ADU and Garage Conversion Builder in Pacific Palisades

The Palisades is City of Los Angeles territory. ADU plans go to the Department of Building and Safety, and the state statute sets the approval standard on top of that. Government Code section 66317 requires a permit application for an accessory dwelling unit to be considered and approved ministerially without discretionary review or a hearing, with the permitting agency approving or denying a complete application within 60 days.

Overlays sit above the clock. Hillside grading rules, coastal zone review, and fire hazard designations each bring their own sheet set and their own reviewer, and each one is discovered from the parcel record, not from the address.

Our project lead identifies which overlays touch your property before design starts. A package that meets an overlay for the first time at plan check loses months that a day of research would have saved.

LADBS requires a grading permit for any grading work in the hillside grading area, and for removal and recompaction or backfill. Soil and geology reports are submitted with the plans at plan check. Grading plan review also reaches slope repairs, landslide repair, basement and pool excavation in hillside areas, retaining walls, cuts, backcuts, and backfill.

On a sloped Palisades lot that ordering is not optional. A geotechnical engineer walks the site before an architect commits to a footprint.

Caisson depth, retaining wall design, subsurface drainage, and haul quantities drive the foundation budget and frequently the shape of the unit itself. A detached ADU placed thirty feet uphill can carry twice the foundation of the same building placed on the pad.

We commission the soils report early and let the engineering set the plan, so the design you approve is the design that can actually be built there.

Owners rebuilding a main residence are looking at the whole lot for the first time in decades. An accessory unit built alongside that work shares trenching, utility upgrades, and site access, which consolidates the heaviest site work into one mobilization. One excavation, one utility trench, one crane day, one set of temporary facilities.

Setbacks, separation distances, and the main house footprint decide where a second unit can sit, so the ADU belongs in the site plan from the first sketch rather than the last one. Adding it after the main house is drawn usually means redrawing the main house.

Our fire rebuild service page covers the main residence side of that work. On the ADU side, we coordinate with your architect and structural engineer so both packages carry the same survey, the same soils report, and the same grading plan, and so the two submittals never contradict each other at the counter.

A detached unit finished ahead of the main house gives a family a place to live on their own land while the primary residence goes up. Sequencing is the whole exercise.

The accessory unit needs permanent power, water, a sewer connection, and a certificate of occupancy of its own before anyone moves in. Those milestones land at different points on the calendar than the main house milestones do, and some of them depend on utility scheduling outside any builder's control.

Our project lead builds the schedule backward from the occupancy date and reports against it weekly. Where the city allows the accessory unit to be permitted and inspected on its own track, that is the track we take. Where it cannot, we say so plainly at scope approval instead of discovering it in month seven and handing you the news.

A coastal development permit is required for most development inside the coastal zone. Where a local coastal program is certified, the local government reviews and issues the permit, and the California Coastal Commission retains appellate authority over specified categories of development that local governments approve. We check the parcel against the coastal zone boundary before design so the review path is known from the start.

Ocean air then governs the assemblies. Stainless and hot-dip galvanized fasteners, corrosion-resistant flashing and drip edges, back-primed siding, ventilated rainscreen on the weather elevations, and glazing detailed for wind-driven rain.

Where the parcel carries a fire hazard designation, exterior assemblies follow the wildland-urban interface provisions of the building code, which changes vents, eaves, decking, and cladding.

Our own crew handles interior and exterior painting under our Class C-33 classification, with prep and coating systems specified for salt air exposure.

CSLB #1113888 covers Class B general building and Class C-33 painting and decorating, held by license holder Sebastian Moreno Rivera. Build And Decor Construction is fully insured, carries a one-year workmanship warranty on every project, and has completed more than 400 projects across Los Angeles.

Clients rate our work 5.0 stars on average across 88 reviews. Ratings current as of August 2026.

We take a limited number of Palisades projects at a time so the same field team stays on your property from excavation through final inspection.

The on-site estimate is free. Call (949) 558-9738 or reach the office through buildanddecorconstruction.com to walk the lot, review the slope and the access, and put a scoped written figure on the work.

Build And Decor Construction, 8033 Sunset Blvd #336, Los Angeles, CA 90046.