Believe it or not, the most time consuming part of this whole ADU journey was not the construction, but rather getting through the permitting process with the county (I live in an unincorporated area so I had to deal with a county instead of a city). Even though the whole permitting process was not particularly pleasant, I’m glad I went through it and will go over the reasons why later in this post. To be fair, the whole permitting process was painful and confusing for me mainly because I wasn’t familiar with the whole process and didn’t know what to expect. Hopefully this post will help you navigate the ADU permitting process a little bit better than I did.
ADU Permitting in a Nutshell
The permitting process I’m going over below is for an ADU in California, but it should provide you with a good guideline of what to expect for an ADU permit anywhere in the United States. The first step in getting an ADU permit is to get it through the planning review. You will have to submit an application to the city/county building department along with the ADU plans (i.e. architectural/engineering drawings). For me, the review fee from the county was around $1,500 but this amount can be higher or lower depending on how complicated your project is because the fee is based on the amount of time the plan checker need to spend reviewing the project. The city/county will take a few months to review your application/plans and might send questions or comments back to you regarding your proposal for further clarification. In general, the city/county are just looking for general conformance to the city/county code and building code so if you are not doing anything out of the ordinary then your application/plans should be approved.
Once your application/plans are approved, you will have to pay a construction permit fee which include fee such as traffic impact fees, school fees, fire protection fees, etc… My total construction permit fee was more than I thought but I think my case was unusual because the area that I live in has a very high traffic impact fee. After I paid the construction permit fee, I was given a conditional permit to start construction and I have 6 months to call my first inspection. The county gave me a physical permit card that has all the inspections that were required for the project listed on the back of it. Once the ADU is completed and all of the required inspections are signed off by the inspector, my permit becomes a valid certificate of occupancy for the ADU.
Why Get a Permit?
Although permitting the ADU will cost you time and money, there are 3 good reasons to still get a permit:
- Permitting the ADU allows you to add its square footage into the official county data for your main house, making your property more valuable when you decide to sell it or take cash out of it.
- Doing the construction for the ADU is a major operations. There will be traffic and noise impacts to the neighborhood. If you don’t have a permit for the project and your neighbor complains about your project to the city/county, you could be forced to shut down the whole operation and/or get fined.
- Permitting the ADU requires the Contractor to follow rules and regulations of the building code which are there to protect you. You will also get a building inspector to check the Contractor to make sure that they are not cutting corners and are following the requirements of the building code.
If you are looking to get in touch with a Contractor to help you with your ADU project, reach out to me at [email protected] and I can give you recommendations for some excellent Contractors.