How Lodgewick ADU Riverside Was Born in Riverside
When the Kingswell family decided to bring Lodgewick ADU Builders to Riverside, they weren’t looking for just any market. They were looking for a city where the housing math had changed but the local building industry hadn’t caught up. Riverside is that city. We have century-old neighborhoods like the Wood Streets and Magnolia Center sitting right next to newer tracts in Orangecrest and Mission Grove, and in almost every one of them there’s a backyard with room for a small house that never got built because the process felt too complicated, too expensive, or too uncertain. That’s the gap this branch was opened to close.
Russ Delmar came on to lead the Riverside branch with a clear understanding of what local homeowners had been through. He’d heard the stories before the doors ever opened: a quote given over the phone that doubled once the crew saw the lot, a permit application that stalled for months with no explanation, a foundation poured without a proper soil check because someone wanted to save a week. The Kingswell family’s promise was simple, and Russ agreed to hold this branch to it without exception. A written price before any work starts. A real arrival window. A clean job site. A written guarantee. Those aren’t slogans. They’re the operating instructions. Bringing Lodgewick to Riverside wasn’t about planting a flag. It was about giving people here a way to build an ADU without the part where they get let down.
Russ Delmar’s Personal Connection to the ADU Trade
Russ Delmar didn’t come to ADU construction through a glossy career path. He came to it the way a lot of people find the work they’re meant to do: sideways, through another trade, at a time when California was changing the rules under everyone’s feet. He was in residential construction when the state’s ADU laws started opening up in a serious way, and he remembers what those early years looked like from the inside. Owners who wanted a backyard unit but got told no by someone who just didn’t want to deal with the paperwork. Contractors who quoted ADU work like it was a custom luxury build because the supply was thin and they could get away with it. And a steady stream of half-finished projects, where a homeowner had spent money, waited months, and still didn’t have a place for their mother-in-law or their adult kid to live.
He found he cared about the unfinished project more than the easy one. There’s a particular feeling that comes with walking onto a site where work stopped three weeks earlier: the plywood has started to weather, the chalk lines are faded, and the homeowner is standing in the doorway trying to be polite about how much money they’ve already spent. Russ has stood in that doorway more times than he’d like to count, for people who weren’t even his customers at the time. The smell of damp lumber and the look of someone who’s stopped believing the next contractor will be different, that’s the thing that got him. He decided he wanted to be the person who finishes what someone else abandoned, who prices honestly from the first conversation, and who treats a 600-square-foot backyard unit with the same care as a full-size house because, for the family waiting on it, it is one. If he weren’t building ADUs, he’d still be building something. The work isn’t a phase for him. It’s the way he’s wired.
The trade itself suits him because it’s tangible. At the end of a project there’s a thing that wasn’t there before: a roof line, a window, a kitchenette with running water, a door somebody’s daughter will walk through with her own set of keys. Russ has always been drawn to work where you can stand back at the end of the day and see what your hands did. ADU work gives him that, and it gives him something else too: the chance to do it for people who’ve been through the wringer with this exact project and are braced for another disappointment. Showing them something different isn’t just satisfying. It’s the whole point.
Meet Russ Delmar – The Person Behind Every Job
Russ Delmar is the Owner & Founder of Lodgewick ADU Riverside, the local branch of Lodgewick ADU Builders serving Riverside and the surrounding Inland Empire cities. He came up through residential construction with over a decade of hands-on experience before taking the lead on this branch, and he’s spent that time learning what actually matters to a homeowner: a straight answer, a schedule kept, and work that holds up. He isn’t a franchise technician dropped in from another state. He’s local, he’s accountable to the people whose homes he works on, and his name is attached to the work in a way that corporate titles don’t capture.
Russ is a practical person by nature. He’d rather show you a material sample and explain why it’s right for a Riverside summer than talk you into an upsell. His personal commitment is direct: every homeowner who builds with this branch gets the same care he would want on his own property, and no one gets a surprise price change at the door. That’s not a policy to him. It’s character.
Our Promise to Riverside Homeowners
The Kingswell Way shapes everything this branch does. The values have real teeth, and the team here follows them because they describe the way we’d want to be treated as customers ourselves. The first one is Say the price before the work. We give a written price before any work starts, and we don’t change it once we’re on site unless the scope changes and you’ve approved it in writing. The second is Show up in the window we gave. We give a real arrival window, not a vague day, and we keep it. The third is Leave the place cleaner than we found it. Construction is dusty work, but your backyard isn’t our scrap pile. We clean up as we go and before we leave. The fourth is Put the guarantee in writing. Every job gets a written guarantee, not a handshake. And the fifth is Come back if it fails. If something we built fails inside the guarantee period, we come back and fix it at no charge. That’s the promise, and it applies to every job this branch takes on.
Our Credentials
Every professional working under the Lodgewick ADU Riverside name is required to hold the license and insurance their state requires. We’re insured and bonded, and we carry the coverage a homeowner should expect from any company working on their property. The people on our local team have years of construction experience, and their workmanship is backed by a written guarantee through The Kingswell Guarantee, the same standard every Lodgewick location across the country works to.
What matters to a homeowner is what those credentials mean in real terms. A license means the person on your property is answerable to a state board, not just to you. Insurance and bonding mean if something goes wrong, there’s a path to being made whole that doesn’t depend on goodwill. And a written guarantee means the workmanship isn’t a gamble; it’s a commitment with a duration attached. Those aren’t decorative qualifications. They’re the difference between hiring a company and taking a chance.
Rooted in Riverside
We work in the neighborhoods of Riverside every week: the Wood Streets, Arlington Heights, La Sierra, Canyon Crest, Orangecrest, and the older pockets near downtown where lot sizes are generous and ADUs make particular sense. We know the soil here, the heat here, and the way Riverside’s building department works. That local knowledge isn’t background music. It’s the reason people in Riverside can trust a quote from us to be realistic and a schedule from us to be keepable. Call (831) 292-4191 to talk with our team about your property. We’ll give you a straight answer about whether an ADU makes sense on your lot, and a written price before any work starts.
Written by Russ Delmar, Owner & Founder at Lodgewick ADU Riverside, serving Riverside and the Inland Empire.