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Case study · JADU garage conversion · Newark, California

15 corrections, found and closed before the set was submitted.

A 15-sheet permit set for a junior ADU built inside an attached garage. Every item below was caught by an internal plan-check review, on our own drawings, before a city ever saw them.

15sheets reviewed
15corrections found and closed
99review score out of 100
0critical items left open

The project

An attached garage, converted to a junior ADU.

The most common ADU project in the Bay Area, and the one with the most structural traps in it. The garage door opening has to be infilled, the conversion has to be legalised against a code the original garage was never built to, and the lateral system has to work around an opening that used to be most of one wall.

The set went through the firm's own plan-check review before submission, rulebook version 1.1. That review is run by a different pass than the one that drew the sheets, deliberately, because nobody catches their own coordination errors.

What the review found

Five of the 15, and what closed each one.

These are verbatim from the firm's correction record. Each is stored against the city and the project type, so the next garage conversion in this city starts with the answer already in the set rather than rediscovering it.

CO-01 SP-1 listed an (E) gas meter while the rest of the set was all-electric
Closed byRelabel to NO GAS SERVICE - ALL-ELECTRIC after confirming no meter
CO-03 JADU area stated as 403 / 310 / 250 SF across CS-1, A-2 and the drawing
Closed byFix one total (403 SF) + one main-room area (310 SF) used everywhere
CO-05 E-1 printed 126 A demand while the calc package governed at 152 A
Closed byPrint the governing 152 A everywhere; state service-size confirmation caveat
CD-03 No JADU deed-restriction / owner-occupancy note on the cover
Closed byAdded standard deed-restriction + owner-occupancy note to CS-1 (now a rulebook require_present + candidate master note)
CD-01 none of the expected items present (R303, NATURAL LIGHT, GLAZING AREA, ARTIFICIAL LIGHT...)
Closed byAdd a CRC R303 light & ventilation note to A-2.

What was still open when the review closed

Unresolved placeholders remain (medium severity). 19 unresolved placeholders remain (A-2:5, P-1:4, S-2:3, A-4:2, S-1:2, A-1:1, A-3:1, S-3:1). Placeholders are legitimate while a set is in progress. They are not legitimate at submittal, so this one stayed on the list until it was resolved rather than being quietly marked done.

We publish the open item as well as the closed ones. A case study with nothing outstanding is a brochure.

The outcome

Zero critical and zero high-severity items at close.

Final review state: Ready for PE review. Score 99 out of 100, with 0 critical, 0 high and 1 medium item outstanding. 4 of the fixes were promoted into the firm's master template, which means they cannot recur on a future project by accident. That is the part that compounds.

What none of this proves is how a city would have reacted, because these items never reached one. That is the point of doing it at this stage, and it is also the honest limit of what a pre-submittal review can claim.

Two minutes, free

Where would your set land?

The same review, as a twelve-question self-assessment. No email required to see your score.

Run the plan-check X-ray