ADU Surveys in Pleasant Hill, CA

Pleasant Hill keeps its published ADU requirements lean — a site plan drawn to scale showing the proposed unit in relation to property lines and other structures — but one detail in the city's handout changes the geometry: setbacks are measured from the furthest projection of the structure, an eave, to the property line. A wall placed exactly 4 feet off the line with a standard 16-inch eave is not a 4-foot setback in Pleasant Hill's math; the eave line is what has to clear. That makes the accuracy of the property line worth more here, not less, because the working margin is smaller than the wall dimension suggests. The city sorts ADUs into Class 1 (conversions and detached units up to 800 square feet) and Class 2 (attached units and larger detached units, which need an ADU Permit, design matching the primary dwelling, and compliance with floor-area and lot-coverage limits) — and those coverage calculations depend on real lot dimensions too.

Pleasant Hill's housing stock is classic mid-century Contra Costa: ranch homes on comfortable lots in Gregory Gardens, Poets Corner, and Sherwood, with fences of varying vintage standing in for lines that were monumented seventy years ago. Some of those monuments survive; finding them is what turns a site plan from an approximation into a document. The city offers three free building-permit-ready ADU plan sets, which still need to be sited on your lot with legal setbacks and utility connections resolved. Our laser-scanned site survey establishes the boundary, stakes the corners, and captures structures, hardscape, trees, and the grades that matter for drainage — delivered as a stamped base map and layered DWG your designer or the free plan set drops directly onto.

Records run through the Contra Costa County Recorder in Martinez. For sloped parcels along the Ridgeview and Grayson Woods edges, our Pleasant Hill topographic surveys extend the same visit into contours and drainage mapping.