Latest / ADU Adventures: Building in Your Backyard / How Pasadena’s Craftsman Legacy Shapes Smart ADU Design | ADU Adventures EP022

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How Pasadena’s Craftsman Legacy Shapes Smart ADU Design | ADU Adventures EP022 · ADU Adventures: Building in Your Backyard

• 0:32
  SPEAKER_00: Welcome back to ADU Adventures Building in Your Backyard.
• 0:36
  SPEAKER_00: I'm James, and I'm glad you're here.
• 0:38
  SPEAKER_00: And I mean that a little more than usual today because it's been a while.
• 0:42
  SPEAKER_00: If you've been wondering where the show went, there's an honest answer.
• 0:46
  SPEAKER_00: I got sick.
• 0:47
  SPEAKER_00: And for several weeks I lost my voice.
• 0:49
  SPEAKER_00: And not in a figurative sense either.
• 0:51
  SPEAKER_00: In the sense that a guy who hosts a podcast could not literally talk.
• 0:55
  SPEAKER_00: There's a lesson in there somewhere about not taking the simple things for granted, and I promise I've learned it.
• 1:00
  SPEAKER_00: But I'm back.
• 1:00
  SPEAKER_00: The voice is back.
• 1:02
  SPEAKER_00: And I've had a lot of quiet time to think about what this show should really be.
• 1:05
  SPEAKER_00: So here's where we're going.
• 1:06
  SPEAKER_00: We're going to keep digging deep into the stories of California cities.
• 1:10
  SPEAKER_00: Because I love it.
• 1:11
  SPEAKER_00: Not just the zoning codes, but the people who live there and how those places came to be, and what they care about, and of course, the approaches to ADUs that are actually helping homeowners reach their property goals.
• 1:23
  SPEAKER_00: Whether that's keeping family close, building something that lasts, or making a home work harder for the people in it.
• 1:31
  SPEAKER_00: That's the show.
• 1:32
  SPEAKER_00: That's always been the show.
• 1:33
  SPEAKER_00: I just appreciate it more now.
• 1:35
  SPEAKER_00: So let's get back to it.
• 1:36
  SPEAKER_00: Today we're heading to the Crown City, Pasadena, California.
• 1:40
  SPEAKER_00: Now if I say Pasadena, you probably see one of two things.
• 1:44
  SPEAKER_00: You see a float covered in roses, rolling down Colorado Boulevard on New Year's morning.
• 1:50
  SPEAKER_00: Or you see a bungalow, a low roof, deep eaves, a wide front porch, and wood that somebody clearly cared about.
• 1:57
  SPEAKER_00: Here's what I want to argue today.
• 2:00
  SPEAKER_00: Those two images are the same idea.
• 2:02
  SPEAKER_00: Pasadena is a city that figured out more than a century ago that a small house could be a complete house.
• 2:10
  SPEAKER_00: A beautiful house.
• 2:11
  SPEAKER_00: A house with dignity.
• 2:13
  SPEAKER_00: And it's a city that figured out that the way you get something beautiful is to plan for it patiently all year long.
• 2:19
  SPEAKER_00: That is the ADU story, and it just happens to be a hundred years early.
• 2:23
  SPEAKER_00: So here's the plan for the next half hour.
• 2:25
  SPEAKER_00: First, we'll walk through the history and how a colony of Midwesterners became the capital of the American craftsman home.
• 2:32
  SPEAKER_00: Second, we'll get practical, what Pasadena's rules actually say about building a backyard home, especially if you live in one of the historic neighborhoods, and what the city's doing right now to help.
• 2:43
  SPEAKER_00: Third, we'll talk about what it means to build something in Pasadena that belongs there.
• 2:47
  SPEAKER_00: And then, as always, the part that matters most to me, why any of this matters to your family at all.
• 2:54
  SPEAKER_00: So let's dive in.
• 2:55
  SPEAKER_00: Pasadena starts in a bad winter.
• 2:58
  SPEAKER_00: In 1873 and 1874, a group of families in Indiana had enough the cold, and according to the Bungalow Heaven Neighborhood Association's history of the city, they organized themselves as the San Gabriel Orange Grove Association, bought land at the edge of the Arroyo Secco, and started planting orange trees and grapes.
• 3:20
  SPEAKER_00: People called it the Indiana Colony.
• 3:22
  SPEAKER_00: In 1875, the settlers held a naming contest, and the Los Angeles almanac records that the stakeholders voted between three options, Indianola, Granada, and Pasadena, a word borrowed from the Chippewa language that loosely means of the valley, Pasadena won.
• 3:42
  SPEAKER_00: And the city was incorporated on June 19, 1886.
• 3:46
  SPEAKER_00: And then something happened that shaped everything that came after.
• 3:50
  SPEAKER_00: Word got out about the winters.
• 3:52
  SPEAKER_00: Not the Indiana kind, but the Pasadena kind.
• 3:55
  SPEAKER_00: Starting in the 1880s, the bungalow heaven, history tells us, health seekers and winter vacationers poured in from the East and Midwest, and grand resort hotels rose to meet them.
• 4:06
  SPEAKER_00: For a while, Pasadena was a place you visited, but then people stopped leaving.
• 4:10
  SPEAKER_00: They came to recuperate and they stayed to raise families.
• 4:13
  SPEAKER_00: The city pushed out of its original downtown and into the orchards of the north and east, and it needed homes, not mansions, but homes.
• 4:21
  SPEAKER_00: This is where two brothers from Ohio come in, Charles and Henry Green.
• 4:25
  SPEAKER_00: They arrived in Pasadena in 1893 to visit their parents, who had moved here for Mrs.
• 4:31
  SPEAKER_00: Green's health.
• 4:32
  SPEAKER_00: The Gamble House's own history notes that between opening their office in 1894 and 1907, Green and Green designed dozens of homes in Pasadena.
• 4:43
  SPEAKER_00: They'd been trained in woodworking and metalworking before they ever studied architecture, and it shows.
• 4:48
  SPEAKER_00: Their houses were built like furniture.
• 4:50
  SPEAKER_00: And then in 1907, a retired executive named David Gamble of the Proctor and Gamble family in Cincinnati decided to stop wintering in Pasadena's hotels and build a permanent home here.
• 5:03
  SPEAKER_00: Now here's the detail I love.
• 5:04
  SPEAKER_00: According to the Gamble House History, he and his wife, Mary, passed up the fashionable address South Orange Grove, which everybody called Millionaire's Row.
• 5:14
  SPEAKER_00: Instead, they bought a lot on a short private street called Westmoreland Place, overlooking the Arroyo.
• 5:20
  SPEAKER_00: The Greens finished the drawings in February 1908.
• 5:23
  SPEAKER_00: Ground was broken in March, and ten months later the house was done.
• 5:26
  SPEAKER_00: Think about that for a second.
• 5:27
  SPEAKER_00: One of the most celebrated homes in American architecture, and it went from drawings to move-in in under a year.
• 5:34
  SPEAKER_00: Not because anybody rushed, but because everybody planned.
• 5:37
  SPEAKER_00: But the Gamble House is the exception.
• 5:39
  SPEAKER_00: It's the masterpiece.
• 5:40
  SPEAKER_00: The real story of Pasadena is what happened on the ordinary streets.
• 5:45
  SPEAKER_00: Northeast of downtown, where the land starts tilting up towards the San Gabriel Mountains, there's a neighborhood called Bungalow Heaven.
• 5:52
  SPEAKER_00: The land was annexed to the city in 1906, and according to the Neighborhood Association, the first big wave of home building ran from 1906 to 1918, right at the peak of the arts and crafts movement.
• 6:06
  SPEAKER_00: These were homes for people in the trades, in business, in the professions.
• 6:10
  SPEAKER_00: The typical bungalow, as the association describes it, is a story and a half, open floor plan, wide verandas, a sloping roof, and built-ins everywhere.
• 6:20
  SPEAKER_00: Cabinets, shelves, benches by the fireplace.
• 6:23
  SPEAKER_00: And the association puts it beautifully.
• 6:25
  SPEAKER_00: The gamble house is Pasadena's most famous example of arts and crafts architecture.
• 6:31
  SPEAKER_00: But the homes in Bungalow Heaven show how ordinary families of the period actually lived.
• 6:36
  SPEAKER_00: Ordinary families.
• 6:38
  SPEAKER_00: Small houses, but complete lives.
• 6:40
  SPEAKER_00: And that's the Pasadena idea.
• 6:42
  SPEAKER_00: And here's the part of the story that gets me every time.
• 6:45
  SPEAKER_00: In the 1960s, that neighborhood was old but not considered historic.
• 6:49
  SPEAKER_00: Absentee landlords, neglect.
• 6:52
  SPEAKER_00: By the 1980s, residents began to recognize what they had.
• 6:55
  SPEAKER_00: A handful of neighborhoods pulled the block, then they walked.
• 6:58
  SPEAKER_00: According to the association's own account, neighbors knocked on the doors of 962 lots over and over until 1989.
• 7:06
  SPEAKER_00: They had signatures from 55% of the property owners, and in October of that year, Pasadena made Bungalow Heaven its very first landmark district.
• 7:16
  SPEAKER_00: In 2008, the neighborhood was added to the National Registry of Historic Places.
• 7:20
  SPEAKER_00: In 2009, the American Planning Association named it one of the 10 great places in America.
• 7:27
  SPEAKER_00: And the APA's own write-up makes a point of praising the collaboration between residents and the city of Pasadena to protect the neighborhood's character.
• 7:37
  SPEAKER_00: Nobody protected those bungalows because they were big.
• 7:40
  SPEAKER_00: They protected them because they were just right.
• 7:43
  SPEAKER_00: Keep that in your pocket.
• 7:44
  SPEAKER_00: We're going to come back to it.
• 7:45
  SPEAKER_00: But first, let's get practical.
• 7:47
  SPEAKER_00: If you own a home in Pasadena and you're thinking about an ADU, the first question I'd ask you is this.
• 7:53
  SPEAKER_00: Are you in a historic district?
• 7:55
  SPEAKER_00: Because Pasadena has more of them than you might expect.
• 7:58
  SPEAKER_00: And the rules are different here.
• 8:00
  SPEAKER_00: Not harder necessarily, just different.
• 8:02
  SPEAKER_00: Here's what the Pasadena's own ADU page says.
• 8:06
  SPEAKER_00: ADUs are permitted in historic districts.
• 8:08
  SPEAKER_00: A newly constructed attached or detached ADU is permitted in the historic district if it is not visible from the public right of way.
• 8:17
  SPEAKER_00: Translation?
• 8:18
  SPEAKER_00: The city wants your backyard home in the backyard, behind the bungalow, not beside it, not peeking over the porch roof from the sidewalk.
• 8:26
  SPEAKER_00: For most lots, that's a design question, not really a barrier.
• 8:30
  SPEAKER_00: A detached ADU tucked behind a main house below the sight line of the street is exactly what most families want anyway.
• 8:36
  SPEAKER_00: So it's not that big of a deal.
• 8:38
  SPEAKER_00: And here's a benefit that comes with being in a historic district.
• 8:42
  SPEAKER_00: The city's parking rules say an ADU normally needs one parking space.
• 8:46
  SPEAKER_00: But no parking space is required if the property is within a historic district, including landmark districts.
• 8:52
  SPEAKER_00: Same exemption if you're within half a mile walking distance to public transit, or if the ADU is a conversion of existing space.
• 9:01
  SPEAKER_00: For a lot of Pasadena homeowners, parking isn't the obstacle it used to be, especially if there's family living in the ADU, which is true in most cases.
• 9:09
  SPEAKER_00: Now setbacks.
• 9:11
  SPEAKER_00: The city's standard plan guidance lays out the general rules, four foot side and rear setbacks for the ADU, and five feet to the property line for any wall with a window or a door.
• 9:22
  SPEAKER_00: There are extra limits in the hillside areas, but those need to be addressed carefully.
• 9:27
  SPEAKER_00: If you want to know how the rules land on your specific lot, Pasadena offers something I wish every city offered, a free virtual consultation with city planning staff.
• 9:37
  SPEAKER_00: Before you submit a single drawing, you book a meeting, you get preliminary feedback on zoning.
• 9:43
  SPEAKER_00: That's the city telling you it would rather help than make you guess.
• 9:46
  SPEAKER_00: And as far as the fees go, Pasadena's ADU page spells out reduced fees for ADUs on single family lots.
• 9:53
  SPEAKER_00: An ADU of 900 square feet or smaller is exempt from the city's residential impact fees, and certain permit fees are reduced by 25%.
• 10:02
  SPEAKER_00: If you sign one of the city's optional housing agreements, committing the unit for seven years to a family member or to a tenant in the city's rental assistance program, the plan check fees drop by 50%, and the unit is exempt from several more fees.
• 10:19
  SPEAKER_00: I want to be honest with you, those agreements come with real commitments, and they have to be executed before the permit is issued.
• 10:27
  SPEAKER_00: So read them carefully.
• 10:28
  SPEAKER_00: But for a family building an ADU for a parent or an adult child, a family member agreement may line up exactly with what you are already planning to do, and you get all of those benefits.
• 10:40
  SPEAKER_00: That's something to pay attention to during the feasibility of a project.
• 10:43
  SPEAKER_00: I also want to be straight with you about something that's changed recently.
• 10:47
  SPEAKER_00: Pasadena had a standard plans program, a set of pre-reviewed ADU designs.
• 10:53
  SPEAKER_00: According to the city's program page, those plans expired on December 31st, 2025, because the California Building Code updated on January 1st, 2026.
• 11:04
  SPEAKER_00: As of August 2026, the city has posted one new plan that meets the current code, a 374 square foot studio, and it says more will follow.
• 11:14
  SPEAKER_00: The older plans remain available only for residential properties that were red tagged in the Eaton Fire, though.
• 11:22
  SPEAKER_00: So if you're looking for a lot of variety from the standard plans program, you may not find it.
• 11:27
  SPEAKER_00: But that isn't to say more aren't coming, or ADU companies with their own libraries of plans wouldn't be able to help.
• 11:34
  SPEAKER_00: I don't want to pause here for one second because I'm not going to breeze past this.
• 11:38
  SPEAKER_00: The Eaton Fire touched this community deeply.
• 11:41
  SPEAKER_00: If you're listening and you're one of the families that's currently rebuilding, I hope you know that the whole San Gabriel Valley is rooting for you.
• 11:48
  SPEAKER_00: And the city has carved out a path specifically for you, a path that matters, and there are a lot of people trying to help.
• 11:55
  SPEAKER_00: That said, there is one more program, and this one surprised me.
• 12:00
  SPEAKER_00: The Pasadena Housing Department runs what it calls the second unit ADU program.
• 12:05
  SPEAKER_00: According to the city's page, which says the application window is open right now, it offers a construction loan up to$250,000 at 1% simple interest with no payments for three years, and a city assigned construction manager who oversees design, permitting, and construction.
• 12:25
  SPEAKER_00: The condition is that you rent the unit to a housing choice voucher tenant, which is very specific.
• 12:31
  SPEAKER_00: Spaces are limited and applications are reviewed on a rolling basis.
• 12:35
  SPEAKER_00: It won't be the right fit for every family, that's for sure.
• 12:37
  SPEAKER_00: So if you're building for your mom or another family member, it probably isn't going to work for you.
• 12:42
  SPEAKER_00: But if you're thinking about an ADU as a rental and the financing has been the wall, that is a wall the city is actively trying to take down, and there may be an opportunity for you.
• 12:51
  SPEAKER_00: Now, I promised you the roses, so I'm going to give you some roses.
• 12:55
  SPEAKER_00: Here's why I think the tournament of roses belongs in this episode about building.
• 12:59
  SPEAKER_00: I know it doesn't seem obvious, but hear me out.
• 13:02
  SPEAKER_00: According to the tournament's own history, the parade began in the winter of 1890 as a promotional stunt by the Valley Hunt Club, a way to show East Coast friends that flowers bloom here in January.
• 13:14
  SPEAKER_00: And by 1895, it had outgrown the club and the Tournament of Roses Association took over.
• 13:20
  SPEAKER_00: Today, the association says 935 volunteer members contribute more than 80,000 hours of work every year, spread across 31 communities.
• 13:31
  SPEAKER_00: The floats, most of them, take nearly a year to build.
• 13:35
  SPEAKER_00: One morning, one year of planning.
• 13:37
  SPEAKER_00: That is the culture of this city.
• 13:39
  SPEAKER_00: Pasadena does not improvise beautiful things.
• 13:42
  SPEAKER_00: It schedules them, it assigns a committee, it builds all year for the moment you actually see it.
• 13:49
  SPEAKER_00: If you're a Pasadena homeowner, you already live inside that culture.
• 13:52
  SPEAKER_00: The question is whether you bring it to your own backyard.
• 13:56
  SPEAKER_00: Now let me tell you a little bit about who lives in Pasadena right now because it explains a lot.
• 14:00
  SPEAKER_00: According to the U.S.
• 14:01
  SPEAKER_00: Census Bureau's Quick Facts, about 135,000 people live in the city as of mid-2025.
• 14:08
  SPEAKER_00: 17.4% of them are 65 or older.
• 14:11
  SPEAKER_00: 56.1% of the adults have a bachelor's degree or higher.
• 14:16
  SPEAKER_00: The median value of an owner-occupied home is about$1.1 million.
• 14:20
  SPEAKER_00: And here's the number I find most telling.
• 14:23
  SPEAKER_00: 87.8% of the residents were living in the same house a year ago.
• 14:27
  SPEAKER_00: People don't pass through Pasadena.
• 14:29
  SPEAKER_00: They stay there.
• 14:30
  SPEAKER_00: Which means the ADU conversation here is rarely about flipping or maximizing.
• 14:34
  SPEAKER_00: It's about keeping a parent close as they get older, keeping a grown kid in a city where a starter home is, by the census numbers, out of reach for most young households.
• 14:45
  SPEAKER_00: Keeping a property in the family instead of selling it to pay for care.
• 14:49
  SPEAKER_00: That's what we call family integrity planning.
• 14:52
  SPEAKER_00: The idea that a home should hold the people you love across generations, not push them apart as life gets more expensive.
• 15:00
  SPEAKER_00: And in Pasadena, there's a second question layered on top of that one.
• 15:04
  SPEAKER_00: Not just can I build one, but will it belong?
• 15:07
  SPEAKER_00: Because you don't put a beige box behind a 1912 bungalow.
• 15:11
  SPEAKER_00: You just don't.
• 15:12
  SPEAKER_00: The neighbors who walked 962 lots to protect those houses didn't do it so somebody could park a shed with a kitchen behind one.
• 15:20
  SPEAKER_00: And frankly, you shouldn't want to.
• 15:23
  SPEAKER_00: You're going to look at this building every single day for the rest of your life.
• 15:26
  SPEAKER_00: Your mother is going to live in it.
• 15:28
  SPEAKER_00: Your kid is going to live in it, and maybe bring their very first baby home to it.
• 15:32
  SPEAKER_00: So let's talk about the three ways people actually build in Pasadena.
• 15:37
  SPEAKER_00: The first is the beige box, a generic structure, built to a price with no relationship to the house in front of it at all.
• 15:44
  SPEAKER_00: It's fast, it's maybe cheaper.
• 15:47
  SPEAKER_00: And in a city like this one, it's often a mistake you'll feel every time you walk out of your door.
• 15:53
  SPEAKER_00: Not to mention its impact on the long-term investment of your property as a whole.
• 15:57
  SPEAKER_00: After all, property valuations are always growing in Pasadena.
• 16:00
  SPEAKER_00: The second is prefab.
• 16:02
  SPEAKER_00: These are like a beige box, but they're factory built, tucked in, craned over the fence.
• 16:07
  SPEAKER_00: There are good prefab products out there for sure.
• 16:09
  SPEAKER_00: There I won't pretend otherwise, but a factory can't see your lot.
• 16:14
  SPEAKER_00: It doesn't know your main house has a hipped roof and exposed rafter tails.
• 16:20
  SPEAKER_00: It doesn't know where the oak tree is or where you want to place that window to see it.
• 16:24
  SPEAKER_00: And in a historic district, where the city is going to care about what's visible from the street, doesn't know your lot is a big problem.
• 16:30
  SPEAKER_00: The third is design build.
• 16:32
  SPEAKER_00: One team from the first site visit through the last inspection.
• 16:36
  SPEAKER_00: The people who draw it are the people who build it.
• 16:38
  SPEAKER_00: So nothing gets lost in the handoff.
• 16:41
  SPEAKER_00: And when the city asks why the ADU has a four and twelve roof pitch and cedar shingles, there's a person who can answer, because that person chose them on purpose to match your home.
• 16:51
  SPEAKER_00: And here's the thing I want you to take away from this whole episode because Pasadena proves it.
• 16:56
  SPEAKER_00: Quality is where the investment succeeds.
• 16:59
  SPEAKER_00: Not size, not speed, not the lowest bid, the quality of the house.
• 17:04
  SPEAKER_00: Look at the evidence this city hands you.
• 17:06
  SPEAKER_00: The gamble house is 118 years old and people pay to walk through it.
• 17:11
  SPEAKER_00: The bungalows in Bungalow Heaven were built for tradesmen and shopkeepers over a century ago.
• 17:16
  SPEAKER_00: And today they sit in a neighborhood the American Planning Association calls one of the greatest places in America.
• 17:23
  SPEAKER_00: In a city where the median owner-occupied home, per the census, is worth over a million dollars.
• 17:28
  SPEAKER_00: The cheap buildings from those same decades, well, they're gone, torn down, because nobody fought to save them.
• 17:34
  SPEAKER_00: What held its value was what was built right.
• 17:38
  SPEAKER_00: And ADU is the same bet.
• 17:40
  SPEAKER_00: You're putting real money into your property.
• 17:42
  SPEAKER_00: The question is whether you're buying something that will be worth protecting in 30 years, or something your kids will want to tear down.
• 17:50
  SPEAKER_00: A box depreciates, but a home appreciates.
• 17:54
  SPEAKER_00: It's not a slogan, it's just what Pasadena homeowners have been doing for years.
• 17:58
  SPEAKER_00: And that's the promise Act and ADU has been making for more than 35 years.
• 18:02
  SPEAKER_00: And it's a simple one.
• 18:03
  SPEAKER_00: Build it once, build it right, one design build team from the first site inspection to the last site inspection.
• 18:10
  SPEAKER_00: So there's no handoff where quality gets lost, no middleman marking up the gap.
• 18:15
  SPEAKER_00: We built our build ready library, more than a hundred pre-designed ADUs with designer-curated interiors and exterior packages, so a family in a neighborhood like Bungalow Heaven doesn't have to choose between a blank box and a beautiful one.
• 18:31
  SPEAKER_00: You start from a plan that already works.
• 18:34
  SPEAKER_00: Then you make it yours, and we make it Pasadena's.
• 18:37
  SPEAKER_00: 35 years of homes that families are still living in.
• 18:41
  SPEAKER_00: That's a track record.
• 18:42
  SPEAKER_00: Not because we're the fastest, because the thing we build is the thing that lasts.
• 18:46
  SPEAKER_00: The Greens understood this in 1908.
• 18:49
  SPEAKER_00: The bungalow heaven neighborhoods understood it in 1989.
• 18:53
  SPEAKER_00: A home never has to be large to be whole, but it does have to be made with care, because care is the part that holds the value.
• 19:00
  SPEAKER_00: Now, I want to go back to the Gamble House for a minute because there is a moment in its history that I can't stop thinking about ever since I read it.
• 19:08
  SPEAKER_00: After David and Mary Gamble passed away in 1923 and 1929, respectively, the house stayed in the family.
• 19:16
  SPEAKER_00: Their son Cecil and his wife Louise moved in after 1944.
• 19:21
  SPEAKER_00: And according to the Gamble's house own account, they briefly considered selling it.
• 19:25
  SPEAKER_00: Prospective buyers came through, and some of them talked about what they'd do with the place.
• 19:29
  SPEAKER_00: They talked about painting the interior woodwick white, the teak, the mahogany, and the gambles changed their minds.
• 19:35
  SPEAKER_00: They kept the house for another 20 years.
• 19:38
  SPEAKER_00: And in 1966, instead of selling it to anyone, they deeded it to the city of Pasadena in a joint agreement with the University of Southern California so that it could never be painted over.
• 19:50
  SPEAKER_00: I think about that now.
• 19:51
  SPEAKER_00: Not because most of us live in a landmark.
• 19:53
  SPEAKER_00: We don't, but because the instinct is the same.
• 19:56
  SPEAKER_00: You build something right and then you protect it.
• 19:58
  SPEAKER_00: You don't let it get painted white by someone who doesn't understand what it is in the first place.
• 20:04
  SPEAKER_00: That's what family integrity planning actually is.
• 20:06
  SPEAKER_00: Underneath the name, it's deciding the place your family lives is worth protecting.
• 20:11
  SPEAKER_00: And then doing the unglamorous, year-long committee meeting work of protecting it.
• 20:16
  SPEAKER_00: Planning the ADU before your dad needs it, not after.
• 20:20
  SPEAKER_00: Choosing the roof pitch that matches, even though nobody from the city would have stopped you from doing otherwise.
• 20:26
  SPEAKER_00: Building so your grandkids inherit something they'd never dream of painting over.
• 20:31
  SPEAKER_00: Pasadena figured this out a long time ago.
• 20:33
  SPEAKER_00: Small houses, but complete lives.
• 20:35
  SPEAKER_00: Planned all year for one beautiful morning.
• 20:38
  SPEAKER_00: Your backyard can do that too.
• 20:40
  SPEAKER_00: Thank you for spending time with me today.
• 20:41
  SPEAKER_00: Thank you for caring about your home enough to listen to a whole episode about roof pitches and setbacks and the history of a wonderful city.
• 20:49
  SPEAKER_00: Thank you for being a part of the conversation.
• 20:51
  SPEAKER_00: If you're in Pasadena or anywhere near the San Gabriel Valley or across LA County and you've been turning an ADU over in your mind, I'd love for you to take that first step.
• 21:01
  SPEAKER_00: Acton ADU has been designing and building for more than 35 years.
• 21:05
  SPEAKER_00: And the promise has never changed.
• 21:07
  SPEAKER_00: Build it once, build it right.
• 21:09
  SPEAKER_00: So what you invest in today is still worth protecting a generation from now.
• 21:13
  SPEAKER_00: We're a design-build company that specializes in ADUs, serving families across LA County and the Bay Area and throughout California.
• 21:21
  SPEAKER_00: No middlemen, no surprises, just one team from the first conversation to the day you hand over the keys to mom.
• 21:28
  SPEAKER_00: So visit actinadu.com or give us a call at 408-539-1908 anywhere in California, and we can set you up with a free consultation.
• 21:38
  SPEAKER_00: We'll look at your lot, talk about your family, and tell you honestly what's possible, including whether a Pasadena program like the second unit loan or a family member agreement might fit for what you're trying to do or not.
• 21:50
  SPEAKER_00: Pasadena taught the country that a small home can be a whole home.
• 21:54
  SPEAKER_00: So let's build yours right.
• 21:56
  SPEAKER_00: I'm James, and this has been ADU Adventures Building in Your Backyard.
• 22:00
  SPEAKER_00: I'll see you next time.