If you are in the beginning stages of a home improvement project and you want to find out whether or not your City/County building department will allow you to do “whatever it is you intend to do”, then finding the zoning information for your property is one of the first things you need to do. Of course, you could just install that 6 foot solid fence out at the sidewalk and hope that you’re not getting City letters telling you to take it down shortly after completion, but that’s your choice. For everyone else though who wants to avoid wasting […]
Read more →We’ve been getting a lot of requests for guest suites (or otherwise known as granny flats) this year. How much are they? How big can they be? Can I have a kitchen? Can I rent them? First and foremost, it seems like most people have this notion that when they plan to build one of these that they have to be secretive or sneaky about it. Almost as if they were doing something wrong, or illegal. Not to get too far ahead, because in some locations they actually are not allowed. But determining whether or not a guest suite/granny flat […]
Read more →
Before ER Home Designs, I spent almost 10 years designing exclusively for one of San Diego’s oldest Design-Build firms. In that time, I can’t tell you the number of times a homeowner walked into my office with a freshly permitted set of plans. It was often a very similar story. The homeowner had spent the better part of $10K (often more than that) on their architect and were now looking to bid their plans out to potential contractors. Without immediately assuming that this homeowner would be disappointed like the last, I’d almost always start out asking, “What was the budget […]
Read more →
