Home Additions in Los Angeles

Homeowners often come to us set on an addition and leave the first conversation planning an ADU, or the other way round. It is worth a few minutes before drawings begin, because the two solve different problems.

An addition is right when the new space has to connect to the rest of the house. A third bedroom that opens onto the same hallway. A kitchen that finally fits the family at one table. A primary suite that does not involve walking through another room. Nobody wants that in a separate building at the end of the garden.

An ADU is right when separation is the point: a parent or an adult child who needs their own front door, a home office that is genuinely out of the house, or a unit that can be let. On some lots an ADU is also simply the more straightforward build.

We are happy to build either. What we would rather not do is build the wrong one well.

Adding to a house means opening it up. The new structure needs its own foundation, framing and roof, tied into what is already there, and the existing house has to be cut into so the two become one space rather than a room bolted on the side.

That connection is where the craft is, and it is where cheap additions announce themselves: a ceiling line that does not carry through, a floor that steps for no reason, a roof junction that leaks in the second winter. Getting it right involves work you will never see once the drywall is up.

Additions are also where existing conditions surface. Older LA houses turn up undersized electrical panels, plumbing that is at the end of its life, and framing that was never as square as the drawings suggested. We would rather tell you about that at the survey than in month three.

A home addition is permitted construction and goes through plan check. Structural changes, electrical, plumbing and often energy compliance all form part of the submission.

We handle plans and permitting alongside the build. What that buys you in practice is that the people who drew it are the people who have to build it, so the set tends to be buildable rather than merely approvable.

The projects below are real, and they are the honest measure of what this looks like finished: a garage addition that added two bedrooms and two bathrooms to a house along with a new roof and carport, a full remodel with an addition where an interior wall came out to connect old and new, and a major addition built alongside a two-story ADU on the same property.