Archives of ADU Build

footing holes

Site Work + Inspections

It’s been one month since my last update when we started on the site work. Since then, the water, electric, and sewer lines have been placed in the trench from their connection points at the front of the property to the connection points where the unit will hook in. The trench and water and sewer […]
Read More
site work day 1

Permits + Site Work

It’s been a long time since I last posted – 9 months to be exact! Between September and December, we collected proposals from both contractors to handle the site work and container fabricators. To be honest, there was a point we were feeling pretty hopeless about finding vendors within our budget. But, RadLab came through […]
Read More

Designs!

A lot has happened in the only twenty days since my last post. We are almost through the design phase with our architecture firm, RadLab. Due to the cost of the site work (e.g. connecting the sewer line, running electric) as well as the scale of a two-story structure in the context of our property, […]
Read More

Preliminary Plans

We’ve officially decided to move forward with a recycled shipping container build and will be working with the architecture firm RadLab, who have a lot of experience with this type of project. There are a few preliminary steps I’ve taken to get things moving. As part of the project, we will be replacing a fence […]
Read More

Introduction to ADUs

I’ve decided to record my journey of building an accessory dwelling unit (ADU) in the City of San Diego due to the general lack of other resources I’ve found in researching this topic. Background on the Project My partner Cris and I bought our property in Fall 2013. A big selling point was the large […]
Read More