Lakewood Remodeling, Pools & Outdoor Living | Remodel Your Vibe

Browser-friendly HTML version

Source: https://www.remodelyourvibe.com/service-areas/lakewood
Last modified: 2026-09-24T00:00:00.000Z
Text part: 1 of 1

Full website text index | Service areas | Previous page | Next page

Image: Luxury Remodeling in Lakewood

Home

Service Areas

Los Angeles County

Lakewood

Lakewood, California

Luxury Remodeling in Lakewood

Pools, patio covers and ADUs all pass through Planning review before plan check.

Book a Consultation Call 818-300-2393

We call you back within one business day.

Building Here

Flat 1950s Yards, Drained by Design

Lakewood went up almost in a single motion. In early February 1950 the Lakewood Park Corporation, the partnership of Louis Boyar, Mark Taper and Ben Weingart, broke ground, and at a pace of one finished house every seven and a half minutes it built 17,500 homes in less than three years.

In 1954 residents voted to incorporate, and Lakewood became the nation's first city by contract. The land under those streets has little topographic relief, falling only from about 60 feet at the north boundary to 35 feet at the south, so the backyards are flat and regular, and many of the houses in front of them are now past seventy years old.

Before a pool, patio cover or ADU reaches Building Plan Check here, it passes through the City's Planning review.

Lakewood is overwhelmingly single-family: roughly 93 percent of its residentially zoned land is zoned for and built with single-family homes, and more than half of all homes date from the 1950s, when the Lakewood Park houses went up as two- and three-bedroom designs, every one with a garage.

Two-story homes came later, first in the Pennswood Square tract in 1965 and then at Westgate. The zoning code limits the first floor of the house plus any enclosed accessory structures to 45 percent of the lot and living area to 60 percent of lot area, and it requires lots of 5,000 square feet or more to keep at least 750 square feet of open space in the rear half.

Side and rear setbacks are four feet, habitable accessory buildings including ADUs must stay four feet from side and rear lot lines, and in the Lakewood Gardens tracts the front setback is 14 feet with no porch allowed to project into it.

The team that plans your Lakewood project is the team that builds it.

Part of our service area in Los Angeles County .

The Essentials

Permits issued by

City of Lakewood Community Development Department, Building and Safety Division

Licensed, bonded and insured

CSLB license #1119054

Ownership

Veteran-owned and family-operated

Experience

Years of experience building across Southern California

Who builds it

Our own crews design, permit and build

Book a Consultation

Local Conditions

The Ground Rules in Lakewood

Permits in Lakewood

City of Lakewood Community Development Department, Building and Safety Division

Building permits are issued by the Building and Safety Division of the Community Development Department, and most permit applications and plan check submittals go through the City's online permit center on OpenGov. Pools and spas, porches and patio covers, walls and fences, additions and new dwelling units, including ADUs, are all on the City's list of residential projects that go through Planning review, and plans move on to Building Plan Check once Planning approval is in hand.

Under the zoning code, new dwelling units on R-1 and R-A lots, ADUs and JADUs among them, receive a ministerial staff design review against the City's Administrative Manual for Residential Development, which looks for consistent architectural compatibility among all the dwellings and structures on a lot.

The City's ADU guidance adds that materials must equal or exceed the quality of the main house, with roofing, paint color, windows and doors, landscaping and trash storage all part of that review.

Permit details checked September 2026 against City of Lakewood and Lakewood Municipal Code . Rules change, so we confirm them again for your parcel.

What We Plan For

Planning review before Building Plan Check

ADU ministerial staff design review

Foundations for expansive soils

Sulfate-resistant slabs and moisture barriers

Lot drainage planned for flat ground

Lakewood is relatively flat, and the City's Housing Element notes that no residentially zoned property sits on or near a slope subject to landslides. With so little natural fall, drainage has to be designed: the zoning code bars regrading that diverts runoff onto an abutting property, keeps roof water from accessory structures, ADUs included, from falling off the lot, and has lot drainage directed to the public right-of-way and storm drain system in a manner the Public Works Director accepts.

The General Plan's technical background report describes the city's alluvial soils as mostly clay and silt loams that are relatively impermeable and cause some subsurface drainage problems. It identifies the Ramona-Placentia and Chino soil associations in parts of the city as expansive, noting that the City required stronger foundations for new construction on them.

The same report documents sulfate attack on slab-on-grade foundations in a handful of tracts, most notably the one bounded by Studebaker Road, Del Amo Boulevard, Interstate 605 and Chadwell Street, where salt-laden moisture drawn up from shallow groundwater degraded the concrete. It names a moisture barrier with reinforced, sulfate-resistant concrete as the most effective slab repair.

Pools and their equipment may sit within the required side and rear setbacks, but an enclosure for pool equipment may not exceed six feet in height, and where the heater or filter sits in a side yard or within three feet of the rear property line, the side and rear perimeter walls must be of one-hour fire-resistive construction.

The City's Hazard Mitigation Plan, as summarized in the 2022 Housing Element, scores the relative risk of fire, including wildland and urban interface fire, as very low, and places all residentially zoned property in areas of low flood risk.