Accessory Dwelling Unit Blogs Written By Real Homeowners - Brutally Honest ADU Cost Breakdowns

These blogs are written from the perspective of real homeowners who actually built Accessory Dwelling Units (or are trying to build one!)

BClaro - Walnut Creek (Contra Costa County) - 1200 sq ft Detached ADU for rental property
Sophia’s Cottage - San Jose (Santa Clara County ) - Detached ADU for his daughter
The ADU Odyssey - Portland (Multnomah County) - Converting a whole floor of a two story house for rental property
Hektor Castillo - Los Angeles (Los Angeles County) - Realtor building his own ADU
Manny Ham - Los Angeles (Los Angeles County) - 448 sq ft Detached ADU guest house and a 428 sq ft garage conversion ADU

Note: if you know of a blog that should be featured, please write to hello@how-to-adu.com with the blog’s URL and I’ll try to get it added.

Why you should read owner-builder blogs

I love linking to good objective educational resources about Accessory Dwelling Units, and the truth is that some of our favorite content comes directly from homeowners who have tried building their own ADUs.

Owner-builders are often:

Brutally honest
Coming from a similar perspective and level of experience
Not selling you anything

What could be better than the raw unadulterated opinions of other homeowners who have gone through the long journey that you’re thinking about embarking on yourself?

Owner-builders are very honest about their ADU projects

My favorite thing about the owner-builder blogs is that they are brutally honest about the Accessory Dwelling Unit.

They tell you the difficult and overwhelming parts of the process without any sugar coating. And you can learn from their experience!

I always strive for honesty on this page, and a lot of vendors think the same way as me.

But at the end of the day, we’re promoting businesses and I will admit that I want to inspire more people to build Accessory Dwelling Units.

So it’s good to link you to the unadulterated, very personal experiences of some owner-builders!

Technicality: One of these bloggers is an ADU professional in addition to being an owner builder, but he keeps it very authentic. (It’s the Portland site by Kol Peterson).

Owner-builders show details that pros take for granted

Sometimes, professionals will gloss over details that are particularly confusing or complicated to first-time developers.

Owner-builders tend to get stuck into those details and really address the subjects that might confuse lay people from outside the housing business.

So when Kat takes a minute to explain how exactly to get quotes from multiple vendors, and how to chase down where their materials are coming from to find other vendors, that is the kind of detail that is really valuable to regular owner-builders embarking on their own ADU journey.

When Hektor explains what a shear wall is, he explains it in a visual way that everybody can understand.

I love owner-builder-bloggers!

First post for each blog

The first post is often a great place to start because they tend to state the intention of the blog:

Introducing BClaro

“I understood little from the structural drawings, spoke no construction terminology, and never physically built myself. But I had my father with his building experience from Ukraine, his persistence, my tenacity, and my own resourcefulness. Between the two of us, I knew we could figure this out.“