levi | Fleschner Construction

Whole House Remodel

levi — Sat, 06 Sep 2025 19:38:29 +0000

Whole House Remodel

by levi | Sep 6, 2025

What you need to know before building an ADU

levi — Tue, 20 Jun 2017 15:07:53 +0000

Thinking about building and accessory dwelling unit (ADU) or having one built? Here are a few things you should know before building an ADU.

Over the last few years, accessory dwelling units (ADUs) have made a significant comeback. ADUs were once a common addition to houses and various types of properties, but they became less common in the later part of the 20th century. For a variety of reasons they have made a comeback, however, and if you are considering one for your house, we have a few recommendations for things you should know before building an ADU.

ADUs – also known as secondary suites, granny flats, in-law units, laneway houses, secondary dwelling units, and by many other names – are defined as a “room or set of rooms in a single-family home in a single-family zone that has been designed or configured to be used as a separate dwelling unit and has been established by permit.” They are a self-contained building or structure in an owner-occupied single-family lot that is either attached to the principal building or on the property, built on a foundation. It cannot be sold as a separate unit, although they can be rented out.

There are countless reasons why a property owner might choose to build (or more likely hire a contractor to build) an ADU. To begin with, an ADU is a great way to expand your livable property without having to do a major remodeling of the entire structure of the existing home. While building an ADU can be a complicated process, it’s significantly easier than tearing down a wall or a portion of an existing structure.

ADUs can serve nearly endless functions, just depending on the needs of the home owner. It can be something as simple as a storage structure, or as complex as a second livable unit complete with a functioning bathroom and kitchen. It can be attached to something like a garage, or be a standalone unit.

Before you consider an ADU, you should double check the zoning laws for your county. Depending on where you live, you will almost certainly need a building permit before you begin. Other permits may also be required based on the purpose of the ADU; you may need electrical, plumbing, and mechanical permits, for instance.

If you are planning on building the ADU yourself, your first step should be to check with your local regulatory body to see what permits you need and what steps it requires. This can be a demanding and complicated process, and missing any steps along the way can lead to fines and countless other headaches. For this portion, even if you are set on building the ADU yourself, you may want to speak to a local contractor like Fleschner Construction.

Before you work on the permits, however, you’ll need to design your ADU. This is an intricate process and should be undertaken by a professional with architectural or design experience. You’ll need plans, which means you should talk to someone that knows exactly what they are doing. A single miscalculation, even one that isn’t immediately apparent, can cause serious problems.

Building an ADU is a job for a professional, and navigating the red tape can be nearly as difficult. The results, however, can be more than worth it.

How technology is changing real estate sales

levi — Tue, 20 Jun 2017 13:41:04 +0000

With the rise of tools like virtual and augmented reality, technology is changing real estate in several ways, and it’s just getting started.

While the construction industry continues to grow and evolve all the time, for the most part, real estate sales have remained mostly static. There have been a few advancements in how houses are sold, but for the most part, it’s a relatively straightforward job – not easy by any stretch, but straightforward. Agents show the house to prospective buyers, answer questions, then the rest is up to the potential homeowners.

Again, not an easy job, but one that has remained mostly the same for the last few decades at least. Technology is beginning to upend that.

While the personal touch is still important and having an agent to handling things like closing the deal is vital, several real estate agencies are turning to virtual reality to help them sell houses. Users can log onto the real estate company’s website and take a virtual tour of a house that’s for sale. Most potential buyers will likely still want to view the house in person before shelling out hundreds of thousands of dollars, but it’s potentially a huge advantage for buyers to be able to simply sit on their couch, throw on a VR headset, and get a sense of the layout and look of several houses at once. Given that it’s just a VR video it doesn’t even require much computing power. You can typically load a real estate VR gallery on your phone and tour a house using VR gear like Samsung’s Gear VR, or even Google Cardboard, which means you won’t have to shell out hundreds for a high-tech VR headset – in theory, almost anyone can make use of this tech right now.

It’s a far better experience than simply looking at pictures or watching a video online. Some apartments already offer this to prospective tenants as well.

At the moment this use of VR is mostly limited to the more expensive houses and rental properties, partly because the cameras needed to capture the 360 VR video are themselves expensive, so a real estate agency probably won’t buy one or more on a whim. In the future, however, as the technology becomes more cost effective, this type of VR experience might become more common.

The real estate industry may not change fundamentally, but it does have a few new tools at its disposal.

The next big design tool for the home and office: virtual reality

levi — Tue, 20 Jun 2017 13:31:55 +0000

Several stores are turning to technology to help artists and customers create their remodels homes using a new design tool: virtual reality.

The mainstream acceptance of virtual reality in one form or another is more or less a given at this point. The technology still has some hurdles to overcome, but there is no denying its potential. At the moment the entertainment industry is leading the way in VR development, but more and more companies are finding ways to make use of the technology, especially design.

Using VR, developers and designers can recreate and customize real locations in a virtual setting. Companies are catching on to this and taking full advantage in a variety of ways, and it is only going to get more common.

One of the pioneers in this is IKEA. The Swedish furniture company recently debuted a new virtual reality tool in many of its stores and on Steam. Users can put on a VR headset and experience a VR display kitchen, where they can move around and experience a virtual kitchen, complete with cooking virtual food.

The virtual kitchen was designed to be a test, with users sending in feedback telling IKEA what they wanted to see more of. Unsurprisingly given IKEA, the top response was “meatballs,” but it has potential to revolutionize the way people shop. If you’ve been to an IKEA store and seen its model rooms, designed to show customers the potential in minimal space, you have an idea of where they might be heading. Imagine looking for decorating tips and simply jumping online to IKEA’s virtual gallery, then selecting furniture to purchase right there, and you can begin to imagine the potential.

It’s perhaps still a year or even a few years from fruition, but eventually, it’s likely that we’ll also see virtual reality used as a remodeling tool. Customers will be able to upload a 3D 360-degree video of a room they want to remodel – say a bathroom, for argument sake. In virtual reality, using a company like IKEA’s selection of items, users will be able to virtually recreate their kitchen. If you’d like to see what your bathroom would look like with yellow paint and a porcelain bath, you just need to click on the right combination. If you want to try a new shower and orange walls instead, you can. We’re not quite there yet technologically speaking, but it is coming.

There are other companies working on VR in related, but slightly separate fields as well. Lowe’s, one of the largest building material stores in the world, recently introduced a virtual reality kiosk to several of its stores, where users can experience a tutorial on how to tile a floor, including how to mix the cement and how to lay the tile. This isn’t recommended for larger projects, of course, but it can help with small DIY projects. It’s not all that different from the countless videos on YouTube that offer the same advice, but there’s a real difference in watching someone explain how to do something in a video and actively doing it yourself in VR, even if your actions are just simulations.

Microsoft is also working on its Hololens, which can do something similar. Using augmented reality as opposed to virtual reality, wearers can watch a guided tutorial on how to do something like replace a pipe under a sink. While wearing the headset and looking at the real pipe, an animated guide will show them exactly what to do. The user then can follow exact directions, including things like where to hold the pipe.

Virtual reality, and to a degree augmented reality, are changing countless industries. And construction is no different.