Over 2 years ago, I started out on a quest to explore and build an ADU at my personal home in the Northside Neighborhood of San Jose. In a few more months, this project will finally be completed. Given that this is getting close to completion, I felt it was the right time to share more of my personal story here with the BP Community.

In December of 2018, I engaged @Adam Mayberry as a architect/designer for my project. He was great! I highly recommend him.

In January of 2019, I performed a site survey with a small company out of Tracy (unfortunately there are no longer in-business).

Over approximately the next 8 months, Adam and I created a simple but elegant design for a new garage with a 1-bedroom apartment above it. In this same period, Adam also designed some plans to remodel the primary house.

Toward the end of 2019, we submitted an initial plan to the San Jose Planning office. This was a long, long process. We had to respond to questions and resubmit our plans multiple times (keep in mind, we are building a 2-story structure). It was finally approved on the third submittal in July. (Yay!)

We hired a great general contractor at the end of June -- @Zab Khan (First Class Construction). He has been a pleasure to work with. I highly recommend him too.

In August 2019, we demolished of our current garage and a large tree. Zab also started the foundation work.

In mid September 2019, we poured the concrete foundation (Bay Area "orange planet" Day -- this photo is not filtered).

By September/October, framing and rough-ins for electrical, plumbing, and HVAC were completed.

In November, the roof was installed and siding work began.

We ran into inspection delays with the city around the holidays so December was pretty quiet.

In January, we got insulation and Drywall up. We used spray-in on the ceiling of the apartment.

Currently we are still finishing siding. Again, the plan is to finish the entire project within the next 2 months. (fingers-crossed)

Overall, I think our family has been really, really happy with the experience. We hope to rent our 600+ SQFT apartment for about $2100 a month, maybe more. We also plan to refinance at the end of this period and take advantage for the lower interest rates.

All in all, the goal is to off-set our living expenses as much as possible and roll the savings into another OOS real estate investment in the coming 1-2 years.

FYI - When the entire project is complete, I will share some high-level numbers for the whole project. In the meantime, let me know if there are any other questions.

San Jose, California

14 Votes