Hello everyone. I want to build a stand alone apartment in the backyard of the house. The backyard is pretty spacious. At the moment roughly half of it is covered with cement and there is a permanent basketball goal as well. I know i'll have to get rid of the cement and the basketball goal and probably get some fencing to segment a piece of the back yard.

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I really have no clue as to how I go about doing this project. Is the best way to go about this through a site like HomeAdvisor and the like? A slew of homes in our neighborhood have these sort of building/garages but I think most of them have been there for decades.