Top-Rated
Home Remodeling In Phelan

For more than 15 years, Horizon Construction & Remodeling has been building additions and whole-home remodels across Southern California as a licensed Class B general building contractor, CSLB #938230, bonded and insured. In Phelan, housing was built out across the postwar decades on large rural desert parcels, with a median year built of 1974, and the typical home is a single story house on a large lot that often carries horses or farm animals, with a simple rectangular plan and an original kitchen set toward the back, and enough surrounding land to expand outward in a way mountain lots cannot — which tells us most of what we need to know about where an addition can go and what it will take structurally.

Permits for this work go through San Bernardino County Land Use Services, Building and Safety, because Phelan is unincorporated county territory rather than a city. One local factor worth knowing: homes rely on septic tanks and leach fields with water from the Phelan Pinon Hills Community Services District or the Sheep Creek Water Company, and the county sewer connection trigger of 200 feet from the property line almost never reaches these parcels, so septic capacity governs any bedroom count change. We confirm all of that before design, because it decides what is actually worth drawing.

San Bernardino County asks a different question of a remodeler than the coastal counties do, because it is not one place. At 20,105 square miles it is the largest county in the contiguous United States, and its development code is written regionally — Valley, Mountain and Desert. Those regional standards are not decorative: the county sets an 18 inch frost depth in the Mountain Region, applies snow load design, and requires protection at exits from sliding snow, while parts of the county fall in special wind regions. This county also has the highest share of detached single-family homes of the four we serve, around 71 percent, which usually means more room to expand than a coastal lot allows.