got it adjusted back much closer to the original quote.
So yes, we got off the hook with much cheaper city fees than we should have.
It should have felt like a win but it really didn’t because we had already expected the $3,811 figure. It’s never fun having to stress out and fight for something you thought you already had.
But hey, it could have been worse!
We’re now finally in the actual build phase of our ADU, although that’s already had a major hiccup as we had to completely scrap our contractor.
The fun continues!
What about you? Have you built or planned an AUD before? How do my costs compare to your experience?
Let me know in the comments!