Attached ADU design and construction in Roseville
An attached ADU shares one wall with your house and almost nothing else — its own entrance, its own kitchen, its own bath, a complete second home that happens to be joined to your first. We design and build them across Roseville, about 20 minutes northeast of our Sacramento base. Most of this page is the stuff we wish every homeowner knew before the first call: how the shared wall works, what the City of Roseville wants, why power runs through Roseville Electric, and where the real money goes.
Attached or detached on a Roseville lot
The first fork in any ADU conversation is attached versus detached, and on a Roseville lot the answer usually comes down to geometry. 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 Roseville parcels — older Old Roseville lots, narrower infill, Sun City lots with room on one flank only — 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. That's often the difference between a project that pencils and one that doesn't.
There's a structural trade in both directions. Detached buys total independence: no shared wall, no tie-in to your roof, no question of whether your existing footing can carry a new load. You pay for that with a second foundation and a second roof. Attached borrows your wall, your roofline, and frequently your utilities, which trims the budget — but it asks more of the house you already own. If the wall it joins is in rough shape, or the foundation needs a transition over Placer clay, some of that savings goes right back into making the connection sound.