Budget Breakdown: With $691K, a Seattle Couple Turned Their Garage Into a Backyard House

Designing and building on a budget isn’t just a matter of choosing cost-effective materials and dialing in square footage. It’s also about relationships: working with people you trust—people you have mountain biked through the dirt with.

Seattle homeowners Steven and Libby Kady had previously remodeled their 1947 Craftsman, but after having a second child they were short on space. Steven, who frequently works from home, gave up his office (which doubled as a guest room for visiting family from their native Indiana) for the baby’s room.

The Kadys didn’t want to move. They loved living in the Magnolia neighborhood, near Discovery Park along Puget Sound. But adding an additional floor would be expensive (requiring new structural support) and would mean vacating the premises for months, which they’d already done for the remodel.

Instead, Steven and Libby decided to replace their detached garage (which was in poor condition anyway) with a new two-story, 906-square-foot structure that included an upper-level dwelling with a guest quarters and home office. For the design, the couple turned to friends of over 12 years: architects Dawn McConaghy and her husband, Kozo Nozawa, of Seattle firm Tokul Design. The quartet and their kids had already gone on journeys together as part of a cyclocross team and family bike group.

McConaghy and Nozawa had never designed a detached accessory dwelling unit (or DADU, as they’re known in Seattle) before. But in addition to Tokul’s portfolio of single-family homes (one of which was recently featured in the New York Times), both architects had previously worked at one of America’s top firms, Olson Kundig, collaborating directly with renowned partner Tom Kundig.