Turn the garage into a rentable
Davis ADU.

Your garage is already a building. It has footings, walls, a roof, and a slab someone poured decades ago that's just holding a couple of bikes and a kayak. A conversion borrows all of that, which is why it lands under a ground-up unit nearly every time. Davis is a UC Davis town — flat, bike-everything, and stuffed with students and faculty who need somewhere to live — so a converted garage rents fast and steady here in a way it doesn't in a sleepier suburb. The lots around Central Davis and West Davis run modest but the attached garages convert clean. The catch a garage always hands you: you inherit whatever the original builder poured, and in Davis that slab is sitting on clay that moves.

A garage turns livable through a short list of moves, and the loud one is the door opening. That wide hole gets framed into a real wall — usually a window or two plus the unit's new entry door, which is where most of the curb appeal comes from. Then the parts you can't see: insulation packed into walls and a roof never built to hold heat, a code-sized egress window in every sleeping room, and ceiling height. Davis layers its own green-building reach codes on top of CALGreen, leaning all-electric and solar-ready, so the insulation and equipment specs run stricter than the state baseline. Some older detached garages in Old North and Old East Davis were built low, right at the 7-foot edge — too low and we re-roof to win the inches. Skip one step and the inspector sends you home.