How Holloway ADU Builders Was Born in Tustin
We started Holloway ADU Builders in 2016, but the real beginning happened about a year earlier. A homeowner in Tustin called us out to look at a garage conversion another crew had walked away from. The framing was off by over an inch in places, the electrical rough-in had been flagged twice, and the homeowner had already paid for work that never passed a single inspection. She wasn’t angry so much as exhausted. She’d done everything she was supposed to do, hired licensed people, pulled permits, and still ended up with a shell of a room she couldn’t legally use.
We spent weeks undoing what was done wrong before we could even start doing it right. The whole time, we kept thinking the same thing: someone should have just told her the truth from day one. What the project would really cost, what the city of Tustin would actually require, and how long it would actually take. Nobody did. So we built our company around that single idea: tell people the truth about their ADU before they spend a dime, then stand behind the work until the final inspection passes and the room is full of their family.
Our Founder’s Personal Connection to the ADU Trade
Our founder came into this work the long way, through years of framing houses and doing remodels around Orange County, back when an ADU was just called a granny flat and most people didn’t know the term. The first one he ever built was for a couple in Santa Ana who needed a place for an aging parent. He remembers the smell of fresh framing lumber on that job, the sound of a chalk line snapping on a slab early in the morning, and the way the homeowner stood in the finished room on the last day and just went quiet for a minute. That room changed how three generations of that family lived together. It wasn’t a garage anymore. It was a bedroom with a door that closed and a window that faced the garden.
That’s why we do ADUs and not something else. An ADU isn’t an upgrade. It’s a place where someone’s mother lives, or where a grown child comes home to save for a house, or where a family turns one mortgage into two incomes. The work matters in a way that other construction work sometimes doesn’t, because you can see it working before the paint is even dry. If our founder weren’t doing this, he’d probably still be doing some form of it: fixing things, building things, leaving something behind that holds up under use and time. The ten-plus years we’ve spent in this trade haven’t dulled that part of it at all. The day the framing goes up is still the best day on any job.
Meet Our Team – The Person Behind Every Job
Our founder is the owner of Holloway ADU Builders, and he’s been building and remodeling homes in Orange County for more than ten years. He came up the hard way: carrying lumber, forming concrete, learning electrical and plumbing from the tradespeople he worked beside, and eventually running entire residential projects from first permit to final inspection. He is not a salesperson with a polo shirt and a binder. He’s a builder who has done every part of this work with his own hands, and who still walks every ADU site himself at least once before the drywall goes up, because that’s when the bones of the building still tell you the truth.
What you’d notice if you spent a day with him: he keeps a small notebook in his back pocket with dimensions and notes from every site visit, he drinks black coffee, and he quotes the Tustin city code from memory more often than anyone should. He doesn’t hunt or fish. He restores old hand planes and uses them when he can. He believes a written quote is a promise, not a starting point for negotiation. And he has told every homeowner we’ve worked with the same thing: if it isn’t right, we fix it. Period.
Our Promise to Tustin Homeowners
Here’s what we promise, in plain words. First, the price we quote you is the price you pay, unless you change the scope. We write everything out line by line so there’s no mystery and no change order waiting at the end. Second, we use materials we’d put in our own homes, not the cheapest thing that meets code. If a fixture or a material fails because it was bad, we replace it. Third, we don’t disappear after the final check clears. If something isn’t right six months later, call us and we’ll come look. We’ve built our reputation in Tustin one finished ADU at a time, and the only way that keeps working is if every single customer can say we did what we said we’d do.
Our Credentials
This is what covers you when you hire us:
- State-licensed. Every project we build requires a state-licensed contractor, and we hold the license required for work in California.
- Insured & bonded. We carry the insurance and bonding coverage our state requires, so your property and the people working on it are protected.
- A decade-plus of local experience. We’ve been building and remodeling in Orange County since before ADU was a common term, and we’ve seen how Tustin’s specific permitting process works, what inspectors look for, and what soil and setback conditions do to a foundation plan.
- A strong local reputation. Most of our work comes from referrals, neighbors telling neighbors about the ADU we built down the street.
Here’s why those credentials matter. When someone’s working in your home, on a structure your family will live in, you need to know they’re legally allowed to do the work, that you’re not liable if something goes wrong, and that they’ve done this before in your city. Licensing and insurance aren’t extras. They’re the baseline. And a track record in Tustin specifically means we already know what the building department will ask for, which saves you time and money on your permit.
Rooted in Tustin
We work all over Orange County, but Tustin is home. We know the difference between the older lots near Old Town Tustin and the newer developments on the east side of town, and we know how those differences change an ADU plan. We’ve built for families in North Tustin, Santa Ana, Orange, and Irvine, but we still do most of our work right here. When you see our trucks on the 5 or parked on a quiet street near Tustin High, that’s us. We live here. We build here. We’re not going anywhere.
Written by the team at Holloway ADU Builders, serving Tustin and Orange County since 2016.