A freestanding backyard unit,
built for a Carmichael lot.

Here's what trips up a lot of Carmichael homeowners: there is no City of Carmichael. It's unincorporated Sacramento County, so your detached ADU permit goes through the County — the same office that reviews Fair Oaks and Orangevale, handling building, planning, and grading under one roof. State law made ADU review ministerial, which is the leverage we lean on. No design board, no neighbor hearing. We submit the whole package in one pass: site plan, floor plan, elevations, structural, Title-24, MEP, plus any tree-preservation or grading sheets your lot triggers. A clean detached set has been coming back in roughly 5-7 weeks lately. Send a thin one and the County hands you correction cycles you could have skipped.

Three things decide where a detached unit actually lands here, and the first is the trees. Carmichael is a mature, leafy mid-century area — old oaks and elms everywhere — and the big ones trigger County tree-preservation review. You can't trench foundations or utilities inside a protected root zone without a sign-off. The second thing is the gift: these lots are generous. Quarter-acre and half-acre-plus parcels are common, some equestrian, so there's real room to site a unit cleanly. The third is septic. Some of the larger river-adjacent lots toward the American River still run septic, and adding an ADU bedroom adds load — the County inspector has to confirm the system can carry it. We sort all three on the site visit.