How Fielding ADU Builders Was Born
We started Fielding ADU Builders in 2006 because of a phone call Reed Calloway got from a homeowner in Santa Monica who was nearly in tears. She had paid a contractor a deposit to convert her detached garage into a rental unit for her aging mother. Six months later, the framing was crooked, the permit had lapsed, and the contractor had stopped answering his phone. She wasn’t asking for a refund. She was asking if anyone could just finish the job properly.
Reed walked that site and saw what she saw: exposed wiring, a slab that wasn’t level, and a family stuck living with the consequences of someone else’s shortcuts. The work wasn’t hard to diagnose. The hard part was that no one had been straight with her from the start. That afternoon, he made a decision. He’d build a company that did ADUs the way he’d want one built on his own property: square, permitted, and priced honestly in writing before the first board was cut.
What began as a single crew in Los Angeles has grown into a network of independent local teams serving communities across Southern California and beyond, from Long Beach and Anaheim to Riverside, Irvine, Santa Ana, Santa Clarita, San Bernardino, Fontana, Moreno Valley, Oxnard, and Huntington Beach. Every location works to the same standard. Every homeowner gets the same promise. That promise has not changed since that first walkthrough in Santa Monica.
Reed Calloway’s Personal Connection to the ADU Trade
Reed grew up around job sites. His first exposure to construction came from watching tradesmen frame additions on the block where he lived, men who showed up before sunrise and left after dark with sawdust on their boots. He wasn’t old enough to swing a hammer then, but he remembers the smell of fresh-cut lumber and the sound of a chalk line snapping against plywood. It felt like order being made out of raw material. That feeling never left him.
When he entered the trade himself, he worked on every part of a build: footings, rough framing, roofing, finish carpentry. Somewhere in those years, he noticed that accessory dwelling units kept crossing his path. A garage conversion here. A backyard cottage there. Each one was different, but they shared something: they were intimate projects. You weren’t building a spec house for an unknown buyer. You were building space for a parent, an adult child, a renter who’d help pay the mortgage. The work had meaning built into it.
Reed has spent more than a decade in this trade, and he still walks every finished ADU before the homeowner takes the keys. He looks at the corners. He checks the door swings. He runs his hand along the window trim. He does this not because the crews need him to, but because he can’t shake the habit of seeing the work the way the homeowner will see it on day one, on year five, and long after we’ve left. If he weren’t doing this, he’d probably still be on a job site somewhere, just with less paperwork. The work gets him out of bed. The people keep him there.
Meet Reed Calloway – The Person Behind Every Job
Reed Calloway is the Owner and Founder of Fielding ADU Builders. He’s a builder by trade, trained on the job and through years of working every phase of residential construction. His background includes rough framing, finish work, permit coordination, and the kind of problem-solving you only learn when a job doesn’t go the way the drawings said it would. He’s not a franchise manager dropped into a territory. He’s a tradesman who built this thing from the first stake in the ground.
Away from the work, Reed is a detail person by nature. He keeps a tidy truck, a marked-up set of plans, and a garage organized well enough that he can find a specific box of screws in the dark. He believes that how someone keeps their own tools tells you how they’ll treat your property. That belief runs through every crew that works under the Fielding ADU Builders name.
Reed’s commitment to homeowners is simple: if we put our name on a job, we stand behind it fully. That’s not a slogan. That’s how he’s run this company since 2006.
Our Promise to Homeowners
Every Fielding ADU Builders location operates under the same written standard, and that standard shapes how we treat every homeowner who calls us. We show up inside the window we gave you. We put the price in writing before any work starts, so the number on the estimate is the number on the final invoice, not a starting point. We do the job by the book, with permits pulled and inspections passed. We leave the site clean and squared away when the work is done. And we stand behind the work in writing for a full year. If something we built fails in that time, we come back and make it right at no charge.
Those aren’t ideals we hope to live up to. They’re the requirements every local team agrees to before they can carry the Fielding ADU Builders name.
Our Credentials
Here’s what every homeowner should know before they invite a builder onto their property:
- State-licensed – Every pro working under the Fielding ADU Builders name is required to hold the license their state requires for the work they perform.
- Insured and bonded – Coverage is required at every location so homeowners aren’t left holding the bag if something goes wrong.
- Permit-compliant – We pull permits and schedule inspections. We don’t skip steps, and we don’t ask you to look the other way.
- Written estimates – You get a line-item price in writing before any work begins. No verbal ballparks that drift once the studs go up.
- One-year written guarantee – The work is covered in writing for a full year. If it fails in that time, we return and fix it at no charge.
Here’s why those credentials matter. A builder who carries proper licensing and insurance is a builder who can pass an inspection and answer for their work if something goes sideways. A builder who writes the price down before starting is a builder who can’t move the goalposts at the door. A builder who guarantees the work for a year is a builder who expects it to last longer than that. When someone works on your home, these aren’t extras. They’re the bare minimum.
Rooted in the Communities We Serve
Garrison Partners, the family of brands Fielding ADU Builders belongs to, doesn’t pretend to be from every town. Each Fielding ADU Builders location is an independent local business that agreed to work to The Garrison Standard. That means the team covering your area knows the local building department, the local permit office, and the local soil conditions. They live where they work. The home base may have started in Los Angeles, but the locations serving Long Beach, Anaheim, Riverside, and every other market are run by people who call those places home.
Written by Reed Calloway, Owner & Founder at Fielding ADU Builders, building ADUs across Southern California since 2006.