Attached ADU design and construction in Rocklin
An attached ADU shares one wall with your house and almost nothing else — its own entrance, kitchen and bath, a complete second home that happens to be joined to your first. We design and build them across Rocklin, about 25 minutes northeast of our Sacramento base. Most of this page is what we wish every homeowner knew before the first call: how the shared wall works, what the City of Rocklin wants, why the granite changes the math, and where the money goes.
Attached or detached on a Rocklin lot
The first fork in any ADU conversation is attached versus detached, and on a Rocklin lot the answer often comes down to geometry and what's under the dirt. An attached ADU grows off your house, sharing one wall. A detached unit stands alone in the backyard. People assume detached is the default, but plenty of Rocklin parcels lack the clear space a freestanding cottage needs on every side to clear setbacks. Hang the unit off the house and you only clear the setback on the outer sides. On a tight downtown lot near Front Street, that's the difference between a project that pencils and one that doesn't.
Then there's the rock. A detached unit means a fresh pad and footings cut into Rocklin's shallow granite — more excavation, more chance of hitting bedrock that needs breaking. An attached unit founds along the existing house, where the original footing already proved the ground out, so you're often excavating less rock. That's a Rocklin reason attached can win that you won't hear in a city built on softer ground.